searched for and analysed, and knowledge slowly but steadily built up, tiny accretions of it accumulating in layers to make solid bulwarks of unassailable fact. There was debate and there were opposing theories, of course, and there was international and personal competition, but the main thrust was mutually constructive and collaborative. Unlike art.
‘What’s funny?’ Mark asked her. Alice hadn’t realised that she was smiling.
‘Nothing, really. I’m just listening.’
‘But what do you think?’
Sunlight lay across the table. The tea in her cup reflected a glittering bronze disc. Pete sprawled back in his chair, lanky and at ease, grinning at her. Their life together was made up of a series of small encounters like this one. They met friends, had tea or dinner or went to the pub together. They went to parties and gave their own – were giving one the very next evening, in fact. Peter was gregarious and liked nothing better than to gather a crowd of people around him. It meant that she didn’t see a lot of him on his own, but she didn’t mind that. She had what she wanted in life.
She smiled more broadly now. ‘I think I’d like another scone before Pete devours the lot.’
She didn’t want to be drawn into the endless discussions about art. Peter never listened to anyone else anyway. He stopped with half a scone almost into his mouth and returned it to his plate. Scooping some extra jam on top, he transferred it to Alice’s plate.
‘Thank you.’
‘What do you do? Are you an artist?’ Mark persisted.
‘A scientist. A sedimentary geologist.’
‘My God,’ he said.
‘He’s one theory. Not many geologists subscribe to it, though.’
They all laughed. Alice bit into the jam-laden scone, enjoying her appetite and the lazy bickering of the two men, and the prospect of going home with Peter to their house and the quiet late-summer twilight in their tiny garden.
When the scones had been eaten and the teapot refilled and emptied twice, they stood up. As they said goodbye, Peter invited Mark to tomorrow’s party. Finally Peter shouldered his chair-remnant, and he and Alice headed for home. The route was so familiar to both of them that they could have walked it blindfolded. They crossed St Giles and walked down Beaumont Street. The end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, but when they turned into Jericho everything was quiet again. The little red-brick houses with their Gothic touches had been built in the nineteenth century for clerks and the more senior college servants, but lately they had become sought after and very expensive.
Alice couldn’t have afforded to buy one, not on an academic’s salary, and of course Peter wasn’t able to contribute anything, but her mother had helped her with the down payment.
This sequence of recollections didn’t quite play itself out in full as she opened the low gate, but it coloured the fabric of her thoughts. Sometimes it seemed to Alice that her mother’s life was always the vivid, engrossing, three-dimensional backdrop against which her own activities were executed on a much dimmer and smaller scale.
Peter hoisted the wrecked chair straight over the wall, snapping one of the rose branches that she was training over a rope swag. It landed foot uppermost, the wheeled claw sluggishly rotating.
‘Will it be safe there?’ she asked as he followed her up the short tiled path to the front door.
He took her question entirely at face value. ‘Should be. I’ll take it over to the studio first thing.’
It was cool inside the house. From where she stood in the hallway, as Pete’s mouth brushed against the nape of her neck, Alice could see straight through the kitchen doors into the garden. There was a blue-painted bench and a little rustic table, and a crab-apple tree for shade.
Pete’s hands slid up and cupped her breasts. ‘Mmm?’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go to bed.’
Their bedroom would be cool too, behind white blinds.
With clasped hands they trod up the stairs.
A minute later they were stretched out on the white-covered bed. Alice tipped her head back, her eyes closed, and Pete’s hand secured her wrists above her head so she couldn’t break free. On the bedside table the phone cheeped. Pete swore, but neither of them made a move towards it. After a dozen rings, the answering machine picked up.
‘Alice, are you there?’
There was a pause and then an audible tut-tutting of annoyance. ‘Well, wherever can you be, at this time of day? I need to speak to you. Give me a ring straight back, won’t you?’ The voice was brisk, busy as always.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Pete murmured. He gathered Alice up and rolled adroitly so that she ended up on top. He never voiced any criticism of Alice’s mother, the formidable Margaret Mather, but there was not much love lost. Alice didn’t pursue this line of thought either. Now was not the time to be thinking about Margaret. Now was not the time to be thinking of anything but this.
Afterwards they lay with their legs interlocked, listening to the small sounds of the street through the open window. Pete hummed a little, an unborn sequence of notes reverberating deep in his chest. Alice smiled, her cheek against his shoulder sticky with their mingled sweat.
She would call in and see her parents in the morning.
Margaret Mather sat at the gate-legged table in the large bay window of the house on Boar’s Hill. Books and papers and correspondence leaned in haphazard piles on either side of her computer monitor and keyboard. She had never been tidy, or even faintly house-proud, and the table was littered with half-full teacups and dirty plates as well as her sheaves of work. The rest of the room was cluttered and dusty, and the Persian rugs were matted with cat hair. The cat itself, a fat white creature with a penetrating smell, lay on the sofa and licked its rear parts.
Margaret’s husband Trevor worked or read in his small upstairs study with a view of the sloping garden. His room was bare by comparison and together with Alice’s old bedroom it represented the only ordered area in the entire house. Although Alice had long ago left home, her room remained exactly as it had always been. Her teenage books filled the shelves and there were framed school and netball team photographs on the walls. It wasn’t that Margaret had preserved it as any kind of shrine to her daughter’s childhood, rather that she had never got around to doing anything else with it. In the same way, a hopbine gathered on a country holiday twelve years earlier was still rakishly pinned to the beam in the kitchen, and was now a dust-and-grease fossil of its former self.
Margaret was listening to music and working through the morning’s e-mails. She peered at the screen through her bifocals, reading interesting titbits aloud to herself and muttering the responses as she prodded them out of her keyboard. She was in her seventies, but she took to new technology with enthusiasm. E-mail made her complicated correspondences with friends and with fellow scientists all over the world much easier. She loved to explain to anyone who would listen that, for example, she could now chat on a daily basis with her old friend Harvey Golding who was based in San Diego and whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh for more than twelve years.
‘And I can keep abreast. See what the others are up to. It’s all there on the net, you know. Much easier nowadays.’
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