1

28 Polperro Gardens

Wood Green

London

N.22

March 30th 1974

Wednesday

Dear Janus

I am very sorry that I have not been able to see you, or even write to you before this. I have been rather ill – since Sunday afternoon, in fact. I’ve had a very bad cold combined with asthma and have hardly been able to breathe. After a visit to the doctor’s on Tuesday morning I was given a great variety of pills etc and am now a little better. (Lobo is crawling over me.) (I’ll have to stop for a moment as she now wants to go out.) Of course, not being at work, I am imprisoned here in this box impersonating a room (I hope I’m going to get paid from work as I’m skint). Still, I am hoping that I shall be able to come and see you on Friday. If I don’t, I hope that you will write to me as soon after you receive this letter as possible. I shall look forward to it!

Of course, what with so many demons flying around forcing gentlemen such as us to take too many drinks and whoop too loud and too often and even more strange and ludicrous actions! And even the changing of names as the mad women of Tierrapaulita do (to change themselves) does not one bit of good – and the changing of Billbaorosta or Januscjeckarama to: violas one day or violets the next or even after a while cirfrusias, cifrernas, tirrenas, mabrofordotas, frabicias, fabiolas, quitanias, pasquinas, shoposas, zozimas, zangoras and that’s the end of the alphabet! (apart from the missing tenaquilas and pogaliras). So think not of changing, my friend, (name or anything) and be damned to devils! For happy are those who whoopeth too loud and delirious are those who ludicrous are!

Now I have heard it said that the natives in the Northern part of Windhover Hill (so far unexplored) speak of a most monstrous Red Lion, that lives in those parts, and its roars can be heard echoing about the eucalyptus and Banyan trees in the valley of the source of the Limpopo. To my mind it is in the national interest that an expedition to discover the Red Lion must be mounted but that it should be properly funded. Many pleas to the Royal Geographical society have been fruitless so far and others snatch away the mountains of the Shangri-las but to the valley of the Red Lion a path must soon be made, and it is we that shall make it.

I hope very much so that dear Scipplecat is well and happy and I hope that you will convey my best regards to the aforesaid furry creature. Lobo also sends her best wishes.

Now look after yourself JJ and take care till I see you again. I’m afraid coughing and spluttering I must bring this letter to its terrible and inevitable end.

Try not to drink too much till I see you.

You must save some money so that we can go a-boozing. (Lobo is sitting on my head, my nose is full of whiskers)

I think the drink is getting the better of this letter

PAX Vobiscum

Lobo says goodbye for now

also adios from myself

Bill

Janus didn’t usually leave his letters from Bill lying around, but this one had been left on the kitchen table, out of its envelope, half-unfolded, beside the glass cider tankard that held a posy of wilting daffodils, in a way that suggested, to Colette at least, that she was being invited, along with anyone else in the house, to read it.

And so she had read it, alone in the kitchen, waiting for Aldous to return after a morning at school to get ready for the funeral that afternoon. It was written in a painstakingly rendered Gothic script using a broad, italic nib and illustrated with exquisite marginal drawings. It was like a drunkard’s version of the Book of Kells. The ‘D’ of ‘Dear Janus’ had been drawn as a D-shaped pub, with a little chimney, creeping ivy and an inn-sign hanging (she even recognised the decapitated Elizabethan on the sign as The Quiet Woman). The remainder of the word had been supplemented by a punning human ear, painted in such pure, Renaissance detail it could have been lifted from a Botticelli portrait. All around the margins of the letter were pen and ink drawings of almost-empty bottles and glasses, some tipped over and spilling the last of their contents, but again drawn beautifully. By the end of the letter the calligraphy, so crisp and rigid at the beginning, had broken down into a scruffy, barely legible scrawl, though Bill’s signature was accompanied by what looked like a woodcut, in blood-red ink, of a clenched fist.

Colette tried to imagine the time it must have taken to produce a letter like this, picturing her son-in-law sitting at the little writing desk she’d seen in his and Juliette’s bedroom, that was a small forest of pens and brushes, bottles of ink, little wrinkled tubes of watercolour, boxes of nibs. It must have taken him several evenings. An act of devotion. Colette found the sheer effort Bill had put into this letter to her son rather touching. At least someone in the world loved him.

By the time Aldous had come home, fresh and fluffy from cycling, Colette had long finished reading the letter, but she pretended to be reading it for the first time as he came in, to make it easier for her to show it to him.

But Aldous only gave the letter a cursory glance, reading the first few lines, and admiring Bill’s graphic skills, giving a half-hearted, rather hopeless laugh at the D-shaped pub, before handing the letter back to his wife.

‘What a load of rubbish,’ he sighed, strolling towards the sink to fill a small saucepan with water. Colette felt briefly annoyed by her husband’s indifference. He might not like the way his son had been behaving recently, the drunken tantrums, the wanton neglect of his talents as a pianist, but he could at least be interested in him. For the sake of the funeral they were to attend that day, however, she decided to be on his side.

‘At least he won’t be around to spoil things today,’ she said, folding the letter, wondering if she should replace it on the table as though it had never been touched, then realising her son could hardly expect her to have ignored it for a whole day, ‘thank Christ he went to work.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past him to turn up out of the blue,’ said Aldous, lighting a ring beneath the pan he’d just filled, ‘you know how he gets if he thinks there’s a chance of free drink.’

They both recalled Christine’s wedding, a couple of years before – the trampled-on wedding cake, the shattered bouquets, the drenched, sobbing bridesmaids.

‘He won’t,’ said Colette, ‘he doesn’t even know the funeral’s today.’

Aldous gave his wife a withering look, meaning to say you could never be sure what Janus knew and what he didn’t.

‘So it will be just you and me representing the Jones family,’ Colette said, ‘I hope there aren’t lots of our nephews and nieces there, it’ll make our children look so mean . . .’

The funeral of Mary, the wife of Colette’s favourite brother, Janus Brian, was not thought worthy of James breaking his second term as an anthropology student at the University of Lincoln, nor of Juliette losing a day’s pay at Eve St John’s Toy Emporium, nor even of Julian, their youngest, missing out on double geography and P.E. at St Francis Xavier’s. Of all their children Janus would have been the one most likely to have taken a day off work, had he known about it.

