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‘So how are things going?’ said Richard.

She was taken aback for a moment. Tm sorry?’

‘Acclimatization.’

‘Oh, that…’ Concentrate, she told herself. The man is not a mind-reader. And he is paying for your dinner. ‘Fine. I know my way around. I have a dog, for better or for worse. Time does not hang heavy, so far – by no means. I say – you were right about the scallops. Perfect. The sauce tastes faintly scented.’

Richard smiled complacently. And I sound gushing, thought Stella. Uncharacteristic behaviour induced by this place, which is not really my cup of tea. And I still have to get through the fricassee of chicken breasts, chorizo, peas and thyme, not to mention an operatic selection of puddings.

‘Food is always more than meets the eye, of course.’

‘You mean there’s no such thing as a free lunch?’ said Richard. ‘This dinner is quite without strings, I assure you.’

‘No, no – I mean that it usually has ritual significance, the world over. Restaurants not least. The McDonald’s ritual is quite different from the ritual of a place like this.’

‘Well, so I should hope. Not that I’ve set foot in a McDonald’s since the girls grew up. So what is the hidden agenda here?’

‘Reassurance,’ said Stella. ‘The customer is being told that he is indeed in the depths of the countryside but, never fear, the resources of civilization are available. Mud and muck there may be, but immunity is available for those with discrimination.’ And a credit card, she was about to add, and then remembered that she was a guest.

‘Hmn.’ Richard eyed her. ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Another could be that the customer is flattered by special effects – ‘ he waved a hand at the swagged chintz curtains, the beamed ceiling, the displays of lustreware – ‘and grandiose cuisine. He feels that this sort of thing is his natural due and decides to come again.’

‘Does it have that effect on you?’

‘No, but I’m a hard-headed civil servant, impervious to corruption. I simply come because it’s the best place within twenty miles for a good meal. I bring the daughters here when they visit.’

‘I hope that’s often,’ said Stella, feeling that she had perhaps been rather too combative a companion. ‘I mean, I hope they’re able to visit you a lot.’

‘They’re busy, but they come when they can. And I retaliate, of course. Laura is in London now …’ There was a fragmentary pause and then he started to talk rather deliberately about an exhibition at the county arts centre. Stella realized that he had felt himself to be treading on dangerous ground, in the presence of one who was childless.

‘Nadine always knew she wanted children,’ she said. ‘That surprised me, when we were young – that she could be so sure. She knew even when she was twenty. By the time I was thirty, I knew for certain that I didn’t.’

He was relieved that he had not been tactless, she saw, but with the relief came a cool look. He found this declaration unnatural, or unwomanly, or just plain selfish. He probably knew something of her sexual history from Nadine. On which I have no intention of expanding, thought Stella. Nothing to do with him, really, any of this. But he’s a decent enough chap and one confidence deserves another, I suppose. If confidence is the right word.

‘Nadine envied you,’ said Richard abruptly.

Stella was almost shocked. She stared at him, momentarily thrown.

He qualified. ‘Not in the absolute sense. And not that she was in any way dissatisfied with her own lot. She just saw you as having something she didn’t – experience, opportunity …’ He let the sentence trail away.

Yes, thought Stella. That fits. And somehow I never noticed at the time.

There’s a man, says Nadine. This is not a question but a statement. She looks at Stella across a table in the cafeteria of the Royal Academy after the exhibition visit which has been the pretext for their meeting. They have not seen each other for over a year.

‘Well… yes,’ says Stella. She would rather not go into the matter, but sees that there is no escape.

Nadine contemplates her. ‘I’ve known for the last hour. It’s written all over you. You’ve got that sort of feverish look.’ She sounds almost grumpy, and if Stella was not in this state of floating detachment, she would have detected then the whiff of envy. Nadine feels sidelined, high and dry on her island of marriage and maternity, while Stella is still out there in the world – free, in love. But Stella is for once blinkered, she is barely seeing or hearing Nadine. She is indeed in love. This means that she is self-absorbed, unobservant and not herself at all.

‘Is he an anthropologist?’

