6

Colette had wanted to tell someone about the things Janus had stolen. But she felt unable to. She didn’t want to turn her family against him any more than they were already. Aldous would have been disgusted, guessing already, though without proof, that Janus had cut out the pipes. How would James feel if he’d known how his brother had sold his air pistol, his binoculars? How would Julian have felt about his steam engine? So she had kept quiet about the thefts, which meant that she grieved for them alone. Though she did find herself confiding in one person, Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s brother-in-law and only friend.

‘You don’t realize how important things are until you lose them,’ he’d said one evening at Fernlight Avenue. The phrase was a cliché, a truism, a banal platitude, and yet it had come to her as a fresh piece of wisdom – profound, resonant, enlightening, when Reg Moore had uttered it.

‘I didn’t realize how important Elizabeth was to me until she died.’

He had also lost a wife.

Colette and Reg had known each other since childhood. In fact, when Janus Brian had married Reg’s sister Mary, Reg had assumed that this was to be part of a straight sister trade-off, and that he would marry Colette, and for a while Colette had allowed him to court her. But Colette had never seriously been interested in Reg, at least not once Aldous had arrived on the scene. Then there had followed a period of time in which she’d enjoyed the attentions of two men who, by a strange quirk, were of very similar appearance. Reg could easily have been the slightly younger brother of Aldous, both were tall men with dense coifs of black hair and deeply recessed eyes, although Reg’s, like his sister’s, were dark and mouselike, always darting about inquisitively, which gave him a shifty, sly, slightly devious appearance. Aldous’s eyes were grey and sleepy. ‘Come to bed eyes’ Colette’s sister Meg had called them.

Even after Colette married Aldous Reg lingered around in the background, on the off-chance that Colette might suddenly realize her mistake, and elope with him. But in the end, shortly after the war, Reg himself married, darkly handsome Elizabeth, who bore him two darkly handsome sons. That was nearly thirty years ago now, and Colette had seen Reg perhaps half a dozen times in all those years, usually at the wedding or funeral of a mutual friend, and whenever they met, if Reg could get her alone, he would resume, as if the days of their courtship had only been the week before, his still clumsy and gauche attempts to win her heart, which only confirmed for Colette that she’d made the right choice all those years ago.

Now however, as housekeeper and nursemaid to Janus Brian, she was brought into regular contact with Reg. Elizabeth had died of cancer three years before Mary, and his two sons had moved far away from home. When he met Colette now he used her as a confidante in whom he could talk about his loneliness, about the emptiness of his house, the emptiness of his days, the difficulties of finding a new partner, particularly when he was limited to his own age group.

‘Elizabeth and I didn’t grow old, not for each other. Elizabeth to me was still a woman of twenty-three when she died. But now that I’m looking for a wife from the same age group I’m suddenly finding myself courting the very old. It’s quite horrific. Sixty-year-old widows with purple rinses and surgical stockings, and I can’t believe we’re of the same generation. I’m drawn towards younger women, but no one under fifty is going to give me a second look, are they?’

Often Colette found herself cornered into having to compliment Reg like this.

‘Of course they are, Reg, there’s plenty of women who go for the older man . . .’

‘But not when they look as old as I do, do you think?’

‘You don’t look old, Reg, not to me . . .’

And this was true, as far as she was concerned. Aldous and Reg, having an almost sibling-like resemblance when young, had aged at equal rates. Their hair had admitted the encroachment of grey at exactly the same rate, their bodies had spread evenly, not into obesity, but into a comfortable, middle-aged paunchiness, and their skins were still both comparatively smooth, though Reg’s was a little darker, as it always had been. Both he and Mary had always borne some trace of a forgotten Mediterranean genealogy.

If in the race of life Reg and Aldous were still neck and neck, in terms of their personalities their divergence continued apace. Her husband still took an innocent and simple delight in the mundanities of life, which enlarged his imagination and preserved his humour, whereas Reg’s personality, after a lifetime of working in insurance, had shrunk. He’d become a chauvinist, a bigot and a pedant.

Where had it all come from, this bitterness of Reg’s? Colette at first took it as a joke, something he said to humour her, but she soon realized that he was expressing something he sincerely felt when he railed against Janus Brian for listening to Schubert on a Sony hi-fi. ‘What do you want to listen to music on that Japanese muck for?’ he would say, smiling, ‘Why can’t you listen to it on an English hi-fi?’ Then there would follow a long and, to Colette, immensely tedious discussion on the relative merits of Japanese and British music systems, where Janus Brian, if not exactly sticking up for the Japanese, would say that quality of music reproduction transcended patriotic considerations, and that if the Japanese made the best record players, he would buy them, while Reg’s contention seemed to be that British, or ‘English’ record players were the best simply by virtue of their national provenance, all the time giving Colette sideways glances. ‘All those nips are interested in is reproducing pop music for teenagers. You can’t get the layered quality of a symphony orchestra out of one of those tin-pot things. We were making record players while they were still running around on horseback . . .’