Aldous took a small package of newspaper from his jacket pocket, untwisted it, and tipped the contents into a mug. He hadn’t had a chance to use it at school, the instant coffee powder he always packed at the last minute before leaving the house for work, tearing off a corner of the Telegraph and spooning on some Maxwell House, folding the paper over in a neat, airtight package, the clever origami of which always delighted his wife when she saw it. He emptied the bubbling saucepan into the mug. They hadn’t had a kettle for years. The little, lidless, gaudily enamelled pots that came to a boil with a gradually strengthening wail of despair, always seemed to boil dry, thus melting the cheap alloys of their bases. So they only used pans now.

‘Do you think I should wear a black tie?’ said Aldous, sipping cautiously the black, sugarless coffee.

Colette sat down in her chair by the old cast iron boiler and opened a bottle of Gold Label barley wine with the bottle-opening end of a tin opener.

‘Have you got a black tie?’

‘No.’

‘Then the question was academic, was it?’

‘I suppose I could buy one on the way. You know what Janus Brian’s like. How fussy he is about formalities like that . . .’

That their eldest son, and Colette’s closest brother shared the same name, had never once been a source of confusion in their lives. At least, not once they’d started using her brother’s middle name in addition to his first, to help distinguish him. Now he was always referred to by these two names – Janus Brian – even when there was no doubt about to whom the name Janus referred, even, sometimes, to his face – Hello Janus Brian, how are you? And Janus Brian didn’t seem to mind. It was, after all, a permanent reminder of the compliment his sister had paid him in naming her first-born after him.

‘I don’t think he’d mind about a thing like that,’ said Colette, ‘I’m not wearing any black.’

‘Women can get away with it,’ said Aldous, ‘men are different. They read things into ties, especially men like Janus Brian.’

Colette poured the Gold Label into a glass, where it fizzed half-heartedly, her second of the day. Colette had taken to this tipple recently, initially as a sedative, to reinforce the ever-weakening effect of her sleeping pills. She would drink two or three glasses in the evening, then take four or five Nembutals (the recommended dose was two), which would despatch her to a deep, dreamless sleep for eight hours. The problem was that awakening was a long, slow painful struggle. She woke as if from a pit of glue, always with a pounding headache and sensations of nausea, the only cure for which, she soon found, was a morning glass of barley wine. One of those and she was near instantly awake and fresh. A sedative in the evening, a pick-me-up in the morning. Barley wine was her wonder-drink.

Aldous looked at himself in the little mirror that was fixed to the wall by the back door. His tie was pale blue. His shirt a dark grey, fraying at the collar. A jacket of light tweed. His teaching clothes. He hadn’t thought about it before, but it now struck him that he couldn’t possibly go to a funeral in his teaching clothes. Standards of dress among the pupils at the school Aldous had taught at for nearly three decades had declined rapidly in the last few years, a wave of slightly bashful permissiveness had allowed hair to creep over collars, ties to be worn loosely, top buttons to be left undone, and shoes of the ridiculously elevated kind to be worn, the effect being to give Aldous a distorted sense of his own sartorial smartness. Against the haystack slovenliness of his pupils he had appeared dapperly elegant, but here, in the mirror, he could see how inappropriate his clothes would be for a funeral. He needed a decent tie, at least.

‘I think I will get a new tie,’ he said to Colette, who was dressed in the pink pullover with white trimmings she had knitted years ago for Juliette, to which she’d pinned one of her mother’s old fake ruby brooches. She had dark blue trousers, green sandals, ‘I’ll call at Houseman’s on the way.’

Houseman’s was a gentleman’s outfitters on the Parade. In the days when Aldous and Colette had had some money Aldous had bought all his clothes from there, though as money had become increasingly scarce, his visits had become less frequent, until he only ever went there now for underwear, making do with jackets, shirts and trousers from the Oxfam shop that had recently opened near The Red Lion.

‘If you must,’ said Colette, ‘though it’ll be a waste of time and money.’

Though secretly she was glad of the distraction and delay a detour to Houseman’s would take, since she was dreading the funeral. Or at least, she was dreading the actual interment, the lowering of the coffin into the grave. Janus Brian had chosen a spot for his wife in Ladore Lane Cemetery just across the path from where their mother and their sister Meg were buried. Colette found visiting these graves a painful experience at the best of times, that their deaths, both from natural causes (old age and a heart attack), had come so close together (Nana first, then Meg) had been a source of anguish in Colette’s life. To be there for another funeral, to witness the lowering of a coffin when it had troubled her so much before (so deep, so dreadfully deep) might, she feared, prove too much for her to bear. On the other hand, she was looking forward to the little gathering that was to take place at Janus Brian’s house afterwards, a meeting of sisters and brothers, brothers and sons, wives and daughters. It was so rare for them all to be gathered in a single place, especially with Janus Brian, who had become very reclusive in recent years. Though he lived only a mile away from Colette, visits to his house in Leicester Avenue, a cul-de-sac of pebbledashed semis, were often coldly received, and rarely reciprocated. In fact, he only ever visited Colette to announce one thing – the imminence of his own death.

‘Nothing funny about it dear. This is it,’ he said once when Colette opened the front door to see him standing on the step in his work clothes (a dark suit with a narrow black tie), ‘my number’s up. Will you get off the floor?’ Colette had got down on her knees in mock worship at her brother’s feet.

It had happened several times, usually as a result of reading some health article or other, that Janus Brian would discover symptoms in himself of a fatal disease. Now she couldn’t even remember what it had been. An innocent pimple, wart, or pedunculated polyp. A benign confusion of cells. A temporary thinning of the blood. As with most hypochondriacs, however, Janus Brian remained annoyingly free of real illness.

Then, only last week, he’d called at the house in his dark suit and Colette had poured ironic gratitude on his presence, unrolling an invisible red carpet, forming a solo guard of honour, kissing him on both cheeks like a Russian at a superpower summit, before she noticed how Janus Brian’s countenance had fallen. His face was a game of Kerplunk and someone had just extracted the crucial straw sending all the marbles tumbling. Colette thought that perhaps death really was coming for him now, after a dozen false alarms. But it was not his own death that Janus Brian had come to announce – it was that of his wife.

