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‘I anticipate a spot of bother with your gutters,’ said Richard. He stood in front of the cottage, staring up. ‘Distinct evidence of blockage. Not to worry – easily seen to. I can put you in touch with someone who does that kind of thing.’

Gutters? Stella gazed, interrupted in the middle of other concerns. There he was on the doorstep, frowning at her roof. But of course, this is what householders talk to one another about. It is just that I am not aware of the dialectic.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Right.’

‘The angle of the chimney is a bit curious, when one comes to look closely. Did you have a survey?’

Survey? Stella struggles again. She had been in the middle of some revisions to her article. Her mind was full of gender in field-work. She hesitated.

‘When you bought the place. Several sheets of paper which would have cited apparent defects,’ Richard explained kindly.

‘Oh, yes … there was something like that.’

‘A good idea perhaps to cast your eye over it again at some point. See if the chimney features.’

He had a tool-kit in hand, the lawnmower in mind. She had not invited him. He had called by – ‘on the off-chance’ – and now she did not know whether to be irritated or amused. His clothes proclaimed his intentions – the deliberately selected gear or a white-collar worker about to undertake a blue-collar task. Slightly grubby trousers, sweater out at one elbow.

‘Come on, then. Tea or coffee?’

Half an hour later Richard briskly admitted defeat. The mower required a spare part, which he would order and bring at a later date. ‘I’m sorry. I’d hoped to fix it here and now.’

‘Don’t worry. I live quite happily with a shaggy lawn.’ She saw his expression and laughed. ‘You forget that you’re dealing with someone unused to a settled existence. I don’t take easily to property ownership.’

He considered this. ‘Maybe it’s because you’ve spent more time than most of us with those who don’t have much.’

‘Possibly. Though in my experience the less people own, the more furiously defensive they are about what they do have.’

‘Children always seemed to me to have an intense and innate sense of personal possession. As a parent, you spend much energy trying to temper this.’

He had accepted a second cup of coffee. She saw him look around the room. Is he going to offer to come and redecorate for me, she wondered. And if so, what would I say?

‘Marriage, oddly enough, blunts one’s sense of mine and thine. Things become ours, instead,’ he observed.

‘It also fuels the acquisitive instinct, or so I understand. The married are the great consumers. I bet you are loaded down with possessions. I’ve travelled relatively lightly.’

‘I’ve managed to shed some now.’

Tactless of me, thought Stella. Of course he has. Out of the family home, into that dapper little farmhouse. She searched for something to say in compensation. Nadine floated there again, gleefully feathering nests. Her room at college had cushions, a tray with a tray cloth, cups and saucers instead of mugs.

‘Something of a relief, I find.’ He glanced around the room again. ‘What you have, if I may say so, seems to be a nice combination of what is necessary and what has accrued, as it were. That khelim rug is Egypt, I suppose. Your Maltese dolphin door knocker. Things accrue, in marriage, but also two people seem to need so much more than twice as much as one person does.’

When I’m married, Nadine used to say, aged twenty … when I’m married I’m going to have one of those sets of Danish dining-room chairs from Heals, and a Race sofa, and curtains from Liberty.

‘I don’t think I would ever have made the grade as a paid-up consumer,’ said Stella. ‘It’s just as well I’ve never married.’

‘Marriage is deeply corrosive, in many ways. Not least because it makes you unfit to live alone. I had not reckoned with that.’

He was looking now directly at Stella, but she was barely aware of what he said. Nadine swarmed into her head. Nadine’s views on love and marriage.

‘I’m in love,’ says Nadine.

Stella does a finger count. ‘One, two, three… That’s the fourth time this year.’

‘No. Second time for real. David Harrap and Bill Bates were passing fancies. It’s only been the real thing twice. This time I’m dying of it, no question.’

‘That man at Balliol?’

‘Of course,’ says Nadine. ‘I hung around the Broad most of yesterday and saw him twice. The last time he looked at me, definitely. He’s reading French, which is a problem. I m going to have to get an essay subject that means the books are in the Taylorian.’

‘Tricky, when we’re doing English II this term. You could do the French Revolution special subject next year.’

‘Next
year
!’ shrieks Nadine. ‘I can’t wait till next year. Even next week is bad enough. I’ll find a way.’