‘You can’t run around on horseback,’ interrupted Colette. Reg didn’t seem to understand. His preference for everything English knew no limits. Even to literature, to landscape, even to television detectives.

‘They’re pathetic, those American detectives,’ he would say, after Janus Brian had been enthusing about the latest episode of Kojak, Colombo, Ironside or McCloud, ‘they take a whole hour-long programme to work out something Sherlock Holmes would have solved in five minutes. They wouldn’t stand a chance against Father Brown, or Lord Peter Wimsey, or even Miss Marple . . .’

Had he always been like this, Colette found herself wondering, or was it something recent? A lifetime of actuarial considerations, of warning against risk, of permanently having in the back of one’s mind thoughts of flood, subsidence, epidemics, war, revolution, of calculating the life expectancies of young men just setting out in the world of paid employment, perhaps all these had had a narrowing effect on Reg’s mind. Whatever it was, she felt uncomfortable in Reg’s presence.

He had taken to calling at Fernlight Avenue at odd times, ostensibly to discuss Janus Brian, and what to do about him, but the conversation would always quickly slip away from that subject towards Reg himself. He would tell Colette and Aldous of his loneliness and of his attempts to find a new partner. He’d joined a Singles Club but was depressed by the people he met. He’d been on various dates with a number of widows and spinsters, but they had all ended in disappointment.

‘She sounds very nice,’ Colette said, after Reg had described an unusually attractive sixty-year-old he’d met, ‘will you be getting together, then?’

‘She’s not interested in sex,’ said Reg, ‘that’s the trouble. What is it about women when they get old? They seem to lose their sex drive. It just goes. Or is it that they’ve never had it, but have just been pretending all their lives, and when they get past childbearing they no longer feel the need to keep up the pretence? Have you puzzled that one out yet, Aldous? What are they up to, these women?’

Aldous endured these visits mostly in polite silence. Reg was often mildly drunk when he called, and Colette slowly gathered that he was almost as much a drinker as Janus Brian. Often his speech was slightly slurred and his lower lip shinily wet. After a while he learnt what nights Aldous taught his evening classes and then called only on those, always leaving before Aldous was home. And it was during these evening visits without Aldous and if Janus was out of the house, that she discovered Reg’s unexpected abilities as a sympathetic listener.

‘He’s apologized several times,’ Colette told him one evening, ‘and he says he’ll never do anything like that again, but I just keep thinking about the things he’s sold. Those little things of my mother’s. That picture she always used to have on her bedroom wall – a marquetry picture of an alpine scene, the mountains were made of different types of wood, and the water was made of walnut, because it looks ripply, and there was a single pine tree that was green. I can remember that picture from when I was a child, and I always used to wonder where the artist had got a piece of green wood, but later I realised it must have been stained green . . .’

‘It was just a picture, Colette, that’s all it was.’

‘No, it was more than a picture, Reg. It was part of my mother. Ever since she died the things she left in the world have slowly disappeared. There’s very little left now. I used to think objects stuck around for ever if you just left them, but now I realize it actually takes lots of energy and effort just to keep things as they are. If you do nothing things just drift out of existence.’

‘But you can’t stop the world from changing.’

Colette thought for a while.

‘I sometimes say a prayer to St Anthony when I’ve lost something.’

‘I thought you were an atheist.’

‘I would be if it wasn’t for St Anthony. He keeps a tiny flicker of faith alive in me. The amount of times he’s found my cigarettes for me, or my matches . . . Now I keep thinking I should pray to him for those things Janus took. And then I think I should pray to him to find my mother, and then I think I should pray to him to find my childhood, because I’ve lost that just as much.’

‘Why do we pray to St Anthony? Was he always losing things? Or was he always finding things?’

Colette enjoyed these conversations, though she seemed to find it hard to convince Reg that there was anything wrong with Janus, her son. She didn’t tell him how he hit her. She hadn’t told anyone about that, but she told him about the drinking and the disruptive behaviour.

‘He’s a man who likes his beer, that’s all,’ Reg said, in a gently coaxing voice, urging Colette to agree with him, ‘there’s nothing wrong with that. He just has one too many every once in a while . . .’

‘No, it’s not just once in a while . . .’