Colette had always felt responsible, in some way, for the marriage of Janus Brian and Mary Moore. The Waugh children – Lesley, Agatha, Meg and Colette – had all married within a few years of each other, in a post-war nuptial frenzy. Colette didn’t want to see her favourite brother left out, sensing that he desired husbandhood while feigning indifference to women. She fixed him up with numerous blind dates, always keeping an ear to the ground for marriage-hungry spinsters, inviting Janus along for evenings in the pub with eager single women. Janus was not spectacularly good looking; tall, bespectacled, balding, thin-lipped and with too much chin, in some people’s eyes he was rather plain, if not ugly. But there was an air of dishevelled elegance about him, a look of casual distinction that some women found attractive. Over the years Colette had rooted out plenty of females willing to wed her brother, but for a man she supposed mostly uninterested in women, he proved surprisingly fussy in his preferences.

‘She was a charming young girl, dear,’ he would say the following morning, ‘really charming, but, you know, I felt that she had rather a tall forehead, and it seemed to come forward slightly, and then go in again,’ he described the shape with his hand, ‘do you know what I mean?’ ‘No. I thought she was beautiful.’ ‘She was, in her way. It was just that her forehead was the wrong shape.’ Another time, she recalled, it was the eyes that put Janus off. ‘They were grave eyes,’ he said, selecting the adjective carefully and with much thought. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t know how else to put it. She just had . . . grave eyes.’ Then there was a girl he described as having a ‘wet mouth’. ‘It’s when someone makes slippery, sticky noises with their mouth while they talk. It drives you mad. I could never marry a girl with a wet mouth.’

How many would-be wives had Colette procured over the years? Ten? A dozen? And then he goes and picks the most unlikeliest of mates from under her nose; Mary Moore, sister of Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s oldest friend, and one time admirer of Colette.

‘Janus never wanted that sort of wife,’ Aldous had said, many years later, ‘He always wanted a glamour-puss for a wife. A dolly-bird. A long-legged, high-bosomed blonde.’ It had not occurred to Colette that her brother was much of a connoisseur of female beauty – pernickety over minor anatomical details like the height of the forehead, yes, but not the sort of man to be drawn to the brazen sirens that filled his sizeable archive of Silver Screen and Movie Goer.

‘How do you know?’ said Colette, indignant that Aldous should claim to know her brother better than her.

‘Can’t you see how he fancies himself? He thinks he’s some sort of suave film star. A Cary Grant . . .’ Colette burst into a sniggering laugh at the idea, ‘. . . or an Errol Flynn. He’s always been like that. A narcissist.’

Mary was not a beautiful woman. She was small and stout with dark, curly hair always cut at a sensible, practical length. Her eyes were those of a mouse – small, black and attentive while her little mouth was crowded with what looked like milk teeth, only just showing above the gums, too much of which were exposed when she laughed.

Then there was the oddness of her movements, the way she would suddenly clench her nose, as though stifling a sneeze, or a laugh. The strange, wine-taster’s lip-poutings she gave, or the whole-face grimaces, produced for no reason, that came from nowhere.

Also, she was sterile.

Colette often wondered what sort of father her brother would have been, what sort of sons he would have had, what daughters. She liked to think he would have been a good father to his own children, because he was very awkward with his nephews and nieces. She remembered allowing him to hold his namesake Janus when he was a few days old, and Janus Brian had held the baby away from him, as though it might be covered in sharp spines, or that it might explode.

Once, when James was a little boy, Colette was washing his feet, which she did, as she’d always done, by sitting her son in a chair and kneeling down with a plastic washing up bowl full of soapy water. Janus Brian was in the house and witnessed the scene – mother kneeling before her son, washing his feet.

‘What are you doing, worshipping that kid?’ he muttered with a half laugh.

Children never came to Janus Brian and Mary. Somehow, it seemed to Colette, childlessness shaped their lives, gave it its character, its distinctiveness. How could they bear it, she wondered, to know that that was it? That their marriage was just that – two people – and would never be anything else, robbed of the phases growing children give to a family. How could they contemplate old age, tottering together along a lonely path into darkness, with no one to leave their house to but strangers?

When they finally abandoned, after years of tentative efforts, any idea of having children, Janus and Mary somehow raised a drawbridge against their possibility. Janus settled into his career as a draughtsman, producing blueprints for power stations. The concern with precision and accuracy that this job entailed seemed to spill over into his domestic life. Their house became a domain of meticulous order with always freshly hoovered floors, unstained upholstery, dusted ornaments that never moved, intricate and expensive crystalware that could sit safely at the edge of a table. Nothing in Janus Brian’s house was ever broken. Their crockery was of complete and unchipped sets that were changed only when the pattern began to fade.

And then there was his garden, a steeply sloping series of terraces rising from a lush patio, passing through alpines, colourfully laden gazebos, little scalloped lawns, eventually flattening out to a kitchen garden where vegetables grew in straight lines. He and Mary had put everything into their garden. It was not a garden designed with children in mind. Janus and Mary’s house and garden seemed to Colette to have become a celebration of childlessness.

She had only ever had the briefest glimpses of the interior of their marriage, and it always felt chilly to her.

Often when she visited, Janus and Mary would be in their sitting room watching the television with a neutral, bland complacency in their postures as they slumped in reclining armchairs and leather sofas.

Is that all you ever do, she sometimes felt like saying, sit there and watch TV?

But instead she said ‘You’ve got a colour television. I didn’t know you had one of those. Why didn’t you tell me?’

Her brother turned to her, drawing his face away from the screen with difficulty, before saying ‘Dear, when you buy a colour television, you don’t go running down the street shouting “I’ve got a colour television! I’ve got a colour television”.’

Mary giggled and said ‘Why not?’ underlining her remark with a facial tic from her considerable repertoire. This was the nose-draw, where she stretched the philtrum of her upper lip, as if to loosen a dried bogey in her nostril.

