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She said it with kindly condescension, as to a young child.

“I wondered if you would let me come and talk to you about my mother.”

There was a brief silence.

“That seems an odd request. You must have known her much better than I did.”

“I suppose that's true, though I wish we had had more time together in recent years. The fact is, though, I know the May McNabb who was the mature headmistress. You knew the young one.”

“True. But don't you think they were essentially the same person?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps experiences changed her. But in any case I don't want to discuss her character. I want to discuss what happened to her in the years before and just after I was born—years when I couldn't know what was going on.”

There was a much longer silence.

“I suppose that could be possible,” said the rich voice,
now robbed of its stridency. “When did you want to come?”

“I wondered if tonight might be possible.”

“I don't have a very full diary these days,” she said, with a bitter little cackle of laughter. “You obviously do, or you're in a great hurry.”

“I shall be away all next week, so I would like to see you before I go—if it's not too much trouble.”

“Getting in before I pop off! Oh don't worry: everybody does it. You can come—oh, let's say tea time. I can't cook dinner for two—it's becoming chore enough to feed myself. It's number twenty-six. Shall we say four o'clock?”

“Four o'clock it is.”

“Please be prompt. I don't like latecomers.”

She sounded as if she was rebuking a child in year three for slipping late into assembly.

“I shall look forward to it.”

“So shall I!”

There was some kind of implication behind Mrs. Southwell's last words. Presumably an old person in sheltered accommodation welcomed any relief from a diet of daytime television and regular hot drinks. But that wasn't the implication. The tone of voice almost suggested that, though she would enjoy the interview, she would do so in an unpleasant way. The caginess of the early exchanges had altered to something close to relish. Presumably, Eve thought, Mrs. Southwell had decided how she was going to handle the encounter. Eve somehow did not think that the relish in the other's voice meant that she, Eve, was going to enjoy the meeting.

May McNabb had a collection of town maps in one corner
of an upstairs bookcase. Eve knew she had had meetings everywhere, particularly in other primary schools, and had needed to know how to get there. It was easy enough that afternoon to find Autumn Prospect, on a hill overlooking Keighley, with a splendid view of Keighley Moors beyond the nineteenth-century dwellings in the immediate vicinity—many of which had become nursing homes.

Autumn Prospect was certainly not a nursing home. It was a custom-built series of small flats, all on the ground floor, constructed in one large square with flats on three sides and a wall on the side adjacent to the road. It was entered through a single gateway with a porter's lodge, where a capable-looking man was pottering. He hailed her, and asked her to sign a book for visitors. Then he came out into the getting-chilly afternoon air and strolled with her toward number 26. As she walked Eve heard jazz on Radio Three and also the television children's programs. She approved of what she saw and heard. If she had to get old and of diminished capability, this was the sort of place she would not mind ending up in. Or taking her autumn views from. The sense of privacy within a small community was increased by the flats being divided into sections of five or six, with their own door to the outside world. The caretaker let her into the section, then took himself off.

She knocked on the door of 26, and there were sounds of movement from inside. It opened, and she encountered her mother's first and only boss in Crossley.

Evelyn Southwell was heavily made-up. As always happened, the orange-brown matte color made her look even older than she was, and the rose pink lipstick didn't help,
or the gingery hair. She had a prepared smile on her face that Eve did not trust or like, but she let herself be led into a small, comfortably furnished living room, though each piece seemed designed for a larger space. Evelyn Southwell was walking with a metal stick, and she gestured with it toward a chair. Already on the table were thin-cut bread and butter, with dark fruitcake and currant buns. The teapot was under a cozy. Mrs. Southwell had assumed her strictures on latecomers would be heeded. When she had heaved herself down into the room's other chair, almost groaning with relief, she welcomed Eve in a fruity voice designed for a larger room, or perhaps an assembly hall.

“So nice of you to come. It's a great treat to see you again. It's not all of one's old pupils who remember.”