‘You should think yourself lucky, Colette, to have a son who still cares about you. Look at mine, I don’t see them or hear from them for months on end. And then you’ve got the benefit of his musicianship. How many people can listen to music like that, live, in their own house . . .’ On this particular evening Janus was at home playing the piano, and the slightly muffled melodies of Schumann’s Kreisleriana were a pleasing background to their conversation.

’Do you think Janus cares about me?’

‘Of course he does, woman,’ Reg was sitting with his hands resting on his widely separated knees, which gave him an authoritative air, ‘you only have to look at him to see how he adores you . . .’

‘Adores me?’ Colette was allowing herself to be convinced.

‘Of course he does. Probably why Aldous hates him so much.’

‘Aldous doesn’t hate him, he just hates his drinking . . .’

‘Ah well there’s your problem, you see. I said you should never have married a Methodist, and never trust a man who’ll change his religion for the sake of a woman, didn’t I say that to you the day before you got married?’

Colette didn’t recall Reg ever saying any such thing. Reg went on.

‘No Protestant can really understand what booze is all about. Alcohol is at the centre of the Catholic mass. Christ turned his own blood into wine for heaven’s sake . . .’

‘Don’t Protestants believe that?’

‘Of course they don’t. They don’t believe in anything. How could anyone take their faith seriously when it was founded by Henry VIII?’

‘Aldous drinks,’ said Colette defensively, ‘though he never gets drunk . . .’

‘Of course he does. One drink and anyone’s drunk, the effects begin with the first mouthful. The problem with your son is he drinks that fizzy muck they put in cans. He should try some real ale. Proper beer, like we used to drink before the war and the Krauts bombed all the breweries. That’s what he should be drinking. Fizzy booze just sends you bonkers, but real ale enhances all your senses and aptitudes. You think better, you drive better, you make love better . . .’

Sometimes the conversations between Colette and Reg became so engrossing for the pair of them that Reg would lose track of the time, and Aldous would come home to hear their laughter coming from the kitchen, noticing how it quietened as he entered the room. Sometimes he would meet Reg in the doorway as he left, or on the front garden path, or would see his white Triumph Dolomite pulling away as he came up the road. And he grew increasingly impatient of Reg’s visits and did his best to make him feel unwelcome, not returning his pleasantries but for gruff grunts and grumbles. Reg wouldn’t be put off, however, and continued his almost nightly visits to Fernlight Avenue. Aldous finally lost his patience when he found that Reg had taken Janus out for a drink.

Janus had been sober for a fortnight, and such times were to be treasured. Reg was keen to prove that Janus’s aggression was not to do with his drinking too much, but with the type of beer he was drinking.

‘I promise you, Colette, let me take him to The Farmers Arms and I’ll bring him back and he’ll be as pleasant and charming as he always is.’

And so Reg had taken him to The Farmers Arms, a glossy, modern pub in New Southgate that sold real ale. The two of them returned at two o’clock the following morning. Reg was sober, bloody and frightened. Janus was bloody, bruised and only semi-conscious.

From Reg’s hysterical, confused ramblings they got a vague and familiar picture of what had happened. Janus had begun insulting the wives and girlfriends of various drinkers in The Farmers Arms. Someone had taken Janus outside and battered him with roofing tiles. Reg had had to take Janus to the local casualty, where he had fallen asleep after raving and raging at nurses and doctors.

‘He’s a damn madman. I’ll never be able to set foot in that pub again thanks to your son and it’s the only real ale pub in Southgate,’ Reg wailed.

Aldous snapped. He took Reg by the lapels and hurled him at the hall wall.

‘Ouch,’ said Reg, screwing his face up as the back of his head took a knock, repeating the word less emphatically when it seemed Aldous had ignored it.

‘If you set foot in this house again,’ said Aldous in a quiet growl, ‘or interfere with my family again . . .’

New chins appeared around Reg’s face as Aldous’s grip created a concertina effect.

‘I’m not . . .’ Reg gurgled. Aldous tightened his grip, stifling the protest.

‘I don’t want you poking your fat nose around here again. Do you understand?’

Aldous gave Reg an underscoring shove before releasing his grip, and Reg hurriedly retreated through the front door and down the path.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Reg, emboldened by distance, though pale and shaky, almost crying, ‘You wouldn’t get me back in this house if you paid me,’ he coughed and then gave a big, self-controlling sigh, ‘you’re all bloody mad. You take a look, Aldous, and see what you’ve made here. It’s a bloody madhouse.’

It wasn’t the last time they were to meet, however. Colette’s regular visits to Leicester Avenue made that inevitable, and shortly after The Farmers Arms incident she found herself phoning Reg from her brother’s house.