‘No … no, he’s a journalist.’

Nadine is even more put out. An anthropologist would have staid, pedestrian connotations. To her ears journalist sounds racy, even glamorous. She is thinking that Stella always had more dashing men than she did. But Stella has not got the Georgian farmhouse in Sevenoaks and the two gorgeous children. And probably this man won’t last.

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘Oh … in Malta. I did a field study there this summer.’

Malta. Sun, brown skin, hot nights. Beaches. Damn her, thinks Nadine, who is no longer enjoying her day out.

Feeling disagreeably bloated, Stella watched Richard attend to the bill, which was delivered discreetly disguised as a leather notepad.

‘Thank you for a splendid meal,’ she said. ‘A treat.’

‘It’s for me to thank you. You did us proud.’

I do not know how this has come about, thought Stella. How can it be that by some diabolical trick I am sixty-five and sitting in a sugar pink restaurant with the husband of my old friend Nadine, who is not anywhere at all. How has it come to this?

‘You will be the talk of the local history group for months. Our meetings are seldom so colourful.’

And how did I come to be trying to explain the seminal matter of cultural difference to fifteen oddly assorted people in something called a village hall?

‘A pleasure,’ she said. ‘Rather cursory treatment of a hefty subject, I’m afraid. I did try to beef up the travel aspect, as you suggested.’

They rose from the table. A waiter eased Stella into her coat as though he were robing a bishop. Outside the restaurant, she turned to Richard.

‘I don’t think Nadine envied me, exactly. We shot off in different directions. Having shared a starting-line, as it were. The thought could be unsettling.’

He shrugged, smiled. ‘Maybe. Whatever … she came to see you as a symbol of lost promise, I think. Her lost promise.’

‘She would have hated to live as I have. What she had was what she always wanted.’

‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ said Richard. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily induce absolute satisfaction, does it?’

Stella drove home through a black velvet night, under a sky crackling with stars. The night sky was clear in these parts, quite unlike the orange pall that hangs over cities. The weather was more vivid, you were more acutely aware of sun and rain, of the theatrical range of cloud effects, from incandescent back-lit masses to the delicate Wedgwood veil of summer cirrus. The car’s headlights made a golden tunnel of the lanes down which she drove; when she came out into the open the hills were a long flank against the sparkling sky. Darkness everywhere, except for the flare of some vehicle on a road. An uninhabited landscape, you would think, if you did not know of its intricate, intimate layers of community.

And invisible populace. She thought of the force-lines out there – of tacit understanding, of mutual incomprehension, of tolerance, of hostility. Those who operated in shiftless isolation, those locked into networks of mutual aid and dependence. An untidy place, she thought. An African village is a miracle of cohesion, by comparison.

North Somerset Herald

The South West Tarantula Society’s summer show at Tropical World near Taunton on Sunday attracted around 100 entries in seven categories.

17 July’s Hoccombe Market saw 391 fat lambs meet an easier trade to average 109.4 pence, selling to a top price of 48.50, 123.00 pence a kilo. 59 killing ewes sold to a steadier trade, half-meat ewes to 34.00, plain to 25.50, killing rams to 45.00.

The Clapperton Foxhounds Puppy Show was held on 10 July at the Kennels, West Oxton, by invitation of the Joint Master. Five couples of doghounds and two couples of bitches were then judged. After the Puppy Show everyone adjourned to enjoy a splendid tea, most kindly provided by the Masters, who then presented prizes to the puppy walkers.

Firefighters were called out to a blaze in a rubbish-bin on the esplanade. The fire had spread to a neighbouring seat and lamp-post, which were badly damaged.

The West Somerset local history group was entertained by slides and a talk given by Miss Stella Brentwood, who recalled her days as an anthropologist. A lively discussion followed. The group’s next meeting will be on 9 September.

