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“Do I call you John or Steve?” Eve asked as he put together a long concoction of fruit juices. “Dad would come rather unnaturally at first, but I expect I'd get used to it.”

“I'd prefer Steve. I'm always called that, and it's what I'm used to. John doesn't exist, but you can call me that in your mind if you like. Dad would seem unnatural to me too: I've never performed the functions of a dad—or not for thirty-odd years.”

“And of course I thought you were dead.”

“She had her reasons for telling you that, I suppose, and if she decided to do something, that was usually the end of the discussion. I take it she is dead.”

“Yes, a couple of weeks ago.”

“I assumed that must be the reason for your turning up. May telling you I was alive on her deathbed perhaps.”

“No, she never told me.”

John McNabb seemed to wish she had. He turned away.

“Of course she probably didn't know about me, one way or the other . . . Now, I wonder what you'd like to eat. Are you a big eater? I was intending to start with prawns—frozen, but straight from the boat to the freezer—then spag Bol, or lasagna or some such thing.”

“It sounds ideal.”

He went off to the monster fridge-freezer and began rummaging for foil boxes and plastic buckets. Eve noticed there were boxes for two meals as well as for one. Steve had a lot of friends. As he straightened and began to put things together, he threw questions at her.

“So what do you do?”

“I'm in PR. Rather boring and not very useful. I'm thinking of a job change.”

“Oh good. What into?”

“Actually, with PR, but much more useful PR.”

“Married, with children?”

“Neither. Relationship recently broken up. Hints and possibilities of a future relationship, but nothing definite.”

“More promising than the old one then?”

“Much more. Something different, genuine, challenging. Unfortunately, he is married, with a child.”

“Does anyone bother themselves with that these days?”

“In the Indian community they do.”

“Oh ho-o-o. But I must stop inquisiting you. Tell me about May's death. I'm really sad. She was too young to die.”

“Cancer. I was with her at the end.”

“Cancer isn't the surefire killer it used to be.”

“This one was.”

“Was she a good mother? A friend as well as a teacher?”

“Absolutely. I couldn't have been more lucky.”

“I knew she would be,” said John, with unbounded enthusiasm. “She was a cracker. Even when I married her, when we were both quite young, I knew she was something exceptional.”

“So what went wrong then, Steve?”

He came back into the living room and sat down opposite her.

“What does go wrong with early marriages? The obvious things: you regret giving up your freedom, you try regaining it in little ways, and then—”

“Are you thinking of yourself, or Mother?”

“Both, my darling . . . Your mother was a manager, you know.”

“Oh,
don't
I know,” said Eve, smiling but without rancor.

“She would consult, adapt her ideas in little matters, but in the end she got her own way in ninety-five percent of the things that were being discussed. And all the people involved in the consultation went away thinking she was a wonderful listener and very open to other people's ideas.”

“Agreed. I had an advantage because I grew up with
her, I understood her methods, and sometimes I could circumvent them . . . I bet you developed ways of doing that too.”

“I'm not sure I did. Maybe I'm just a bit slow. I remember when the job came up in Crossley we discussed it, I said maybe I could do my job just as well away from Glasgow: the McTavish cartoons would not be affected, and the political ones were more often on national matters rather than more parochial Scottish ones. Then one evening we were at a party at the
Tribune
offices and she dragged me over to where she was talking to the proprietor and said it was all settled. I'd be a freelance with special connections to the paper and a commitment to be in Glasgow two days a week.” He grimaced. “All miraculously arranged—and without me!”

Eve raised her eyebrows, but not in surprise.

“And did it work?”

“It seemed to at first. I was reveling in being back in Yorkshire, not so far from where I grew up, and where I loved the scenery and the small towns. But there's no substitute for being in the thick of the action. If something important happened—like the three-day week in Heath's premiership—you needed to be
in
your newspaper's office,
with
journalists, in touch with the general reactions of the people who were going to read your paper, you had to judge by their letters, phone calls and so on. Sitting in my home office in 24 Derwent Road, Crossley, trying to judge things through the BBC coverage was nowhere near as good.”