Colette’s visits to Janus Brian had become part of a regular routine, almost daily at one point. She now tried to visit only two or three times a week. If she left Janus Brian alone for more than three days, she found, it was likely that her brother would relapse into a state of depravity, naked and asleep in a nest of his own filth, the mattress swollen with faeces, the carpet slushy with urine, the bitter stench of vomit everywhere.

He was becoming a baby. He reminded her of when James was a child, and how he would, when cross, turn his food bowl upside down and tip its contents all over the table, or the floor, or his own head. Janus Brian was now tipping his food bowl over, the only difference being in the contents of the bowl. She hadn’t had to deal with human faeces since her children had grown up, but Janus Brian, despite his meagre diet, still managed to produce regular amounts of pungent, watery matter.

And it was with an expectation of filth that Colette had approached the house alone one early summer morning after nearly five days absence, having herself been down with a stomach bug, yet the house, she discovered, was surprisingly tidy. The floor in the living room had a spruced-up feel, as though recently hoovered. The kitchen surfaces had been wiped, the food, what little there was, correctly stowed. As she wandered through the house calling for Janus Brian, she began to think something dreadful had happened. In her brother’s inverted world tidiness and cleanliness must surely be signs of catastrophe, and when she reached the main bedroom, where Janus Brian usually slept in the big double bed he’d shared for nearly thirty years with Mary, she allowed herself a little scream, because hanging from the ceiling was a noose.

A pear-shaped loop of rope tied with a skilful approximation of that difficult hangman’s slipknot, hanging from a hook that had once held a macramé plant holder. The mere shape of it Colette found hideous, just as the mere shape of a spider can be hideous. Repulsively macabre, yet thankfully empty. Empty, she hoped, meaning unused. Yet Janus Brian was not in the house. Surely, if he’d been found hanging, she would have been informed. Or had his body, hanging from the noose, somehow evaporated where it swung? The only person she could think of asking was Reg, and so she phoned him. He popped over a few minutes later.

‘It was my fault, I think,’ he said, as they walked upstairs, ‘he did it on my advice.’

‘But you said he’s okay.’

She could smell that Reg had already been drinking.

‘I don’t mean he’s done it, I mean he sought to do it. I was going to drive over and tell you, but what with the way things are . . . When are you going to get a phone?’

‘Tell me what happened to Janus.’

Reg’s usually perfect hair was unsettled, his lower lip was glistening.

‘I wish you had a phone, Colette. Then I could talk to you. I’d love to have a chat with you over the phone one day, just you and me and the wires . . .’

‘Aldous won’t have a phone. He thinks they are intrusive.’

‘Yes, he’s built a little castle there at Fernlight Avenue, hasn’t he,’ said Reg as they walked into Janus Brian’s bedroom, where the noose still hung, ‘and he’s got you behind a moat and drawbridge locked in a tower with a big silver key . . .’

‘No he hasn’t.’

‘Come on,’ said Reg, suddenly impatient, taking hold of Colette by her shoulders.

‘What are you doing?’

‘For God’s sake Colette, we’ll be dead before long, all of us. The Russians have got a forest of missiles with our names on them. What the hell does it matter?’

Suddenly Reg’s hot face was right up against hers, and she could see that his shiny, wet lips were bunched up and making to kiss her own. She pushed him away. He pushed back. They struggled lamely, then fell onto the bed. For just a second, perhaps less, it crossed Colette’s mind that she might as well let Reg get on with it, instead of struggling against him. There was a time after all, in those innocent years before the war, when she could have found herself married to him. So similar to Aldous – in stature, hairstyle, complexion, even in certain aspects of personality (a vagueness, a boyish charm) and yet now, on the bed, Reg breathless on top of her, groping like a teenager at the buttons of her coat, the smell of stale beer in his mouth, he came across as a mere shadow of her husband, his weaker, darker self, and she found him repulsive. Apart from that, lying on her back, she had an intolerable viewpoint – Reg’s face gormless with lust and, behind it, the noose, unused, hanging from the ceiling. She pushed him off and slapped him hard across the face, and Reg rolled backwards, gasping.

Too bashful, drunk and stupid to make any further advance Reg lay on his back and spoke between gurgling noises.

‘I drive better when I’m drunk. It sharpens my reactions, it raises my alertness. It enhances my judgement of speed and distance . . .’

‘I’m not a car, Reg.’

‘That is my point. It is my mistake to think that I could operate you in the same way, if you see what I mean . . .’

‘Just tell me what happened to Janus.’

Reg sighed, and then sat up, with some difficulty. His hair, ruffled, was ridiculous, sticking up in big spikes. His tie was over his shoulder, his shirt hanging out of his trousers.