Colette was fond of Mary, however. She found her witty and friendly. Unpretentious. Unsnobbish. These things set her apart from the other inhabitants of that well-to-do cul-de-sac, along with the fact that she was membership secretary for her local branch of the Labour Party, which didn’t seem to prevent her from being a popular participant in many coffee mornings. She was good at getting along with people. So Colette was upset when Janus Brian told her of her death.

‘She was watching the telly,’ he said, trying so hard to speak calmly in the hall at Fernlight Avenue. He seemed, as always, reluctant to penetrate further into Colette’s house than its hallway. ‘Sat in the armchair with a mug of coffee and a saucer of digestives. Then she said “Oh dear”, and put her head on her shoulder and closed her eyes and that was it. I thought she was just dozing off, not something she usually does, but then she let the coffee go, scalding hot all over her lap, and when she didn’t flinch I realized she’d gone. I wondered how I could ever have thought she was just asleep. There’s a special face we save for when we’re dead, Dear, and that’s the face she had . . .’

So Aldous and Colette drove to Houseman’s for a black tie, and Colette took the opportunity of stocking up on cigarettes at Hudson’s, the tobacco-reeking newsagents two shops down. Then a straightforward drive along Green Lanes to St Nicola’s church, where there was already a sizeable crowd gathering. In his haste, Aldous had forgotten to actually don his tie, and so spent an awkward few moments crouched down in the depths of the Hillman’s footwells knotting the black silk around his neck, and then at the service found he was the only person so dressed. Even Lesley, Colette’s other brother and Aldous’s oldest friend, had not thought it necessary to wear any black. In fact, he was wearing the sort of teaching clothes (the lifelong occupation from which he’d now retired) that Aldous had felt so uncomfortable in earlier. His wife, Madeleine, was dressed in a bottle-green two piece with a matching hat and veil.

Colette was surprised by the turnout, and by the number of people she didn’t know. As far as she was aware, Janus Brian had only one friend, Reg Moore, but his wife must have been rather more sociable, because the church was teeming with women her age and who were, prior to the service, chatting to each other with the comfortable informality of long acquaintance.

Taking her place at the front of the church, alongside her brothers, and her sister Agatha, pleased to find herself standing next to Janus Brian, whose face was stiff with the effort of self-control, Colette caught her first glimpse of the coffin – four tall candles at each corner, a tasteful spray of lilies on its top, and though it contained a person who had only ever existed on the periphery of her life, Colette felt immediately the surge of unwanted tears behind her eyes. Memories of her mother’s funeral, her sister’s, which had taken place in the same church nearly ten years before, were made intensely real by the stench of varnish and incense, the hopelessness of flowers and prayers.

Colette had once been a regular churchgoer, the whole family spending Sunday morning among St Nicola’s religious kitsch, it’s half-hearted attempt to evoke the grandeur of the Gothic. Nowadays only Aldous continued this tradition, taking leisurely strolls there and back each Sunday morning, seeming to find in Holy Communion a much more ordered and comprehensible version of Sunday lunch than the one he usually experienced at home. Colette, however, now only visited St Nicola’s for funerals, and her convent upbringing meant she could not escape a sense of guilt at her lapse, even more so when she flirted, as she sometimes did, with agnosticism, even outright atheism. Her sister Agatha had surprised her once by announcing, in the plain, casual tone so characteristic of her, that she was an agnostic. She seemed to find a satisfaction in the word, and smiled slyly, as if not expecting Colette to understand what it meant.

‘So am I,’ she had replied instantly, in a childish attempt to appear unshocked.

But entering a church was, for her, like walking into a theatre for a part she had been rehearsing all her life. The words came so easily, the Our Father, the Hail Mary. She knew them in Latin probably better than she knew them in English – Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus . . . The automatic genuflections, the bowing of the head, the whole choreography of the Catholic Mass was written into her memory so deeply she could never truly call herself an atheist without a fear of divine wrath, or the pursuit, at least, of the nuns who had terrorized her childhood.

So she, and her brothers and sister, stood, sat, knelt, sang and recited in unison throughout the service, and only at the De Profundis did she look up

Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord . . .

And felt the surge of tears again. The coffin now amid clouds wafted by respectful altar boys from their quietly rattling gilt censers, dripping with the holy water the priest had shaken over it with such vigour she had felt a few droplets reach her,

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that
watch for the morning

She found herself mouthing the words along with the elderly, rather bumbling German priest, who had given her sister-in-law a middle name she didn’t possess, and could not, at that moment, have possibly declared herself an atheist. She stifled more tears, and heard behind her the wet noise of loose mucus being sniffed. She wanted to turn to see who else was crying. She sensed Janus Brian beside her, stoically firm, unyielding to emotion. He too, as far as she knew, liked to call himself an atheist. Far too scientifically and practically minded ever to be ‘fooled’ as he’d put it, by the mysteries of the faith.

Things got worse for Colette at the graveside. Still next to Janus Brian, their arms linked for mutual support, Colette didn’t know where to focus her attention – the coffin in half-shadow beneath them? The greengrocer’s fake grass draping the edge of the hole? The all-surrounding wall of mourners? In the end she had to close her eyes, and look at nothing but the afterimages of light that drifted behind her eyelids. She felt herself drifting with them, a dangerous thing to do at a graveside. The priest’s words were mostly lost in the breezy air, as meaningless as the bickering sparrows nearby. She wondered if she was going to faint. She had never fainted in her life, and yet she was always expecting to. She drifted further, and became conscious of her brother’s arm restraining her. She was being gently tugged back from a brink.

Afterwards at Leicester Avenue (never could Janus Brian’s house have contained so many people), Colette found a moment to thank her brother for not letting her fall.

‘Oh,’ said Janus Brian, ‘I thought it was you that pulled me back.’

They laughed, and Colette would have liked to talk to her brother more, to find out how he was really feeling about the loss of his wife, to try and ascertain if they really had been in love for all those years alone together, to know what it was like to lose a spouse, and to have no children, but Janus Brian was the object of a long, commiserating queue which seemed to consist, mostly, of the primly dressed cohorts of Mary’s suburban coffee mornings.