Mrs. Southwell was taking the visit as a tribute to herself. And she had forgotten that Eve had never attended Blackfield Road. May had thought it bad for a child to attend a school run by her parent. In any case, Evelyn Southwell had moved on (or been moved on?) well before she, Eve, had started school.

“It's a pleasure for me too. A lot of people have talked to me about you in the last few days. You must have made a big impression in Crossley.”

“Ah yes,” sighed Evelyn with a flutter of eyelashes. “I always believed a good teacher had to be something of a
performer
—don't you agree?”

“Oh, I do,” said Eve. But what percentage performer? she wondered. “So many people have passed on to me memories of my mother's early years in Crossley, and what an impression she made.”

“Ah yes, your mother,” said Mrs. Southwell vaguely. Eve sensed that she was being played with.

“And of course my father too.” The old eyes, under the mascara, blinked, apparently in an effort of remembrance. Eve felt sure her namesake remembered her father perfectly well. But the woman pantomimed a sudden remembrance.

“Oh yes, of course: the artist.”

It sounded better than cartoonist.

“Yes,” said Eve, determined to continue with the subject. “I haven't found any of his artwork in the house. He went abroad for his health when I was very young.”

“Yes, I remember now. People went abroad for their health then. Nowadays they just go for sun and fish and chips, or so people tell me.”

“Many do. But from what I hear, Australia doesn't go in much for fish-and-chips tourism. I believe my father must have died there at some point.”

“Yes, I remember people talking about it. I'd moved to Bradford by then—a big promotion to a fine, well-endowed school—”

“But you did hear that he had died?”

“Oh yes. Your mother by then was headmistress of Crossley. And people knew I came from the Crossley school. So of course they passed things on when they heard them.”

Suddenly a sharp, sardonic look came into those old eyes, and Eve felt she was being directed by a cunning director of plays—forced to react in a certain way.

“But you doubted my father was dead, didn't you?”

“I didn't—let's say—think the news was conclusive. I
wondered whether your mother wanted people, especially you, to think he was dead. That would rule out your trying to find him when you grew up. I don't mean to be cynical, but that would have saved her an awful lot of trouble.”

“Was my father ‘trouble'?”

She shook her head, looking annoyed.

“I didn't say that. On the surface he certainly wasn't, and I only saw the surface. But death is conveniently final, and just being in Australia is not.”

“What
exactly
are you saying?” Eve was getting annoyed now.

“Have some more bread and butter, Eve. Or some cake.” She paused while Eve reluctantly took a small bun. “What exactly am I saying, you ask. Let me get at what I'm saying by going at it crabwise. When your mother arrived at Blackfield Road School, she was the answer to a headmistress's prayer. So wonderfully competent all round. I could hand any little task to her, and know that it would be done, and
well
done. When she became deputy head, I could do more of what I really enjoyed—teaching. And she still so young! In her late twenties, but she looked even younger. If she'd been in a secondary school, she could have been mistaken for one of the pupils, but in a primary school it was fine. She both fit in and yet was a leader. She was like a big sister to the children.”

She paused, and Eve thought it time to step in.

“We were talking,” she said, “about why my mother might have put it around that my father was dead, when perhaps it wasn't true. It seems quite unlike the woman I knew.”

“Crises produce special responses,” Mrs. Southwell
said grandiloquently. “Now the reason things started to go wrong for your mother—and they might have gone a great deal more wrong than they did if it hadn't been for me—was of course sex.”

Eve raised her eyebrows, somewhat hypocritically.

“Sex? I don't associate sex with my mother.”

“Children seldom do, unless it's too blatant to be ignored. How do they think they came into the world? I grant you that your mother, by all accounts, lived a blameless life for all the years you knew her. But it's those early years in Crossley you're asking me about, and while she was winning a great reputation in educational circles, and from parents and people generally, she was also attracting a degree of attention
from the wrong sort
.”

“The fast set of Crossley? Difficult to imagine that there was one.”