‘I’d been over here nearly every evening last week, and I just got fed up with his whingeing on and on about how miserable he was since Mary died. It got me annoyed, because he seemed to have forgotten that I’ve lost a wife as well. It was only four years ago Elizabeth died, and I felt pretty bad but I didn’t hit the bottle like he has and mope around getting on everyone’s nerves. It’s been nearly a year now, for heaven’s sake . . .’ Reg, who’d been working himself up to a long rant, checked himself and spoke more calmly. ‘So he kept saying he couldn’t see any future and what was the point of everything. So I said to him, why don’t you just do yourself in? Top yourself, I said, top yourself’, (there was a gently urging tone to his voice), ‘why don’t you just do yourself in, I said.’

‘What a thing to say to your best friend, Reg. How could you?’

Reg looked troubled, wiped his lower lip with the tip of his index finger, looked abstractedly at the dampness he had reaped.

‘Do you think I’ve done a bad thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well I never thought he would do it. He’s too cowardly.’

‘But he’s completely drunk most of the time, he could do anything.’

‘When he’s drunk he couldn’t tie his shoelaces, let alone a hangman’s noose . . .’

‘So you told him to go and hang himself?’

‘Christ no,’ said Reg, offended, ‘I think hanging is one of the worst deaths imaginable. No, we discussed lots of alternatives. I said I could give him some pills that would do the trick. Elizabeth’s medication. You know she was in great pain for the last few months. Terrible pain. She was given these superpowerful painkillers, like little red and black torpedoes. Elizabeth always had a big stockpile of them, and when she died there were a lot left over. Several bottles full. I’ve hung onto them. I think of them as my escape route. I’ve enough there to send an army to sleep. They were Elizabeth’s only real legacy. She left me nothing else, apart from two sons I never see, of course, and a useless orange dog that wants nothing but to be fed and taken out for walks all the time. Anyway, we left it at that, but the next thing was he phoned me to tell me he’d rigged up a noose in the bedroom and he was going to hang himself, so I said don’t be a bloody fool, but he said no, he was going to hang himself, so I just got fed up and called the police and let them sort it out. And they took him off to a loony bin.’

‘Not the Hatch?’

‘No, it’s a place I’d never heard of before, out in the countryside in the middle of nowhere. The name’ll come to me in a minute.’

‘So he never got as far as actually trying to hang himself.’

‘No,’ said Reg, dismissively, ‘it was always just for show. Like I said, he’s too cowardly. Though, to be honest, it wouldn’t be that bad an idea, would it. I mean, what sort of life has he got now? He’s completely miserable, he’s no company, he’s got nothing to look forward to. The only reason I called the police was I didn’t want his blood on my hands, if it ever got out I’d persuaded him to top himself . . .’

Reg offered to take Colette to the asylum, whose name he’d remembered, Haverford, but Colette declined.

‘Don’t be like that. I told you, I drive better when I’m drunk. At least let me drive you home.’ This she agreed to, and wished she hadn’t, as it was a terrifying odyssey through narrow streets at sixty miles an hour, skidding round corners, and at one point, in Goat and Compasses Lane, coming off the road and veering onto the grass verge, narrowly missing a tree.

Haverford Psychiatric Hospital was tucked away behind a ridge of chalk that was thickly planted with barley, three miles to the north of London.

Leaving London to the north Colette always had the impression that the city was an island of stone and glass in a sea of endless wheat. As soon as the buildings ended the great fields of dull yellow began. A foreigner travelling this way would not have a great impression of the English countryside. Even before the war it had been a featureless landscape of cereals and hardy crops – cabbages and potatoes, and since the post-war loss of hedgerows and the emergence of superfields the size of several parishes, The Great North Road had become a highway through sad prairies almost as far as Scotland. There was a sadness about that landscape, relentlessly simplified, big and empty when once it had been small and complicated. It had seemed more concentrated in those days somehow, more dense, so that, mile for mile, journeys were that much richer. Now, where horses had once worked the fields there were combine harvesters which produced so much grain it had to be stored in concrete silos, domed towers that marked the landscape more prominently than the ‘Hertfordshire spikes’ of the local churches.

Or the water towers. In these flat riverless tracts water was a scarce resource, soaking straight through the chalky soil into underground aquifers that could only be retrieved by the sinking of deep bores, then to be stored high above the ground. Odd, these water towers, it occurred to Colette. On the journey to Haverford they passed three or four, a modern concrete one near Cockfosters that looked like a piece of monstrous basketwork, another one was a black iron box on four legs with a ladder leading up to it. At the top of Stag Hill there was a Victorian brick tower that looked as though it had been converted into a house. Then, as they rounded the crest beyond Potters Bar and the flatlands towards St Albans were revealed, she could see them everywhere, scattered about the shimmering wheatfields, water towers, brimming with all their elevated liquid.

