residents leading sedate and private lives. Good fences make good neighbours, he used to say, when they moved in, nine years ago. Sylvia didn’t agree. In her fortieth year, Sylvia discovered social concern. She discovered community action, and protest, and steering committees. If Alistair’s blossoming delinquencies didn’t spoil her chances, she’d probably end up a JP. This was a big change; but it was not unaccountable. The children no longer needed her, and the marriage was not worthy of sustained attention. It just ran on, taking care of itself. After twenty years you can’t expect passion. It’s enough if you’re barely civil.
Colin stood over the cooker and looked down at his egg, bobbing dizzily in a froth of leaking white. As if alive, it flew about and tapped itself against the side of the pan. He picked up a teaspoon and dabbed at it, scalding his fingers in the steam. He could feel Sylvia watching him. By her standards, he had no common sense: he had never laid claim to it. But he was a clever man, and capable in his own line. His face wore a habitual expression of strained tolerance, of goodwill and anxiety, uneasily mixed.
‘We’re still marking exams,’ he said. He dipped for his egg with a tea strainer, which he had found by chance in a drawer. ‘I’ve got three hundred reports to sign. And the union blokes are coming in to see me this morning. You’d think they’d let it rest till after the holidays. But no.’
‘Strike?’
‘Well, they’re talking about it.’
‘I’ve every sympathy.’
‘So have I, I want a pay rise too, but it makes it bloody difficult to run a school.’ He sighed, and went about with his egg.
‘What are you doing?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Why don’t you put it in an egg cup and sit down with it? Or are you going to race off with it down Lauderdale Road?’
Colin sat down with his ovoid ruin and picked up the newspaper. The day had brightened and the pleasant morning sun shone through his double glazing. ‘I always think of Gulliver’s Travels when I eat an egg,’ he told his wife. ‘You see –’ He broke off, gaped, put down his egg spoon and seized up the newspaper. ‘Good God, Sylvia. York Minster’s burned down. Look at this.’ He thrust the newspaper at her. The front page bore the headline NIGHT SKY LIT UP BY GOTHIC GLORY ABLAZE and a four-column picture of the Minster’s south transept wreathed in smoke and flame.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Sylvia remarked, glancing at the kitchen ceiling. She tilted her yoghurt carton and scraped it out delicately with her teaspoon. ‘Funny, Lizzie was off to York yesterday on a day trip. I wonder if she saw it.’
‘It happened at half two in the morning.’
‘What a pity. She doesn’t like to miss anything.’
‘Good God, it’s not a tourist attraction,’ Colin said, ‘It’s a national tragedy. Four million pounds’ worth of damage.’ He groaned.
‘Don’t take it so personally.’
‘“The fire took almost three hours to contain,”’ Colin read out loud. ‘“Although it was stopped from spreading to the central tower, or from seriously damaging the Minster’s famous collection of stained-glass windows, it left the transept’s ancient roof beams and plastered vaults a smouldering mass on the floor below.”’
‘Your egg’s going cold,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’d have thought you’d eat it, after you went to such trouble to get it.’
‘I’ve lost my appetite. You don’t seem to appreciate what a loss this is to our heritage.’
‘It’s no loss to your arteries, anyway.’ Sylvia tossed her yoghurt carton into the wastebin. She opened one of the kitchen cupboards and began to take down the packets of the stuff the children ate. Amid Colin’s disinterested grief he felt a sharp prickle of personal resentment: she still does things for them, but nothing at all for me. ‘How did it start?’ she enquired.
‘Lightning, they think. They quote a priest here who says it was divine intervention.’
‘Why should it be that?’
‘Because of the Bishop of Durham. He was consecrated at the Minster last Friday. You know, all about his controversial views on the Resurrection. I thought that now you’re so friendly with our vicar you’d be well up in all this.’
‘Francis doesn’t talk about the Church much, he talks about community projects.’ Sylvia rummaged in the cutlery drawer. ‘If God didn’t like the Bishop of Durham, why didn’t He strike him personally? And do it promptly, on Saturday morning?’
‘Well, I tend to agree with you,’ Colin said. ‘It can’t be that, can it?’ He turned to the back page for more news of the disaster.’ “The Lord was on our side as we battled the flames,”’ he read. ‘By the way, how’s the vicar’s son? Has he come out of Youth Custody yet?’
‘He’s not in Youth Custody. He’s having Intermediate Treatment. He’s doing community service.’ Sylvia reached out for a piece of toast and picked up her knife. ‘Do you know what Francis says?
‘Watch it, that’s butter you’re eating,’ Colin said.
‘Oh, so it is!’ Looking thoughtful, she put the bread down on her plate. ‘He says that this business of Austin doing take-and-drive-away, it’s a deep compulsion he has, a compulsion to find out his real identity by sampling and testing out various machines.’
‘You mean it’s the vicar’s fault for naming him after a car?’
‘At some level, you see, Francis thinks he does believe that. By dumping the cars, he’s trying to jettison the mechanistic fantasies that have taken him over, and affirm his survival as a human being. It’s a form of acting out. Francis’s real worry is that because he usually leaves the cars in such a wrecked-up condition, it may indicate suicidal tendencies.’
‘Lordy, lordy,’ Colin said. ‘I didn’t know you could kill yourself by sniffing glue.’
‘It can damage your brain.’
‘How would they know?’
‘Francis is very worried. He can’t talk to Hermione. She thinks it’s because they didn’t send him to boarding school.’
‘I don’t doubt he’ll be boarded out soon enough, and at the taxpayers’ expense. How he got off this time beats me.’
‘He didn’t get off.’ Sylvia looked offended. ‘Community service is a very valid option.’
‘I’d rather he were in custody. Keep him away from our kids. How does a vicar’s son turn out such a thug?’
There was no time to go into this, because the children rushed in: Karen and Claire in their school uniforms, and the boy in a kind of romper suit of sagging jersey fabric, with holes cut out of it here and there, exposing bits of flesh. The girls flung themselves into their chairs.
‘Brownies tonight,’ Claire said: a chubby child, putting out her paws for everything edible within reach. ‘And I haven’t got my new uniform yet, Mum.’
‘Okay, I’ll see about it.’ She knew that the Brownies were a conformist outfit, pseudo-masculine if not paramilitary, but she suspected