She will, too. Nadine is single-minded where love is concerned.

‘You should try it more,’ she scolds Stella. ‘It’s heaven. So exciting. Every day is a cliff-hanger – will you manage to see him or won’t you? And then if things come to a head, it’s sheer bliss. I’m a bit worried about this one. I’m not sure that he’s that interested in women.’

‘Ah…’ says Stella.

The young of the fifties were perfectly
au fait
with homosexuality, but less inclined to identify it amongst themselves. Girls like Nadine and Stella, whose antennae were acute, simply knew to write off a certain kind of man where romance was concerned.

‘No, no – not that. He’s a rowing man – in the college First Eight. He’s always in the King’s Arms, apparently – but how am I to get in there?’

Again, women undergraduates of the period did not go unaccompanied into pubs. With a man, fine. Without one, a solitary girl would have to be very confident of identifying male friends immediately or risk grave embarrassment. A group of mutually supportive girls would prompt raised eyebrows.

‘It’s not fair,’ fumes Nadine. ‘They can go wherever they like.’

‘Well,’ says Stella, ‘you’re just going to have to spend a lot of time on the towpath. You can borrow my duffel coat if you like.’

‘You’re making fun of me. You don’t know what it’s like. Why doesn’t it happen to you?’

‘I believe in grand passion,’ says Stella. ‘I’m waiting for that.’

There is some truth in this. Stella perceives, perhaps rather more sharply than Nadine, that this stage of life is in many ways a rehearsal. One is gearing up for what is to come, flexing the muscles. Above all, one is trying out for size various aspects of personality. Stella is not very clear yet who she is.

‘Oh, that,’ says Nadine. ‘That all ends in tears.’ For an instant there is a glint of a later Nadine. ‘You’ve got to find someone to marry, definitely. But marriage isn’t about grand passion.’

‘Hang on …’ says Stella, who sees that more than one seminal point is raised here. ‘First of all, you’ve just said you’re in love, and where you’re concerned that has always ended in tears rather than marriage so far. And what
is
marriage about, in that case? I mean, if it’s not passion. There you are stuck with someone else for ever.’

Divorce is entirely familiar to the children of the fifties, but marriage is still viewed with disconcerting sobriety. It is seen as a permanent arrangement. Well, they will find out.

Nadine ducks the issue. ‘Oh, marriage is for later. The thing right now is simply – men. Here we are, surrounded by them. Spoiled for choice. The point is to make the most of it – we’re never going to have it so good again.’

She’s right about that, at least.

You were bucking the trend, Stella heard Richard say.

‘Sorry?’

‘Not marrying. It does you credit. The pressure was on, back then.’

‘For men, too?’ she enquired. One never really thought about their side of it, at the time.

‘Certainly. It was a wise career move, on the whole. You were seen as more stable if married. You’d made an investment, had more at stake.’

‘Is that what it felt like?’

‘No,’ said Richard, rather impatiently. ‘Not at twenty-five or whatever. It felt like falling in with an expected procedure. And having someone to go to bed with on a permanent basis. Nadine was very attractive.’

We’re getting a bit near the knuckle, thought Stella. Positively confessional. ‘Of course she was. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.’

He shied away. ‘I’ll be off now, since I can be of no further use right now over the mower. The spare part shouldn’t take too long. I’ll bring the phone number for the chap who does the gutters.’

‘Thanks,’ said Stella. ‘You’ll make a householder of me yet.’

After he had gone she found herself thinking not of lawn-mowers or gutters but of Nadine again. Had Nadine continued to fall in love four times – sorry, twice – a year after her marriage to Richard? Patently not. Nadine had reinvented herself, as wife, mother and responsible citizen. Her letters had been full of Consumer Groups, protests against road schemes and campaigns for nursery schools. The skirmishes of love had been a necessary rite of passage, that was all.

And I conjure up Nadine, thought Stella, because to do so is also to conjure up myself. There seems to be this compulsion to take stock, to see from whence and from what one has come. To look at the old photos.