Instead she spent some time trying to recognize faces she hadn’t seen for many years. It was difficult. She must have seen these nephews and nieces since they’d grown up, but somehow she still pictured them as children. The little boy she remembered spreading peanut butter over a record player was now a tall man with a beard, going bald on top. The red-faced girl she recalled tying her teddy bears to a chair with a skipping rope was now a serious looking woman with a drooping bust and bags under her eyes. Frequently she found herself addressing strangers with questions like ‘Were you a friend of Mary’s?’ Only to have them reply ‘No, I’m your nephew, Douglas, auntie Colette,’ or something similar.

To her further astonishment, there was a new generation sprouting, still at the infant stage, but whose arrival had taken Colette mostly unawares. If she thought back she could recall now and then little cards arriving at Fernlight Avenue announcing the birth of these children, which had hung around on the mantelpiece for a few months, sometimes with blurred, black and white photos of sleeping, squashed faces and the caption ‘Hallo!’, until they were lost in the thicket of bills and postcards that grew up around them. And now here they were, in the flesh, full of childish energy and language, addressing her, to her horror, as ‘great-aunt’.

She found her sister Agatha and brother Lesley sitting silently on a sofa. Colette rarely saw these siblings now, since their emigration to opposite sides of High Wycombe, a Chiltern dormitory town famous for making chairs. Lesley had moved there because he’d always had a passion for the Chiltern landscape. Colette couldn’t quite remember why Agatha had moved there, presumably following Lesley’s example, though the two had never been particularly close. Agatha was the oldest, in her late sixties, happily widowed and retired. Lesley, second oldest, retired schoolmaster, had at one time been tutor and mentor of her husband, Aldous. Lesley had taken Aldous to his bosom when he’d been his teacher, encouraging him through art school in the years before the war, paying the fees himself. Lesley had treated him almost as a little brother, but their friendship had cooled once Aldous had turned himself into Lesley’s little brother-in-law, by marrying Colette. He’d never been quite the same man since, Colette felt, at least not since his own marriage to Madeleine Singer shortly afterwards. Colette had taken an instant dislike to Madeleine, and always believed her brother had made the wrong choice in marrying her. She could see it in his eyes, in the haunted looks he gave her over the tea-table in their bookless house when they visited, of a man who has realised, just too late, that he has taken the wrong course through life. Colette viewed Madeleine as a philistine, a gossip and a snob who’d put an end to her brother’s life of reading and high culture.

How she hated Madeleine. The perfect housewife. The perfect mother. How she hated hearing about their latest coach trip to ‘Wordsworth Country’ or ‘Constable Country’, her cultured brother dragged with the rest of the common herd through the plastic tearooms and trinket shops of the tourist trails. On his mantelpiece last time she’d visited she’d noticed a Brontë Calendar, a tiny reproduction of Branwell’s portrait alongside a tear-off pad of days and months.

She hadn’t said anything. She’d never said anything. She’d always bitten her tongue, telling herself that it wasn’t worth getting upset about. In fact, she always seemed to find herself apologising to Lesley and Madeleine, usually for something her eldest son had done. The last time it had been Christine’s wedding, the marriage of Lesley and Madeleine’s oldest daughter to a bushy-faced teacher in Bournemouth. Janus had turned up drunk at the reception, having travelled down separately. He’d played the grand piano that had sat unused in a corner of the hall, but had produced nothing but trills and glissandos. He’d danced drunkenly with bridesmaids, lurching around so clumsily they would end up on the floor. He’d shaken up the bottles of champagne and had sent fizzy cascades into the shocked, walrus-moustached faces of the groom’s older relatives. Colette and Aldous had made their escape quickly and had travelled back to London alone, leaving Janus to run amok in Bournemouth. A stupid thing for them to have done, but it had been Aldous’s suggestion. ‘If we go now Janus will probably be stuck down there for the weekend and we’ll get some peace at home.’

They did get some peace. Janus was held in a Bournemouth police station for Saturday night and most of Sunday. Lesley had had to bail him out. The letters that came from High Wycombe shortly afterwards were carefully measured in their mixture of indignation and sympathy. How dare you leave us to deal with Janus, but now we see what you have to put up with, were their gist.

Colette was vaguely aware, as Madeleine walked over to her, holding an empty sherry glass in one hand and a jar of homemade blackberry jam in the other, that she hadn’t yet apologized for that incident, to either Lesley or Madeleine. They hadn’t met since, and Colette still had the letter of apology she composed and never posted, in her old needlework box, along with all the other unfinished, never-to-be-posted letters she had written over the years, most of which began ‘Dear Madeleine, I won’t beat about the bush, I think you are a cow . . .’

‘I’m so sorry, Madeleine, about Christine’s wedding,’ she said.

Madeleine affected great surprise.

‘Sorry? Whatever for. It was a tremendous success.’

‘Sorry about Janus and his antics that day.’

Madeleine closed her eyes and gently shook her head.

‘Colette, if there is one thing that gives me a constant supply of energy and happiness as I grow older, it is the knowledge that my daughter that day married one of the finest men in Bournemouth. The memory of your son’s self-debasement and humiliation has completely faded and died in the shadow of Christine’s happiness, except of course, to give me concern for yourself and Aldous’s poor plight in having to cope with him. Is he still as terrible as ever?’

‘Aldous is fine,’ said Colette.

‘I meant Janus,’ Madeleine laughed embarrassedly.

‘Well, he still enjoys his drink, like we all do,’ she looked down at Lesley, still sitting silently on the couch. He gave a polite, non-comprehending smile in return.

After an awkward pause Madeleine became aware of what she was holding. She held it out for Colette.

‘Anyway, Colette, this is for you. The blackberries grow all along the alley at the end of the garden, so last summer I finally found the time to make some jam. I’ve got far more than we could ever use.’

Colette took the preserve.

‘How nice,’ she said.