“I suppose you resented that?”

“A little. I did try not to. It was an exciting time in other
ways because you were born in Crossley, and quite soon after that we bought the house, with help from May's father, and May was enormously enjoying her new job.”

“Taking over a lot of the headmistress's work.”

“Yes. When May became deputy head, which was quite soon after we arrived. Evelyn made no bones about that, and it suited May, preparing her for what she always wanted: a headship of her own somewhere or other. You can't believe Evelyn Southwell on everything—couldn't, I suppose I should say—but she never hid the fact that she loved teaching and despised administration. You were probably too young to remember her. You were named after her, you know.”

“She's still alive, by the way. I met her recently,” put in Eve.

“Really? Lucky old Evelyn. She's done better than May. By the way, she and May genuinely liked each other at first, though May would giggle a bit behind her back at her ways and all her little dramas.”

“Did the liking cease when Jean Mannering came along?”

“Ah, so you know about her. Yes, that was roughly the turning point. I can't even remember how they met. Some kind of ‘do' in Crossley, or Halifax perhaps. Or did May give her a lift in the car?”

“That's what I heard.”

“Anyway she clicked immediately with May, who from then on was full of admiration for her—loved her differentness, her sense of adventure, her love of saying and doing outrageous things.”

“Jean was much younger than May, wasn't she?”

“Yes, by several years. But even so, somehow, she always seemed to be the leader.”

“Were you jealous?”

John shifted in his chair and frowned.

“Common sense suggests that I probably was. Certainly I
became
jealous. But in the early stages, as I remember it, I was mostly amused. You know Jean was a lesbian? I knew May was not lesbian, though she found the
idea
of it attractive. I also knew that behind Evelyn Southwell's relationship with May there was a strong lesbian impulse.”

“
Eve
lyn's?”

“Oh yes. Didn't you get it? You say you've met her.”

“Oh yes. We've talked.”

“Well, maybe the fires have burned themselves low by now. But look at the situation: May is a new teacher in a new school, and almost at once she gets loaded with administrative work that was not just donkey work but often quite important stuff. The fact that she did it brilliantly, the fact that everyone recognized May as future headmistress material, are neither here nor there. The fact is, the situation was very unusual, could have aroused real jealousy, and was sometimes downright irregular. It was favoritism of the usual kind, based on sex. Evelyn wanted her favorite to be recognized as a star. Evelyn fancied her rotten, though it was in the balance whether she would risk her position, and May's, by proposing any physical relationship.”

“Which way did the balance go?”

“Toward ‘no.' But that may be because Jean had come into the picture.”

Eve thought for a time, and in the silence John slipped out and brought in prawns.

“Evelyn said she ditched her husband because she couldn't bear him near her,” said Eve. “And she was very scathing about how May's work went downhill as soon as she got involved with Jean.”

“
That
was a downright lie,” said John, popping a prawn into his mouth. “I know that. People were always full of praise for the way May did her double job. That's how I knew the job would always come first—was the thing she prized most. That hurt, perhaps more than the business with Jean.”

“You thought that the job came before her marriage?”

John pondered this.

“Well, it wasn't quite like that. But after a year or two in Crossley, the marriage wasn't going well. May was getting her most pleasurable hours with Jean, not with me. I was getting mine with you. It was a rotten situation. The basis of the marriage was crumbling under our feet.”

As John changed their plates and doled out spaghetti and sauce, Eve thought about the situation in the house, which she now lived in, or camped in, when she was hardly more than a baby.

“Jean says there was never a physical relationship between them,” she said as they settled down over their food. John pulled a face.

“I suspect she was lying. So you've talked to her too? What's she like now?”

“Not quite the original and energetic soul everyone paints her as when they talk about her thirty years ago. But then, who is? She's got into religion, by the way.”

