‘Suppose so.’
‘Not since then?’
‘What’s the point? She has no interest in me.’
Barbara could have pointed out how avidly Monica tried to follow her son’s career and that she only telephoned so rarely because Jacob made her nervous, but she also knew that this was what he did when he thought someone might leave him – insist they had left him already. As for when he wanted to leave …
‘Are you really here?’ Barbara asked. It was a serious question but one she knew she would have to answer for herself. ‘I don’t think I ever believed, in all those years, that you were really here. Or even that you were real. Because you don’t even feel real to yourself, do you? You haunted our life and you haunt yourself.’
‘It is,’ said Jacob, without opening his eyes, ‘a question of style.’
‘As serious as that?’ said Barbara, with more kindness than you might expect.
The next morning, Juliet woke up and blushed. ‘I was spying,’ she said to herself, and then to Fred as she hauled him out from under his blankets, ‘Do you think I’d make a good spy?’
‘No, too bad-tempered.’
‘Why can’t a spy be bad-tempered?’
‘Because people notice you. They notice your temper. But don’t worry, it’s your charm.’
‘Don’t you mean part of my charm?’
Fred considered this. ‘No.’
One Saturday afternoon, Fred came home with a large and smelly parcel under his arm. He went upstairs, ran a bath and came back down.
‘Are you in for dinner?’ he asked Juliet. ‘And what’s that you’re reading?’
‘It’s about the picture outside the picture if you must know.’
‘Aren’t your swotting days nearly over? I thought you were about to become the Doctor of Departure.’ It was his joke.
‘Just trying to keep up.’ The book was by someone who taught at Littlefield, the Massachusetts college which had offered her a year’s research post.
Fred took the book from her hands and raised her head so that he had her full attention. ‘I’ve invited a couple of people round.’
‘Who?’
‘Caroline and the others.’
‘Others?’
‘The ones she lives with, Graham and Jane. They had me to dinner last month. I told you, remember? A mansion flat with those ceilings that have been iced like a wedding cake, balcony windows like barn doors, low-slung chairs with metal bars, candles like tree trunks, good steak.’
‘And you want to reciprocate.’
‘It’s the polite thing to do and anyway, I’ve bought a salmon; it’s in the bath.’
‘Isn’t it one of those things that has a season?’
They went up to the bathroom where a flabby grey fish lay on its side in an inch of water.
Fred looked nervous. ‘It is a salmon, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what they look like, not a whole one with its skin on and everything.’
‘The man in the market said it was fresh.’
Juliet considered the fish’s slack mouth and clotted yellow eye. Its scales looked as if they had been brushed with glue. She thought of all the things she might point out but she was tired and Fred was excited, and so she decided not to.
Caroline, who was the only one to have visited Khyber Road before, took it upon herself to act as interpreter. Juliet wasn’t saying much and Fred was in the kitchen.
‘Isn’t this room an interesting colour!’ she declared.
Graham nodded, ‘Absolutely,’ and leant back against the mantelpiece. He would not sit down. His wife Jane had retreated to a stool and she also nodded, but did not speak.
‘It’s to help them sleep,’ Caroline continued. ‘They have this little man who takes drugs and lives in the roof and never sleeps only he likes brown, so …’
Graham became interested. ‘You live with a junkie?’
‘I wouldn’t call him that,’ said Juliet.
‘What would you call him?’ asked Caroline. ‘I mean what ought one say?’
‘It’s alright,’ said Juliet, ‘he’s gone back to his mother’s. I won’t be effecting any introductions.’
Graham looked disappointed and then bored. In firelight, his colourless English looks took on the urinous tinge of a weak streetlamp. He was resting a hand on the mantelpiece and from time to time the hand would creep along reaching for something to toy with, an invitation or an ornament, only there was nothing and so the hand would go limp and slide back towards Graham, who would then scratch his head or nose, as if to distract the others from its wanderings. He was accumulating streaks of dust on his face and was trying to stop himself rubbing one ankle against the other, unable to get rid of the notion that fleas had settled in his trouser turn-ups.
‘Is the man in the roof an insomniac?’ asked Jane. ‘I never sleep.’
Juliet had already forgotten that Graham’s wife was sitting beside her, almost behind the door. She looked from Caroline to Graham and then back to Jane, and had to stop herself leaning over to push the girl’s hair out of her eyes.
‘He doesn’t trust himself to sleep,’ said Juliet, wondering what she meant.
Jane gave a hiccup of a laugh and for a moment lit up as if she understood this perfectly. Caroline reached out her foot and tapped Graham’s leg. He nodded and moved across to kneel in front of Jane, who squeaked and drew away. Juliet was fascinated.
‘Jules!’ Fred bellowed from the kitchen. She picked up the bottle of wine and carried it through.
‘Shut the door.’
The room was full of steam but Juliet, who did not cook much herself, trusted her brother knew what he was doing. The hot tap was on full blast and the kettle was being kept at a boil. Fred was dancing between the two, trying to waft steam towards the fish which was draped bumpily across two roasting tins straddling the two front gas rings of the stove.
‘It wouldn’t fit in the oven so I had a great idea. Poach the bastard. Only it got a bit dried out.’
‘How