The jam was one of those barbs that Madeleine was always firing at her, compliments, kindnesses, gifts, but each with an inward pointing hook that stuck and hung in the flesh until it festered. She had become very skilful at it. A neutral observer would never have known what blackberry jam meant to these two women – how Colette’s garden was so overrun with blackberries they could have outdone Robertson’s in the production of blackberry jam. How in the days when Lesley and Madeleine had been regular visitors to Fernlight Avenue Colette and Madeleine were always talking about the blackberries, Colette saying how she was going to make lots of jam that summer, Madeleine how she was looking forward to having some. But Colette never made their blackberries into jam. The children ate what they could off the bush, but there were too many even for them. The rest rotted on their stems. But now Madeleine was making the jam, and giving it to her. Madeleine may as well have stabbed Colette and written across her forehead incapable wife and mother, in blackberry jam.

But Colette took the jam thankfully, smilingly, knowing it would sit in the larder uneaten for months, even years, forgotten about among the relics of that cupboard, to be rediscovered one day, opened, and found do be an inch deep in fungus. Colette’s family had never much taken to jam, or marmalade. She bought it occasionally, on a whim, thinking it to be a treat, and perhaps a quarter of the jar would get used, then it would go runny, and greasy with the butter that had carelessly got in, and then it would be forgotten about.

‘Although I say it is unnecessary for you to apologize to me about Christine’s wedding,’ Madeleine went on, ‘you might like to have a few words with Christine herself, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.’

‘Christine’s here?’ said Colette, surprised.

‘Over there,’ said Madeleine, pointing across the room, where Colette could just glimpse between the crowds, a figure of a woman in deep purple, sitting on a coffee table, who looked nothing like the Christine she remembered from that summer in the late sixties when she had been a regular visitor to Fernlight Avenue, the summer during which her friendship with Janus had blossomed. Then she had been a girl – happy, pretty, willing to please. It felt as though that was the last time she had seen her, because at the wedding she was all veiled and tucked away in her silk. Now, having passed through the chrysalis stage of her wedding, it seemed, she had emerged as a mature woman, still pretty, in a soft, dreamy, dark sort of way, but serious, confident and rather sad.

Madeleine having retreated into the crowd, Colette made her way across the room in an awkward and slow zigzag towards Christine, preparing the long apologetic speech she had wanted to deliver for a long time, not just for the wedding, but for the awful way Janus had treated her before that, when their friendship had come to an end – hounding her with phone calls, writing her a long series of childish, haranguing letters, once abandoning her in the middle of London without any money. But as she nears she feels a nervousness creep up on her. It was to do with Christine’s beauty and confidence, two female qualities which always unsettled Colette, since she had always felt a distinct lack of both. She passed close by where Christine was sitting, noticing the man she was talking to, who had cropped hair and round wire glasses, in the Auschwitz-survivor style John Lennon had recently adopted. She then realized that this man was the same hirsute hippy Christine had married herself to in Bournemouth, only then he was mimicking John Lennon’s long-hair phase. Feeling a sudden rush of panic as she neared the coffee table on which Christine was sitting, she felt unable to break into their conversation, and passed quickly by, as if having something important to attend to in the kitchen.

She would catch Christine later, she thought. She had always liked Christine, but had always feared she would grow into a woman like her mother. Having married that deranged-looking teacher had given Colette some hope, since she detected some disapproval in Madeleine, despite her long eulogy to her daughter’s happiness.

The kitchen, too, was crowded with strangers. She made for the cool air of the garden, which was empty.

When the kids had been younger they’d loved visiting Janus Brian for his garden. He would always begin by giving them a formal tour, where they would stand patiently and a little nervously while their uncle named all the plants, usually in Latin, telling them when they’d been planted, when they were expected to flower, or fruit. Then, the tour over, the adults would retire indoors while the kids ran riot in the flower-beds and vegetable patches, destroying most of the plants whose names they’d already forgotten.

It was always with a loud sigh of relief that Janus Brian saw them off the premises in the evening.

The garden now was as perfect as she remembered it from those days, already colourful with spring flowers – daffodils and hyacinths sprouting on the rockeries, crocuses peeping through the little lawns. Colette climbed the crooked stone path that took her through the different levels of the garden, past the dainty oval lawn backed by ornamental firs and its rustic bench, through the wattle-made laburnum arch to another tiny lawn, then past a dwarf willow and the herb garden to the level area where there was a long lawn on one side, the vegetable patch on the other – canes and trellises, ranks of winter and spring vegetables, frames, a greenhouse, netting, a little shed. More food grew here than could possibly be consumed by wan, wispy Janus Brian. Odd that a man who grew such an abundance of wholesome food in his garden should always look so undernourished.

Beyond the lawn and the vegetable patch, where the garden ended, was the garden’s real treasure. Through the tall trees could be seen a railway cutting, and in it, the rails that carried the little silver trains of the Piccadilly Line above ground. They passed so frequently the kids had never had to wait long to watch them rattling past. Colette watched them now, through the trees, and tried to remember the childish thrill of trains. These trains weren’t up to much, however, not to a woman who’d travelled on the Silver Streak and the Flying Scotsman, leaning dangerously out of the carriage windows to watch those magnificent locomotives as they’d taken the bends on their way to the north. They could hardly be called trains at all, and they always looked so weak and vulnerable above ground, these tube trains, like snails out of their shells.

‘I thought I’d find you here.’

Colette jumped, then turned to see Janus Brian standing close behind her.

‘Janus don’t,’ she said, a hand to her chest, ‘you nearly gave me a . . .’

‘Sorry. I just had to get out of that house. Mary’s friends are driving me nuts. They keep saying how brave I am. If I was really brave I’d tell them all to shove off and leave me in peace.’

Colette laughed.

‘I’m just remembering the times we used to come here when the children were young. With Nana, do you remember? The children loved it. Nana too. She was always very complimentary about your garden.’

Janus Brian, without altering the expression on his face, simply said, ‘Nana was a dream, dear.’

‘How can you say that, Janus Brian, about your own mother?’

It had upset her greatly when Janus Brian had first started denying the existence of the past in this way. Whenever she had related some anecdote from their childhood, a fond memory she wanted to share – the time their floppy Airedale Barry fell into the river Lea or the time a drunk from The Flowerpot tried to turn the water in the pond on Clapton Common into wine, Janus Brian would wait politely for Colette to finish, and then say, always with that same dry tone of pity, ‘Barry was a dream, dear. The water into wine was a dream. It was all a dream.’

