was quiet. The big school clock on the kitchen wall ticked with one rhythm: the grandfather clock in the hall, proud amongst the bicycles and coats, ticked with another. The school clock had to be wound, every day; the grandfather clock every eight. It was Isabel’s job to wind the former, because she so easily forgot the latter. Homer never forgot.
She made herself a cup of coffee. Homer limited himself to two cups a day, and never drank the powdered kind. He feared the powdering agent was carcinogenic.
How would she ever live without Homer, who structured her life and surrounded her personality, and had made her lie-about, sleep-around personality into something so sure, so certain? Isabel clutched her arms across her chest. She had a pain. She rocked to and fro.
Of course she had known: she had seen or heard some mention somewhere of Dandy Ivel’s name, and repressed the knowledge. Of course she had woken up afraid; of course she had rung her mother; of course she had wept.
Dandy Ivel, President of the United States.
Once, Isabel thought, I believed that events were haphazard and unrelated. I believed that people could be loved and left, and that happenings receded into the past and were gone, and that only with marriage, or its equivalent, and the birth of children, did the real, memorable, responsible life begin. Now she saw it was not so. Nothing was lost, not even the things you most wanted to lose. All things move towards a certain point in time. Our future is conditioned by our past: all of it, not just the paths we choose, or are proud of.
There was nothing to be done except say nothing, do nothing, hug the knowledge to herself. All would yet be well.
After an earthquake a house changes. Ornaments stand minutely different on the shelves; books lean at delicately altered angles. The lamp hangs quiet again at the end of its cord, but all things have discovered motion: the power to act and upset. The house laughs. You thought I was yours, your friend. You thought you knew me, but see, you don’t. One day I may fall and crush you to death. It seemed to Isabel that the house she loved so much had changed. It mocked her, and laughed.
Isabel went next door to drink her coffee with Maia. Maia had quarrelled with her husband and run out into the street with tears in her eyes and stepped in front of a car, and lost her sight. Nothing is safe. Husbands, tears, cars, eyes. They won’t be sorry; you will.
Maia and Isabel talked, and said nothing very important. During the day Isabel went into her Hello-Goodnight office. Alice, the researcher, had found the Norwegian architect, but it transpired that these days he built underground houses, not solar-powered holiday homes. In consultation with the producer, Andrew Elphick, it was agreed that it would do neither the architect nor the programme any good were he to appear on it.
‘We’re an informative but light-hearted show,’ said Elphick. ‘Our viewers don’t want to switch off Hello-Goodnight and have nuclear nightmares about the end of the world. They’re common enough without us helping. Don’t you agree, Isabel? I don’t mind us being serious about feminism, racism, homosexuality or any of the other social trimmings, but I won’t devalue the currency of the end of the world in a late-night chat show.’
Isabel saw what he meant. So did Alice, who was thirty-two, and had just turned her back on promotion in order to work just one more time, every time, with Elphick, whom she loved. Elphick was tall and broad and sad and clever and had red hair and a boyish smile. He was forty, and married. He was not popular with the camera crews or studio staff, at whom he shouted and raged, as if married to them.
‘Isabel,’ he said to her as she left the room, ‘do you have a social conscience?’
‘Of course,’ she replied, startled.
‘I thought you did,’ he replied. ‘It’s rather like mine. We know where our duty lies. It’s to fiddle as prettily as possible while Rome burns, so that Nero throws us a penny or two.’
He was drinking already. It was his occupation on five days out of seven. On the other two, run-up days and recording days, he kept sober. His face was lined by scars – from going, rumour said, through too many car windscreens. He only ever slept with Alice when he was drunk – and was thus able to keep his sober self, his real self, faithful to his wife. He believed in individual probity and sexual responsibility, and would not have shifty or immoral people on his show.
‘The example of achievement,’ he would say. ‘That’s what the people need to see. The power of the individual to shape his own destiny.’
‘Her,’ said Isabel, in duty bound.
‘Or her,’ he said, bored.
He caught Isabel’s hand and kissed it, as she left, pressing it to his cold lips. She felt he was desperate rather than lecherous, and removed her hand gently.
‘You don’t really like me, do you?’ he said. ‘No one I like likes me. They put up with me but they don’t like me.’
‘Alice likes you,’ said Isabel.
Isabel went home in time to receive Jason and his friends. The television was on. The video played an endless stream of Popeye cartoons. Parents came and failed to go. Isabel, after all, was a celebrity. Homer, unusually, was late home. The noise was great: Jason paced up and down in the way he had when impatient or cross, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, like some adult in a ridiculous cartoon. It made the grown-ups laugh, and that made Jason crosser.
‘Daddy’s late,’ he said. ‘We’ll miss the film. It’s no laughing matter.’
Which made them laugh the more, to hear the adult phraseology from the child’s lips.
Jason’s friend Bobby, who could never be trusted near anything technological, flicked the switch on the video which sent it back to transmitted television. There, on the screen, pacing up and down, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, against a background of the stars and stripes, was Dandy Ivel.
‘For all the world like Jason,’ remarked Bobby’s mother.
‘Isn’t that a coincidence!’
‘Stop walking about like that, Jason,’ said Isabel.
‘Why?’ asked her son, not stopping.
‘It’s sloppy,’ said Isabel.
‘I think it’s rather cute,’ said Bobby’s mother.
Jason’s mother slapped her son on the cheek just as Homer came in.
‘Isabel!’ cried Homer, shocked.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Isabel, to both Jason and Homer. It was hard to say which one of them looked more hurt.
Homer switched off the television and ushered the children into a waiting taxi. Isabel iced the cake, while Bobby’s mother watched, critically. Isabel wished Bobby’s mother would go home, but she didn’t. She stayed to help and cut the bread for the elephant sandwiches; she cut far too thickly and failed to butter the slices to the edges.
‘Do you suffer much from premenstrual tension?’ asked Bobby’s mother.
She wore a lacy peasant blouse and a full cotton flowered skirt.
‘No,’ said Isabel, shortly.
‘I