Stella had named the dog. A dog must be summoned, therefore it needs a name. She found the choice exasperatingly difficult, seeking to avoid both the arch and the mundane. Persistent guilt about the creature’s desperate devotion made her feel that she owed him at the least a carefully considered handle. Eventually she called him Bracken, remembering that her parents had a dog of that name, long ago in her adolescence. That animal was now reduced to a vaguely distasteful memory of something square and brown perpetually slumped on the hearthrug, but never mind. To bestow upon this new dog a name with ancestral overtones was a compliment and confirmation of status. She felt a mite less guilty.

Within a week she discovered that she had committed a minor solecism.

‘What’s that you’ve called that dog of yours?’ enquired the postman, as she tried to keep the dog from assaulting him in frenzied propitiation.

‘Bracken.’

The postman laughed. ‘Hound name, that is. In these parts. You only get hounds called that. Better take care you keep him inside when the hunt’s exercising.’

Stella had grown up in Enfield, where fox-hunting is not rife. She decided that it was hardly worth mentioning this in mitigation. The postman was an invaluable source or information; the occasional firm correction was a fair price. And so far as the name went, it was too late now. The dog already recognized his label. I’m sorry, Stella told him. Put it down to my suburban upbringing. We’ll just have to keep this as a matter between ourselves.

And what about the postman himself, with his name from the Welsh valleys? Stella had presumed once to ask him if his forebears had come over the water to the mines up on the hill. He had shrugged. Didn’t know. Didn’t much care. That was then, this is now. Suffice it that he was of this place, and knew what was what. Unlike some.

Names, names … she thought. The ultimate signifier for those of us who like to ferret away at such things. Inside the cottage were card indexes and notebooks in which she had diligently recorded hundreds upon hundreds of names. These harvests could then be assembled into patterns – clusters of similar sounds which made kinship groupings and lineage structures. We all of us bear witness to our genes and are labelled accordingly. As a child she had been fascinated by the litany of the Old Testament – and Jared lived an hundred and sixty two years, and he begat Enoch … and Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah … She had savoured the outlandish names, chanting them aloud, noting the piling up of generation upon generation. Perhaps this early addiction counted for much.

But she had savoured also the names on the map of Greater London, noting how they appreciated in flavour from the muted streets and avenues and terraces of her own suburb to the metropolitan splendours of Trafalgar, Piccadilly, Victoria and Waterloo. She had compared her own homely no-frills English family stock – Brentwoods on her father’s side, Nordens on her mother’s – with the more suggestive surnames of certain schoolmates. Elizabeth Cremona, whose father was Italian. The McTaggart sisters. May Chang. Fernanda Rodriguez. She approved such a freight of reference. What did Brentwood tell you, for heaven’s sake?

She had learned about this landscape from its names. Topographical history left her somewhat cold, but she had borrowed the Somerset volume of
The Place-Names of England
from the library and become interested in the betraying dissection of the names of farms and villages. Here was the relentless Anglo-Saxon plod, there was a faint Celtic whisper. Here a hint of Roman, there a Norman reference. Nothing was arbitrary, each name a coded signal.

Similarly the more intimate surroundings, for each and every one of us. ‘Don’t need to be much of a detective to know you’ve spent time out of this country,’ the removal foreman had said, perched on a pile of cases with a mug of tea in his hand, watching one of his henchmen carry in the big khelim rug, the Turkish brass tray. ‘And all these books. Dead give-away.’ He sat upon three book boxes, his feet upon another. He did not specify what it was that was given away, but the thought hung in the air. One kind of person as opposed to another.

The books were now unpacked, and continued to bear witness, as did the contents of Stella’s desk, of the drawers of her bedroom chest. Possession of this, absence of these and those. We are defined by what we own, by what we are called.

‘Come along then, you,’ she said to the dog. ‘Time for a walk.’

The favoured direction was always up the old mineral line. The dog, too, now automatically headed that way. Once oft the track over the field, you were on to the sheltered sunken lane which had once been the route of the railway incline and you could go as high and as far as you wished – on several occasions Stella had been right up to the ridge of the Brendons. Once in a while she would meet another walker, or someone on a horse, but for the most part the route was deserted. Knowing its original function, she found it impossible not to imagine the industrial bustle of that other time – the waggons grinding up and down the line, the gangs of miners at the winding-houses. But if you knew nothing of this, the place was just an agreeable and apparently fortuitous path for a country walk.