Aldous knew how it upset her. She was often in tears as he drove her home along the winding suburban back roads.

‘What did he mean – Nana was a dream?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just his way of . . .’

‘Way of what?’

‘He doesn’t like talking about the past.’

‘Why doesn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t take any notice of him.’

‘I don’t like being told my whole life is a dream,’ Colette held pink lavatory paper to her eyes, crimping it with tears, ‘Nana wasn’t a dream, she was real.’

‘I know.’

‘He’ll say I’m a dream next. Is that what he thinks? Everything is a dream?’

‘I don’t know.’

Now, in her brother’s garden, where she can almost see the ghost of her mother reaching up to sniff the lilacs, the delightful phantoms of her children tumbling in the flower beds, she feels a strong urge to question her brother.

‘You don’t really mean it, do you, when you say that? You don’t really think Nana was a dream?’

‘Do you remember those lines from that poem in Alice in Wonderland, how does it go –

Ever drifting down the stream,
Lingering in the golden gleam,
Life, what is it but a dream?’

‘I never liked Carroll’s serious poems. He could be very sentimental.’

‘But true all the same. What is the past? Dreams and dust. And not even much dust. Would you like some tomato sherry?’

For the first time Colette’s attention is drawn to the objects in Janus Brian’s hands. A wine bottle and a glass. He holds up the bottle for her inspection, it has a plain label bearing Janus Brian’s cramped handwriting. Tomato Sherry – 1972.

‘The coffee morning dragons have got through all the off-licence stuff, so I’m reduced to raiding my wine cellar. It’s not proving too popular for some reason.’

He poured some into the empty sherry glass Colette had with her. She remembered now. Those little gifts she used to get at Christmas, or on departure from a visit – Cucumber Wine, Cauliflower Champagne, Brussel Sprout Whisky. That was where all the fruit and vegetables from this extensive kitchen garden went – into the fermentation bins of Janus Brian’s home brewing kits. She took a sip of the tomato sherry and felt as though something had jumped out of the glass and punched her in the nose. Janus Brian’s home-brew was always like that. Unbelievably potent, and sweet to the point of burning, though her tongue, these days seasoned by regular drinking of barley wines, was more able to cope with it, and she downed it quickly for a refill.

‘You know, dear, all my life I have been scared of death, but since Mary died I have come to the conclusion that it is life that’s the really frightening thing.’

They sat on a bench that looked as though it had been made by seven dwarves, and shared the bottle of sherry together. Janus went on, ‘Religion is supposed to make us cope with death, but we need something to make life bearable . . .’ He suddenly looked at the full glass in his hand, then drank thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I was thinking all the way through the service. Did you understand a word that priest was saying? He had a very strange accent . . .’

‘He was German.’

‘And I was thinking all the time that we should be praying for ourselves, not Mary. Mary’s gone. It’s the people left behind that are suffering . . .’

‘She isn’t gone, not really, stop saying that,’ said Colette. She didn’t like this line of thinking that her brother was so insistent on pushing, partly because she felt it was true. She was not there to mourn Mary, but to talk to Janus Brian, and as far as she could tell, Mary had been all but forgotten about already amongst the nattering mourners. Mary was the past, and she was rapidly being overwritten by the present.

‘Oh I know you still believe in heaven and all that ghostly stuff. But I never have. Not even as a little boy. I could always see, even from infancy, that it didn’t make sense. The same with Father Christmas, the tooth fairy. I always knew it was just a trick.’

Colette remembered the Christmas Eve when Janus Brian had rigged a little web of cotton across the fireplace, a mesh of barely visible black thread taped to the surround. He’d called it his Father Christmas trap. On Christmas morning, he took the fact that it hadn’t been broken as conclusive proof that Father Christmas didn’t exist.

‘What is that you’ve got in your hand?’

Janus Brian uttered the last remark as though it was a question he’d been burning to ask.

‘Oh, just some of Madeleine’s jam. A little reminder of what a terrible mother I am,’ she said.

In the house the absence of the pair went almost unnoticed. The coffee morning women in their dark frocks chatted mostly with each other. Aldous found himself trapped with someone from the local branch of the Labour Party where Mary had been a voluntary helper for many years, and had to endure a long panegyric to Mr Wilson ‘. . . he’s no fool you know. He’s a fellow of the Royal Society . . .’ and after escaping several such encounters, found himself in a circle that included Lesley and Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s oldest friend and Mary’s brother.

‘Bloody good stuff,’ said Reg, hiccuping stupidly, ‘Janus certainly knows how to make a good wine.’

As a regular visitor to the house, Reg knew where the wine was kept, and felt obliged to help himself for the sake of the guests whose glasses were beginning to run dry.

‘It’s not bad at all,’ said Lesley, who disguised his avid consumption of the liquor as a connoisseur’s interest in taste, continually twirling his glass, sniffing the bouquet, then downing it in one for another sample, ‘fruity. Very fruity.’

‘Got quite a kick as well, hasn’t it?’ said Reg.

Lesley shrugged and wagged his head, as if to say the ‘kick’ was not important.

‘What do you think, Aldous? But Methodists don’t drink alcohol, do they? Is that why you’re on the orange juice?’

‘You’re not a Methodist are you, Rex?’ said Lesley, downing another glass and looking at his old friend blearily.

‘Of course I’m not a Methodist,’ Aldous replied, charmed to hear the middle name no one but Lesley and Madeleine ever used.

‘No, of course you’re not,’ said Lesley, relieved to have got it straight in his mind, ‘you converted to marry my sister.’

‘Ah, that was your first mistake,’ said Reg, swaying. His lips were shiny, his speech beginning to slur, ‘changing your religion for the sake of a woman . . . A man with any sense would have insisted the woman change to his religion, not the other way round. You should have told Colette she had to become a Methodist.’