When Colette first saw Haverford Hospital, she noticed that it also had a tower, shaped rather like a modern grain silo, though square, and topped with a pyramidal cap of slate.

‘Why do these asylums always seem to have towers?’ she said to her husband as they pulled into the car park.

‘As a look-out for escapees, perhaps?’ offered Aldous. It seemed to Colette a quite likely explanation.

They found Janus Brian in a day room with magnificent, tall windows that gave onto a view of rolling parkland and beyond to the beginnings of the midland plains. Colette was astonished by how well Janus Brian seemed. In his light blue, monogrammed (an interlinking JBW) pyjamas and calf-leather slippers he seemed to have lost ten years. Blood had returned to illuminate his skin, which shone now in a way it had never done before. His face had filled, he even seemed to have thicker, slightly darker hair. It was as though the half empty husk of the brother Colette had known had been refilled.

‘Apparently I screamed for the first two days without gin,’ Janus Brian told them, once he’d settled them into a pair of the red, PVC armchairs that furnished the day room, ‘and then I got the shakes, and started seeing things.’

‘What sort of things?’ asked Colette

‘Well,’ Janus was finding it hard to explain, ‘I never actually saw anything, not properly. It was always just outside my field of vision. For instance, looking at you, I can’t quite see the chair immediately to my right, but I would be conscious that there was something perched on one of the arms, but if I looked directly, it would vanish.’

‘But what sort of thing? A bird, you mean?’

‘No, it wasn’t a bird, dear. It was more like some sort of giant insect-like creature. Rather frightening. Like an enormous fly, or woodlouse, something like that. Lots of moving legs. But about the size of a cat. Perhaps it was a cat, there are cats here, you know. But sometimes I would be aware that the room was absolutely full of these blasted things, but whenever I looked for them they scuttled away and hid behind the chairs, or under the tables. Just my imagination, I realise now, but at the time they were sending me potty, and I kept screaming for nurses to take them away. But that only lasted a couple of days, and now, as you can see, I’m fully recovered, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol for nearly a week and I don’t feel the desire for any.’

Colette, who’d once spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital, knew about the spirit of self-confidence such places can inspire, and how quickly it can evaporate in the outside world.

‘The only craving I get now is for water,’ he said, ‘I love the stuff. I drink it by the jugful. The doctors tell me I’m dehydrated, all the years of boozing have sapped my body of all its reserves of water and I’m as dried up as an Egyptian mummy.’ Janus Brian had a plastic jug of water on the table beside him, with its white, hinged lid. He poured himself a glass as he spoke. ‘You don’t think of things like that, things so simple. A glass of water. Yet life is totally dependent on it. I read somewhere that an average glass of water will almost certainly contain a molecule that has passed through the body of Aristotle. It’s always the little things, isn’t it, it’s always the things that you take for granted that turn out in the end to be of life and death importance. Here we are worrying about nuclear bombs and Communism versus Capitalism, when it’s just a glass of water that matters.’

Aldous recognized the heightened spirit of Janus Brian’s discourse. Colette had been like that in hospital. It had come as if to counterbalance the flat years of her depression, as though her person had been replaced by a bright, talkative alter ego, and it had left him with the feeling that so-called normality is a sort of masque, played out continually. In madness we don’t so much lose our minds as forget our lines, and it was in hospitals like these that the insane began to relearn the pretence of normality, which was why their inmates seemed so preternaturally normal. They hadn’t yet learnt the subtleties of their roles, and were overplaying them.

For Colette, Janus Brian’s residence in Haverford meant an extended period of rest for her, the first since Mary died. It took his internment to make her realize just how dependent he had become on her, and so she hoped strongly that this might be the beginning of his full recovery, and that when he came out he could begin leading a fully independent life again. But her feelings were ambivalent. She knew she would feel disappointed if he came out of hospital and spurned any attempts to help him. And she couldn’t deny that responsibility for her brother had had a beneficial effect on her, she hadn’t felt so good for years.

It shocked her how quickly she missed her daily visits to Leicester Avenue. With her son at home it had become something of a retreat, or haven. Now she was stuck at Fernlight Avenue all day with Janus drifting about the house. She did her best to avoid him. He wasn’t usually up before eleven, so she would wait till then before going out to do the shopping. She could spend a couple of hours wandering down to the Parade and back, pottering about in all the shops. When she got back Janus might have gone out. Where he went she never knew, but it wasn’t to go drinking. He usually came back sober some time in the evening. He really had run out of money by now. Presumably he’d run out of things to sell, people to borrow from.