Stella thought of the miners today, as she walked between hedgebanks that rippled with birdsong. She saw them in the mind’s eye in monochrome, an effect prompted presumably by old sepia photographs – short dark men done up in that complicated garb of the Victorian working man which is a parody of respectable dress: the battered jacket, the waistcoat, the scarf at the neck, the cap. Talking Welsh, presumably. Conspicuous and alien. Immigrants. Nothing left of them today but this track, a scattering of Baptist chapels and the postman, who was not interested in his ancestry. Fair enough. It is perhaps only the nicely adjusted who can afford to dismiss their antecedents. Those passionately interested in their roots are usually either the historically oppressed or the oppressors, both needing to prove a point.

Today she went only as far as the waterfall, where the track briefly ran parallel with a stream just as it tumbled down over rocks set in woodland. Bracken had a drink. Stella rested on a fallen tree and then headed back.

Coming out on to the lane she saw the Hiscox boys with their bikes propped up against the hedgebank. They squatted alongside, examining a wheel. Hearing her step, they turned and abruptly stood up. Bracken, running ahead, approached and sniffed tentatively at one of the pairs of grubby jeans, his ears laid back ingratiatingly. At once the boy shoved at him with his foot – something nearer a kick than a push: ‘Fuck off!’

Stella was jolted. The harsh adolescent voice hung in the bright morning. The dog had retreated to her side and she slipped on his lead. ‘He wasn’t going to hurt you. He’s just curious.’

‘I don’t like dogs.’

‘Really?’ said Stella. ‘Well, some don’t, I suppose. He’s the first I’ve had, as it happens.’

The boys stared at her. They were almost identical. Sunburned sullen faces under mops of dark hair. Twins, you would have thought, except that one was slightly taller. With one accord they turned their backs on her and squatted down to the bikes again.

‘Puncture?’ said Stella determinedly. ‘In my day it was that palaver with a bucket of water, looking for the bubbles. No doubt the technology has improved.’

Silence. Then the bigger boy swung his head fractionally in her direction and mumbled something.

‘Sorry?’

‘Piss off, will you? We’re busy.’

The following things are in the drawers of Stella’s desk. It is a pine knee-hole desk of no particular distinction, topped with a rectangle of imitation leather embossed in gilt.

Brown envelopes labelled Orkney, Malta, Nile Delta, Miscellaneous. These envelopes contain photographs. Some of the photographs are scenic, others show groups of people. Occasionally these groups include Stella. Other incarnations of Stella. She stands under a palm tree, flanked by beaming men in galabiehs. A tanned Stella wearing a large straw hat poses with a black-clad priest in front of a baroque church. She perches, laughing, on the seat of a tractor; a big man with a mane of ginger hair leans with his hand on the steering wheel, like a groom curbing a stationary horse.

An assortment of card-index boxes in varying degrees of decay. These are the boxes which are filled with names. Packed, stuffed, crammed with names. They are a distillation of humanity, these boxes, a reduction of flesh and blood and bone into a compact mass of cards, 5” x 8 “. There are hundreds upon hundreds of people in here. Pietru and Victor and Pawlu and Maddalena and Tereza. Ahmed and Saleh and Fawzia and Fatima. Neil and Isobel and Mary and Fergus. They are bleached, shrunk, stripped of life and stashed away here as silent witness to patterns of human behaviour.

A string of blue beads.

A bundle of letters, tied with string. The letters are all addressed to Stella in the same hand but the provenance is global. Smudgy illegible postmarks from goodness knows where, clumps of gaudy stamps.

A stack of notebooks, also labelled: Orkney, Nile Delta, Malta. And Birmingham, Sheffield, Milton Keynes.

Several passports in Stella’s name. The corners are cut off to indicate that they are out of date, the pages are liberally spattered with immigration stamps.