‘I don’t think the Methodists are that fussy about who they marry. It’s just the Catholics that make a fuss,’ said Lesley, ‘isn’t that right, Rex?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I went to a Methodist wedding once,’ said Reg, curling his nose, ‘we had to toast the bride with raspberryade. Luckily I’d taken my hip flask.’ He turned again to Aldous, ‘I suppose old habits of abstemiousness die hard. Go on, have some of this . . .’ he looked at the label of the bottle he was holding to remind himself, ‘Gooseberry Sherry 1971. A very good year, wasn’t it Les? A bloody good year for gooseberries . . .’ He reached out to fill Aldous’s almost empty glass of orange juice, Aldous quickly pulled his glass out of reach.

‘Come on,’ said Reg, irritably, ‘it’s a funeral, for Christ’s sake . . .’

Aldous, who’d never had much of a stomach for either alcohol or Reg, placed a hand over his glass.

‘I can’t drink in the afternoon,’ he said, ‘and anyway, I’m driving.’

‘So am I,’ said Reg, ‘all the more reason. It’s a well known fact that alcohol improves one’s driving abilities. I drive much better when I’m drunk. I do everything better. It’s what drink’s for. Do you know there is not one society in the whole history of humankind that has not discovered some form of alcohol? It doesn’t matter if they’re running around with bones through their noses, they make sure they invent booze before they invent anything else. We do it instinctively, like spiders with their webs. Drunkenness is our natural state, sobriety is a modern invention.’

Just then a burst of jangling piano music filled the room. Colette had come in from the garden and had made straight for the upright piano, followed by Janus Brian.

‘Colonel Bogey’, ‘Kitten on the Keys’, ‘Tico Tico’. The atmosphere of the gathering was lifted, there was even some dancing. When, with a lap full of ash from the cigarette that had burned away in her mouth, Colette finished her playing, she heard a warm, buzzing sort of voice close to her ear.

‘I don’t think that was the appropriate music for an occasion like this, do you? Are you specializing in ruining funerals now as well as weddings?’

Colette turned to see Madeleine walking away. It was almost as if she’d heard the words telepathically, since there seemed no evidence that Madeleine had actually spoken to her. Colette left the piano and spoke to Aldous who had left Reg and the others to join her.

‘Did you hear what that cow said to me?’ she said to Aldous.

‘No.’

‘The bitch. I’m going to tell her what I think of her. I’m going to give her a punch . . .’

‘I’m going to punch Reg before too long, if he keeps going on about drink. Perhaps we should leave.’

Madeleine, she saw, was now trying to revive her daughter Christine, who, having consumed many sherries, had quietly and gently passed out and was lying flat on the sofa. Her John Lennon husband was fanning her with a magazine.

Colette giggled to herself.

‘Yes. I feel like going now. I’m just going to get my bag.’

Her bag was in the kitchen, which was now empty, many of the mourners having drifted away. There was another handbag in the kitchen, resting on a small chair that was placed with its back to the wall, out of the way behind the door. Colette recognised it as Madeleine’s. She quickly opened it to double check. It opened with the smooth turning of a gold catch, and gave a smell from its interior of new leather. She rummaged quickly among lipsticks and compacts, tweezers, nail-scissors, hairspray, hairbrush, headscarf, purse, until she found some corroboration. A pension book in the name of M. Waugh. Colette stifled another giggle. Madeleine was a pensioner. How funny. How wickedly funny. Now she needed quickly to think of something to do with this handbag, and her eye fell upon the jar of home made blackberry jam that she had left on the kitchen work top on coming in from the garden. Quickly she took it, opened it with some difficulty, straining at the lid with white knuckles until there was a pleasing snap and the lid came off. Then she took a dessert spoon from the drawer, spooned the entire contents of the jar into Madeleine’s handbag, closed it, taking care that the jam didn’t ooze through the gaps, and, noticing how much fuller and heavier it seemed, replaced it as she had found it, on the chair. Then she quickly binned the jar, washed up the spoon, and returned to the living room. Madeleine was still with Christine, who was moaning quietly on the couch.

‘Coffee,’ she heard Madeleine saying, ‘I’ll pop into the kitchen and make some coffee.’

‘Let’s go now,’ Colette said to Aldous.

On the doorstep, which was at the top of a flight of steep stone steps, Colette became weepy. She cried on Janus Brian’s shoulder.

‘I’ll always remember Mary,’ she said.

‘It is best to forget,’ said Janus Brian, though he didn’t sound certain.

‘You’re going to say she was a dream, is that it? Mary was just a dream?’

Janus seemed to consider this as if it hadn’t occurred to him before. He was turning over the possibility.

‘No, I don’t think so. Mary was real.’

‘And everything else?’

Janus Brian shrugged and smiled, and Aldous ended the conversation by calling to Colette from the car in the street below.

Janus accompanied his sister down the steep steps and saw her into the car, silently. The Hillman Superminx (maroon body and grey roof) was the longest lived of the wrecks Aldous had bought since the Morris Oxford had gone.

Just as Colette was closing her door Janus said quietly ‘Remember Dismal Desmond?’

Colette had shut the door. Aldous had started up and was pulling away so that she had no time to reply other than to nod and wave as the Superminx rolled down the gentle, curving slope of Leicester Avenue.

‘Did you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘He said “Remember Dismal Desmond”.’

Aldous didn’t understand.

They drove left along The Limes, under the bridge that carried the Piccadilly Line above ground, then through a curious district of narrow, winding avenues lined with prosperous semis, where the pavements were given shrubberies for verges and where ornamental cherries and maples adorned the corners.

‘Dismal Desmond,’ Colette went on, ‘I’ve told you about him. He was this toy dog we used to have, on wheels. You could sit on him and wheel yourself about. I used to sit on him and Janus would push me. Quite fast, racing round the garden. But he was old even when we got him. I think he was probably Agatha’s first. He was in a real state – both eyes gone, leaky stuffing, filthy pelt. That’s why we called him Dismal Desmond, he looked so sad.’

Colette seemed elated as she talked. It was the first time for many years Janus had said anything about the past. She paused for a moment before adding, more cautiously, ‘So he didn’t mean it, did he, when he said the past was a dream?’

‘I suppose not’, said Aldous. ‘He just didn’t want to think about it, or talk about it.’

‘And now by mentioning Dismal Desmond he’s saying he wants to talk about it? Do you think?’

‘Maybe.’