‘So how are you, then?’ said Molly in the shop. ‘Good. I’ve kept you a
Herald.
You forgot to pick it up last week. Not a thing I like to be without, myself. The national papers you can keep, but you don’t know what’s going on without the
Herald.
The cottage by the church is for sale, I see. People don’t stay put nowadays, do they? It’s here today and gone tomorrow. Didn’t used to be like that, round here. Still isn’t, for some, if you see what I mean – ’ a momentary pause within which Stella is subtly defined and perhaps delicately distanced – ‘but that being said, there’s those that muck in and pull their weight and those that don’t. You used to know how a person stood, without having to take soundings, know what I mean? You knew if they were farming or trade, church or chapel, you knew who their father was and which way they’d jump if it came to the push. Nowadays, people can walk into the shop and it’s anyone’s guess, frankly … Not that that doesn’t have its own interest, mind. Still, it’s complicated. Even the
Herald
doesn’t help there.’ She laughed.

Naturally, thought Stella, getting into the car. All societies are complex, most are opaque – a fact which has kept the likes of me in business for quite a while now. But I am no longer in business, I am a part of the landscape like everyone else. And some of us are more tenuously placed within that landscape than others. Some are entrenched; others merely perch.

All her life, wherever she was, she had thought of herself as a bird of passage. She had rented rooms or flats, expecting to move on. Where she worked, most of her colleagues were sunk deep in the culture of mortgages and house prices; she had felt relief to be excused all that. And in the field she had been in the ultimate state of transience – the invisible observer, the visitor from outer space. The people in whom she was interested were there, in that place – she herself was both there and crucially apart. If she lived permanently anywhere, it was in a landscape of the mind.

In the Delta village no one knew where England was, except that it was distant. For most Maltese the general impression of Australia, to which many of their friends and relations had emigrated, was that it could not be that far away, since they knew that it took only twenty-four hours or so to get there. Orcadians refer to Scotland as the south. The siting of elsewhere depends on the viewpoint, but in the last resort it is simply elsewhere, with all that that implies. We are here but they are there, where things are done differently.

She drove home. The red car tore past her on the lane, belching exhaust fumes. Karen Hiscox raised a hand in perfunctory greeting.

The boys considered one another. Furtively, but each knowing that the other was doing it. That complementary face – the same thick dark brows, blunt nose, jut of the chin.

I hate her, they told each other.

‘Maybe they gave me the wrong ones at the hospital.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘It happens. You don’t look like me, do you? Neither of you.’

It did not occur to them that this was disproved by their resemblance to one another. They were slow thinkers. Later, at some point, they stumbled to this realization, but by then the incident was just part of a general cargo of resentment.

‘It’s going well,’ said Judith. ‘Far too well, so far as the Southwest Building Society is concerned. Two more trenches and I think we shall have most of the perimeter wall. The Southwest Building Society comes along in its pin-stripe suits and gazes in dismay. It sees its squash court receding by the day. The local paper did three columns and a nice picture of my students digging away in shorts and T-shirts. That’s bought me another week or two at least. No way the pin-stripes can move us on while that’s fresh in the local mind. I’m considering school visits and an Open Day. Come and visit again. Bring your boyfriend. Interested crowds are what I need. Sorry, did you say something? Joke, joke … You said yourself he keeps offering services. Seriously, though, noise it abroad.
ELECTRIFYING DISCOVERY OF TWELFTH-CENTURY CHAPEL UNDER SQUASH COURT FOUNDATIONS
. It’s the only way we’ll buy more time. What? No, medieval chapels are not two-a-penny, even in these parts. Even the pin-stripes know better than to suggest that. Oh … joke, I see. All right –
touché.
But what would really serve the purpose is a burial. No, you idiot – an
ancient
burial. Medieval graveyard, that’s what I want. Bring in the demographic boys and I’d be in business for months. No, I shouldn’t think there’s much chance. Best we can do is scrape on and hope for… You’ve just heard what? Shots? Well, people do shoot things in the country, don’t they? It’s the main point of the place, as I understand it. So anyway, get over if you can, otherwise I’ll give you a ring again. Have to go now. Mary wants me to give her a hand with something …’

The boys went a little way up the grass track to the hills. They had a go at some pigeons and then a crow, but didn’t get anything. And they didn’t dare stay long – their parents were both out, but their mother could be back any time. Michael cleaned the gun and hung it up again in her study. They were both shaking, in case she came. But it was worth it. It gave them a buzz, all evening, knowing what she didn’t know. She thought she knew everything about them, did she? Well, there were things she didn’t know.