the others started recommending piano teachers to each other, boasting about their children’s grades, merits and distinctions.
‘It’s all going to the dogs,’ a man said. ‘This’ll be a third-world country by 1980,’ and the others gravely agreed. Malcolm made his rounds again; for the last twenty minutes he had said nothing to anyone, only smiled and offered the bottle, and he was circling too soon. All the glasses were full, and the guests refused with a smile, wondering about their host, who they did not know. Absently, he offered the bottle to Daniel, who took the opportunity, his fourth, to refill his glass, still thinking of tits.
‘It would have been nice if they could have come,’ Katherine said again. ‘Sellers, they’re called.’
‘Your son’s getting to be a handsome young man,’ they said in reply.
‘I’ve got two,’ Katherine said, laughing.
‘Yes,’ they said, wondering where the other was, the one they wouldn’t have meant, since he was, what?, nine years old.
‘We invited Mrs Topsfield, too,’ she said. ‘The old lady who lives in the great big house, the old one, at the bottom of the road, the edge of the moor. But only to be polite – she wouldn’t be likely to come at her age.’
‘I’ve often wondered about her,’ someone said. ‘A gorgeous house.’
‘It’s just her in it, apparently,’ Katherine said.
‘I do think they’ve done their house beautifully,’ Karen Warner said to her husband; they had been marooned together at one side of the room. It was a handsome room; one wall had been covered with a bold paper in a bamboo print, jungle green with lemony highlights, and the others painted the palest beige. The fat suite, pushed back against the walls, and the carpet were rough oatmeal; instead of a fourth wall, a single picture window gave on to the garden.
‘It’s quite like our house, the way it’s arranged,’ Warner said.
‘Not quite, though,’ Karen said. The estate, a hundred and twenty houses, all built in one go ten years before, was elegantly varied; there were a dozen or more differently shaped houses, arranged irregularly. There was nothing municipal about the estate; but, of course, she had said this many times before. ‘Had you heard anything at work about a Sainsbury’s opening in Sheffield?’ Warner informed his wife that he had not, and that such information would not have come his way in the course of his work at the council. ‘I do like that unit,’ she said in a rush, because now she, too, had seen the elder Glover boy, sprawled about his erection.
‘I didn’t expect to be invited,’ the nursery nurse was saying, to someone she didn’t know, ‘but I’m glad I came.’ It had been ten days before; she had been resting in the afternoon, her feet, horribly swollen in this weather even at six months, up on a stool. Through the window she had seen a woman in a sleeveless summer dress stomping up the drive; a familiar figure, some sort of neighbour, with an air of imminent complaint about her walk. What now? she’d thought wearily. But the woman hadn’t rung: there was the clatter of something through the letterbox that proved, when her husband got home and picked it up, to be an invitation. ‘But who are they?’ he’d said. ‘I think we might as well go,’ she’d said, not answering his question.
But the Glovers had three children, surely: the youngest a boy, wasn’t he? Maybe he was in bed.
The youngest was behind the sofa: he had been there most of the evening, slipping behind it quite early on. Timothy had with him his favourite book in the whole world. He had been reading it steadily all evening, letting his eye run over the familiar entries. He had taken it out from the public library eleven months before; he had renewed it once, then stopped bothering. It was now ten months overdue, which caused him great terror whenever he thought of it. In happy moments, he decided that he could conceal the book where no one would find it, and his parents would never uncover the gigantic fine now building up. The fear of punishment was huge in him.
But the terror did not touch the book. It was as good now as ever. The pleasure he found in letting his eye ride over it, touching on category after category, overrode anything else. Whenever he could, he returned to its calm instructions. Even when it was not quite right of him to do so, he sensed, he found a way to be alone with it, as now burrowing behind the sofa at his parents’ party. It was so important to him that often in the last months he had found himself telling others – his best friends Simon and Ian, his sister Jane, his mother but for some reason not his brother Daniel, not his father – some facts about his subject. More oddly, he found himself asking them questions about it, as if they could instruct him, feigning ignorance, wanting to find out if they knew what he already did.
The book was about snakes. Timothy gazed at the photographs as if at a family album, committing the names he already knew to a further refreshment of memory.
He had been there for three hours, wedged between the sofa and the large picture window. If the party went outside, they would see him, and probably laugh. From time to time the back of the sofa, the porridgy tweed panels between the wood frames, bulged as someone sat down, swelling towards him, like some inchoate mass searching for him. There was a queer smell of dust down here, and the nasty smell of spilt alcohol. It was his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.
‘I don’t know where he’s got to,’ Katherine Glover said to a departing guest; it was too warm for anyone to have brought coats, but she made a helpful gesture. ‘He’s a little bit shy.’
The guest smiled; her husband made a honking noise, understanding that the woman was talking about her son, not knowing that there was any son apart from the great lout who had been lolling on the sofa, gawping at the ladies.
On the mat was an envelope, which, surely, had not been there earlier; it was addressed to Katherine, and she picked it up. In front of her, the remains of her party; the poor pregnant woman, harassed and tired, waiting for her husband to want to go. But the husband was drunk, his hair rumpled, making a hash of a joke to a group of husbands. Where was Malcolm? Sitting down, his host’s bottle in his hand, all refills at an end; and the Mozart had come to an end, too, leaving the patient silence to dismiss the guests.
‘You looked so nice,’ Jane said to her mother, coming up to her in the hall, munching a cheese straw, ‘in your posh frock and your hair like that.’
Katherine felt so terribly tired. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ she said crossly. ‘They didn’t appreciate it at all.’
Jane looked at her mother in astonishment. ‘It was a lovely party,’ she said. ‘You should always wear your hair like that.’
‘What, to work?’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Thank you so much,’ the drunk man was saying, ‘for a lovely time, my dear. We’ve had a lovely, lovely time.’
He leant towards her, as if to kiss her, but did not; Katherine had him by the shoulders, a gesture that might have been affectionate, holding him at arm’s-length inspection.
‘We’ve had a very good time,’ the pregnant woman said. But it didn’t look it.
‘When is your baby due?’ Jane said abruptly.
‘In November,’ the woman said, not smiling. She took her husband by the arm, and they went.
‘Where’s your dad?’ Katherine said, but then Daniel was in the hall, up from the sofa for the first time all