“Impossible, rather. No, by the wrong sort I meant—well, it started when she gave a lift to Halifax to a girl who had missed her bus. I say girl advisedly, because I believe she was six or seven years younger than May, though she didn't look it, and I suspect she was quite as—or
more
—worldly-wise than May was. When May got back to school that day—she'd had a dental appointment—she was full of what an interesting girl she'd met, how the best people didn't always go to university or teachers' college. And that was the beginning of it.”

“Was this girl called Jean Mannering?”

Mrs. Southwell was visibly disappointed.

“Oh, you know. Why am I wasting my time?”

“You're not wasting your time. I know very little about her.”

Mrs. Southwell twisted her mouth.

“Bright. Talented. A bit of an actress. And a lesbian. That was the problem. May became quite erratic and unreliable. Where before she would do anything I needed done, without fuss, after she met the Mannering girl she became forgetful, or she would do what I'd asked, but in a slipshod way.”

“Was this because she was having an affair with Jean Mannering?”

“I didn't say that.” She held up her hand, as if to deplore an impertinent question from the class. “I don't know. Why would she? A young married woman with a talented husband and a new baby. But I think there was a lot of pressure, which left her bewildered, uncertain what she felt or what she wanted. I think she was torn apart.”

“It sounds as if she was attracted.”

“I hope
not
. I hope she was too sensible. Don't get me wrong. I am not against lesbianism. But I have grave doubts about that particular woman. It was all surface with Miss Mannering. She's done all sorts of things with her life in the years since she met your mother, and landed up in the Anglican church.”

“Nothing particularly odd or disgraceful about that, is there?”

“I mean
in
it. As a vicar or parson or something.”

Eve was extremely surprised, but her suspicions of Evelyn Southwell kept her from showing it.

“There are lots of female vicars now. I believe more women than men are going into the church.”

“It seems very odd to me, after her having been in the
tax office, then business, and doing every part imaginable in amateur dramatics.”

“Well,” said Eve, “if it comes to that, a priest or a vicar is a sort of actor, isn't he? What he does in front of the congregation is ritual, repeating words he's learned off.”

“Very clever,” said Evelyn Southwell, twisting her over-pink mouth. “I would have expected May's daughter to be clever.”

“So you don't know that there was an affair?”

“Well, I couldn't have asked, could I?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Thirty-five years ago? In a
primary
school? The word ‘lesbianism' was hardly known, let alone spoken. The nearest one might go was the word ‘mannish,' and that certainly didn't apply to May, or to Jean Mannering, come to that. Whether or not there was an affair—and I wouldn't like to say one way or another—it was clear that the relationship was not doing any good to May's marriage.”

“How do you know that?”

“Jean was around to their house as soon as John left to go off to Glasgow. Stayed there all hours—all night often. She and May and sometimes the baby, you, would be out to pubs, visiting tourist spots, going to the theater—as often as not leaving you with Jean's parents to babysit. To me, May seemed quite a different person. It was very sad, very depressing.”

Eve could not analyze her reactions to Evelyn's words, but she felt that behind the words there was a sort of relish, a lip-smacking self-satisfaction that Evelyn was now “dishing the dirt” on Jean Mannering. Probably not even
realizing that for most people of a younger generation than her, lesbianism was no longer dirt.

“And this all climaxed in my father taking off, supposedly for the sun, to a warmer, drier climate for his bad chest?”

“Yes, it did. You should ask the Mannering woman about that.”

“I will. What can you tell me?”

“Not very much. It happened while both May and John were away.”

“You mean she saw him off on the plane?”

“No, I don't. May was at a weekend conference in Birmingham about teaching history to the nine-to-eleven-year-olds. There were so many young women teachers wanting to attend that they provided a crèche, which meant you could go with her. She later told me John was in Glasgow on the Thursday, as usual, but he flew straight down to London because he was seeing a London editor on Friday—the old
News Chronicle,
I think, or maybe the
Observer
—about a job. London would have suited him for all sorts of reasons, not least because he was very English—hardly Scottish at all, except by blood.”