“Really? Well, that I never would have suspected. But religion gets a hold on the most curious people. Rupert Murdoch, for example . . . I suspected at the time that they did sleep together but that May found it—how shall I put it?—irrelevant, neither exciting nor disgusting but beside the point. She was interested in the friendship, that was where the life and the vigor of the relationship lay. In any case it's pretty irrelevant now. The important point is that Jean was young, hot and very determined. She realized that as long as May remained a teacher, particularly in a small Yorkshire town, there was no question of an open relationship. But she was determined, if she could, to destroy May's and my marriage, to make herself the central, dominant figure in May's life and to gain the nearest thing possible to the open relationship she craved. Me out of the way, and of course with the child, you, remaining with the mother, as went without saying then—it was to be the perfect little family group, from her point of view.”

Eve meditated on the picture. It seemed to make sense, though perhaps more with the young Jean of popular report than with the older Jean she had met. Perhaps religion had wrought change.

“So how did she take May along with her?” she asked. “I don't believe my mother would go along with anything underhand or crooked.”

“May didn't know. That's the whole point of the story: the biter bit. When May found out what Jean had done, she assured me she was utterly shocked. She broke with Jean forever.”

“Yes, I heard that, though Jean assured me it was just
a natural wastage of friendship over time. So what did Jean do? This was on the weekend when you and May were both away, separately, wasn't it?”

“Yes. I went straight to Glasgow as usual early Wednesday morning, leaving a note for May with my London hotel's phone number on it. After my usual two days, which was in fact a day and a half there, I flew down to London. The reason I went there was that I had been offered an interview with the editor of the
Observer
.”

“A job interview? As their cartoonist?”

“No, just an interview. I'd approached them, they were responding. Perhaps they were just being kind. When I had the interview, on Friday, early evening, the editor said they could be interested long term, at some time in the future. But he felt my recent stuff had lost a lot of the punch and energy of the earlier work I did for the
Tribune
. It was exactly what I thought myself, but depressing to hear it from someone else. It was a helpful interview though, it set me thinking how I'd lost a lot of the brio of my earlier political stuff. Was this a normal stage of growing up? Was I getting stale? Or was I just out of things, away from the action? I tried to ring May, who was in Birmingham, but she wasn't in the hotel room. I never managed to contact her that evening.”

“So what happened?”

“I got a phone call in my hotel room. I'd had a couple of drinks, but any fuzziness cleared the moment I heard the voice. It was Jean Mannering. I thought, Watch it!”

“Why?”

“She'd been encroaching for months. Making decisions
about Eve—sorry, you, my dear—getting the keys to the house, making unusual calls on May (calls she usually resisted, I may say). Now she started off: ‘Listen very carefully, John. You're going to have to make a big decision.'”

“She sounds as if she was power crazed.”

“Do you think so? I don't think she was ever crazed. She went on: ‘You must know by now, John, that your marriage with May is over. She's bored, you're in a rut. Did the
Observer
offer you a job today, by the way?' ‘No, they didn't.' ‘You see? You're in a rut. You need a great big change in your life. Here's the offer. If you go to Heathrow early tomorrow morning, you'll find waiting for you a single ticket to Australia, all paid for.' I just laughed and said: ‘Manna from heaven! What if I said “I'd rather die?”' She said: ‘In effect, you have no choice. I know you
can
go. You have your passport.' That was in my note to May. She had started to annoy me. ‘Is this some conspiracy with May?' I demanded. Because we'd discussed the need for a warmer climate, and I'd told her I might take off for a month or two to Majorca. I didn't like the thought of Jean reading my notes to May, but I liked the idea of my future being discussed between them even less. ‘No, it isn't,' said Jean. ‘But I'm sure she'd sympathize.' I blew up: ‘May is much too sensible to sympathize with nonsense like this. And bullying like this. We'll solve our problems in our own way and time.' And then it came out.”