Once, to avoid Janus, she’d gone down to Tottenham High Road to see if she could retrieve any of the things Janus had stolen, feeling quite certain that he would have sold them to the various second-hand shops that were down there. It was a long, tiring and fruitless task. A difficult journey, two buses and a long walk, and she felt depressed by the scruffiness and overall seediness of the district that in her childhood had seemed so grand and elegant. She poked around in all the shops but could find no trace of her things, returning disappointedly to Fernlight Avenue.

She visited Janus Brian at Haverford weekly. She had never known him so talkative. He would talk about anything. His mind free-associated. His numerous appointments with a psychiatrist and therapy sessions with a group of other would-be suicides has caused him to think about the past, and his own childhood.

‘Apparently I thought Dada would castrate me,’ he said, half-amused.

‘Did you?’

‘That’s what came up in the sessions. Did you know this is the main drying-out clinic for the whole of north London? All the old soaks come here. They take you off the booze for a couple of weeks, give you a few therapy sessions, then sling you out. Some of the old characters here come back again and again. All they have to do is attempt suicide, or appear to have attempted suicide. Handy thing to know about . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Colette. ‘What else do they say in these therapy sessions?’

‘They just keep asking us about our childhoods. For some reason they want us to share our earliest memories. I keep telling them the same one, I just can’t get it out of my head, and it’s not even a memory, it’s that story Dada used to tell, about the Man Who Thought He Was Jesus, do you remember?’

The story had been one that Dada frequently retold, with great laughter. He had been in The Flowerpot, an Irish pub on the fringe of Clapton Common. The area hardly merited the name, as it was really just a triangular wedge of grass surrounded by tall Victorian houses, with a small pond in the middle. It was near to where Colette’s family had lived, after leaving Howard Road and moving a little upmarket to Stamford Hill. Dada had become a regular at The Flowerpot, and from his descriptions of the event that evening she had a picture of its interior, crowded with Irishmen in flat-caps drinking Guinness and singing Irish Folk songs to the accompaniment of someone on the piano accordion, when into the pub burst a wild looking figure with matted hair and a long tangled beard who claimed he was Jesus Christ. He was ignored at first, but then he lifted his hands, palms outward, above the crowd, to show that they had been running with blood. ‘I am the risen one,’ he cried, ‘I have pushed back the stone at Golgotha and I sit at the right hand of the Lord!’

Gradually he was engaged by the drinkers. Someone bought him a pint of stout and he drank while a circle gathered around him, who, drunk as they were, seemed rather convinced by the man’s claims to be Jesus Christ. They kept asking him to perform a miracle. When he appeared to heal Frank O’Shea of his bad back, a state of great excitement ensued, and the man was requested again and again to perform further miracles. So a great hush fell on the pub, the accordionist stopped playing and the singing ceased, as the man prepared to announce his next miracle.

‘For the benefit of all men on this night of great thirst I will perform for you a re-enactment of the miracle I performed at a wedding in the village of Cana in Galilee. I will turn the water in the pond on the common – into wine!’

The Flowerpot emptied, the drinkers, empty glasses in their hands, following the Man Who Thought He Was Jesus out of the doors and onto Clapton Common, across the unlit grass to the pond.

What happened then? Colette was never sure if Dada had been one of the crowd, or even whether he was there that night, and the story sometimes varied. The one she remembered was of the man walking straight out into the water until he was at the centre of the little pond, up to his waist in the muddy, murky liquid. Arms outstretched he proclaimed some words. What words? Miraculous incantations. A cheer went up and the drinkers closest to the edge of the pond dipped their empty glasses into the water and drank. Then, instantly, they spat out what was only filthy, stagnant pond-water. Incensed they turned on the Man Who Thought He Was Jesus. They splashed into the pond with him with the intention of ducking him under. The Man Who Thought He Was Jesus was sharp enough to make a hasty escape, was lost in the darkness and the spray of the water that was being kicked about. There the story dissolves into a myriad of variant endings. Sometimes he merely vanished into the night, other times he was chased around the common, or found hiding in Piggot’s Church, prostrate across the altar, self-crucified.

‘Do you think Dada was actually there that night?’ said Colette, ‘When you think about it it sounds a bit made-up.’

‘He may have embellished it a little. I don’t suppose there was a big crowd at the pond, but the event definitely happened. I remember other people talking about it, friends of Dada’s, other kids’ dads. I think it’s probably basically true. But it has made me think about Dada and drink. It never occurred to me before, but Dada was out most evenings in that pub, as I recall. Do you think he had a drink problem?’