These things are on, in or around a large deal table with a single long drawer in a small room adjoining the sitting-room in the Hiscox bungalow. Karen Hiscox refers to this room as her office.

A metal spike on which is impaled a column of bills, many inches high. Electricity and telephone bills are almost invariably in red: second demands.

A packet of rat poison.

A stack of back issues of the
North Somerset Herald.

A tin of flea powder.

A calendar for 1989, turned to the May page, showing a woodland vista, with bluebells. This item hanging from a hook on the wall.

A shotgun. Also hanging from a hook.

A battered wooden box with hinged lid, which looks as though it may once have housed a croquet set. Inside the box are a dog collar and lead, a Johnny Walker whisky bottle (empty), several cartridge cases (full), a large torch with no glass or bulb, a bundle of bank statements, a lipstick, packets of Disprin and Elastoplast, a bulldog clip holding three documents, one recording the birth of Michael John Picton, another that of Peter Keith Picton, and the last notifying Edward James Picton that he has been declared bankrupt. There are also Twix and Mars Bar wrappers, loose change, pieces of string, torn stamps and assorted further detritus.

In the Hiscox bungalow, in the bottom drawer of the chest in Gran’s room, there is a knitting bag. Inside the bag are knitting needles and the half-finished sleeve of some blue garment, grimy with age, still on the needles, along with various hanks and balls of wool, these, too, old and grubby. There are also some knitting patterns, rolled up together and held by an elastic band.

Within the core of this knitting pattern tube are other items. The estate agent’s particulars for a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, called the Larches, with four bedrooms, sitting-room opening on to a conservatory and a half acre of landscaped gardens.

A letter. The letter is on thin lined notepaper and is dated 11 February 1986. It is apparently minus the last page.

Dear Milly: It’s not my business, I dare say, but I feel I’ve got to speak out. I tried to ring you the other day and got Karen. Told me you were out. At half past nine in the evening? I said, Milly never goes out after dark. Then she became offensive and I put the phone down. Milly, Karen has been trouble from the word go, frankly, and if she were my daughter, I’d make it plain enough’s enough. You and Arthur did everything for her any child could ask and a fat lot of gratitude you’ve had. If she and Ted have bitten off more than they can chew with this garage business and come a cropper, then it’s up to them to pick themselves up as best they can. They’ve no right calling on you to bale them out. Your home’s your own, Milly. Arthur would have been horrified. He died easy, knowing you were comfortably set up. Well, not easy, given he was only fifty-six, but easier, put it that way. As for Karen saying you’ll be better off with them in any case, let me just point out that Karen’s not the easiest person in the world to get along with and you should know that better than anyone. Look after you, she says, does she? That’ll be the first time I’ve ever heard of that young woman looking after anybody except number one. I don’t like the sound of this, Milly, and since I doubt if anyone else is going to say so loud and clear, I’m doing just that. It’s my duty as your sister, that’s now I see it, though I dare say you won’t thank me. And if Karen and that Ted …

That woman had come out of the field when they were trying to fix Peter’s broken spoke. She’d come up suddenly so it took them by surprise, and then the bloody dog started sniffing around. So Peter kicked it. Afterwards they both wished he’d kicked it harder, but it felt good at the time as it was. And Michael told her to piss off and that was good too.

Stupid cow. What business was it of hers? Asking a stupid question like that.

If we had proper bikes, they told each other. Decent bikes like other people got.

They sat in their place behind the sheds and worked themselves up about the bikes. If we say to her we’ll do without our birthdays and Christmas. We’ll muck out the pens every day, after school. Half an hour or so of this and they’d got up enough head of steam to ask. She’d been in quite a good mood the last few days anyway.

She was in the room she called her office. Where the gun was. She was sitting at the table where she put bills and stuff, sorting through a pile of papers.

They stood at the door. Even just looking at her they knew it wouldn’t be any good. The way her mouth was screwed up into a hard knot. The good mood was over, for some reason.

‘Clear off, I haven’t got time for you.’

Peter said, ‘Mum …’

She slammed the papers down on the table. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? D’you want me to say it again? Louder? Longer?’