Colette thought. It was true, he did drink almost nightly at The Flowerpot. But she could never remember him drunk.

‘He may not have appeared drunk,’ said Janus Brian, ‘but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. I think maybe his drunkenness manifested in the violence he showed towards me and Lesley. I think maybe he was an alcoholic.’

It was rather a difficult idea for Colette to take in at first. She’d always thought of her father as a tower of moral rectitude, a Victorian patriarch, brutishly disciplinarian. Someone to be feared and respected. Her clearest memories were of his old age, however, when he’d mellowed a little. He still drank, bottles of stout by the fireside, reading travel books. A man who never went abroad, in his old age he’d developed a fascination with the great Victorian explorers, and loved to read Livingstone’s accounts of his travels. Where had the violence gone? If it had been inspired by alcohol, surely it would have persisted in different forms even after his sons had left home.

‘No,’ said Colette, ‘Dada was never out of control when he was thrashing you or Lesley. That was always the frightening thing, the way he administered those beatings so calmly, somehow. Almost clinically. If it had been drunken violence it would have been like my son’s, wild and out of control, randomly striking out at whoever was near him.’

‘But the more I think about it, the more I think there was a drastic mood change that came over him when he was violent. I don’t know. I’m just starting to think that alcohol played a big part in Dada’s life. And one of the fellows here was telling me about a theory that’s come up, saying that alcoholism can be inherited. Which could explain a few things, if he’s passed it on to me and to you, if you don’t mind me saying, and to your son, and to Lesley . . .’

‘Lesley’s not an alcoholic.’

Janus Brian paused, seemingly greatly surprised that Colette didn’t know.

‘Surely you’ve heard about his escapades from Agatha? I thought she’d told everyone. She usually does, the gossip.’

He then went on to fill his sister in with stories about Lesley’s drinking, about how he had taken, like his father, to going out alone each evening to seedy pubs in the shabbier parts of High Wycombe, and returning, unlike his father, in a state of near unconsciousness each night. Madeleine had confided, foolishly, in Agatha, despairingly telling her sordid tales of having to undress her husband, remove his soiled underpants, sponge the vomit from his clothes. Colette absorbed this information greedily.

‘So it’s passing down through the generations, this drinking gene,’ Janus Brian went on, ‘One of Agatha’s lot, Douglas, I think, or is it Kevin, has turned out to be a raving alcoholic. He sounds rather like Janus, as a matter of fact.’

Janus Brian stayed in Haverford for nearly three weeks and when he came out he seemed greatly recovered. Colour had returned to his skin, he walked with more certainty, and had lost that perpetual drunkard’s stagger. He had begun to eat properly. She hoped that this marked the beginning of his rehabilitation, she worried about how he might feel once he was back in the house. On the day of his release she went to Leicester Avenue to prepare the house for his return, and was shocked to realize that the noose on which he’d tried to hang himself was still hanging in the bedroom. She took it down.

When Janus Brian arrived in the afternoon, delivered by Reg, he was full of plans.

‘I’ve decided you’re right, dear. I’m going to sell the house and move somewhere else. I’m going to the estate agent’s tomorrow. This place is too full of memories. I need to make a fresh start. Wipe the slate clean. I could sell this place and buy somewhere smaller, and release a considerable amount of capital that’s tied up in this house. Also, my dear, I realize I’ve been an awful burden on you this past year or so, I’ve been an awful bloody nuisance, so I’m going to move right away from the area. I need to be out of New Southgate, out of London altogether.’

‘But where will you go?’ asked Colette, rather taken aback by the boldness of Janus Brian’s decisions.

Janus Brian looked at her as though the answer was obvious.

‘High Wycombe,’ he said.

Colette mouthed objections but couldn’t say anything.

‘Dear, I’ve had enough of being a pain in the neck for you. You’ve been so sweet this year, but now I thought it would be time to go and be a bloody nuisance to Lesley and Agatha.’

‘But it’s so far away, Janus, I’ll never see you.’

‘It’s only an hour’s drive away, dear. Be reasonable. Where else can I go, to be honest? I want to move right out of the area, but I don’t want to move somewhere where I don’t know a soul. High Wycombe’s the only place outside London where I have any connections with family. House prices are much cheaper as well. It’s the obvious answer. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, it’s so obvious. High Wycombe!’ He said the last words with a sort of absurd emphasis, raising his small fist and thumping the television gently, just as a prospector might have thumped a map of Idaho at the beginning of the gold rush.