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“What?”

“The clincher. The reason I had no choice. Jean said: ‘If you don't get on that plane, the ten thirty BA flight 674
to Sydney, the police will be informed that in your house there is a rich collection of explicit pornography involving underage girls.'”

Eve stared at him.

“But I don't understand. Why—”

“I said: ‘There is no such collection,' and Jean said: ‘There is now.'”

“She'd put a collection of pornography in the house?”

“Oh yes. You can see how she could have got hold of one. One branch of lesbian taste and one branch of male hetero taste for once coinciding.”

“But it wouldn't have your fingerprints on it.”

“In a way absence of fingerprints would be as suspicious as the presence of them. It would show that I knew what I was doing was illegal. And of course it still is. People caught downloading such stuff from the Internet get caught routinely and jailed for quite long periods.”

“But I still don't see—”

“Think about it. Jean was trading on the fact of my tenderness for May and my pride in her achievements. Where would her career as a primary school highflier be if her husband was arrested for possessing explicit pornography involving little girls? Even continuing to employ her would involve terrible publicity and an orchestrated public outcry from parents and an orgy of righteousness from the tabloids. My career would be in tatters, especially if I was jailed. That cartoonist with the series about the McTavishes. Just a dirty old man at heart. And with
children
! Little girls! London in the seventies may still have been swinging, but I can tell you Glasgow was much less swinging, and Edinburgh never swung at all,
except at festival time, rather genteelly. Oh, she was clever, was Jean. She chose just the right thing that would ruin both May and me.”

“I'm beginning to see. So what did you do?”

“I hemmed and hawed, I accused her of all sorts of things (with good reason and good evidence), but in the end, as she said, there was no choice. I said ‘I'll be on that plane,' and next morning I was, with what I stood up in, a change of underwear and shirt, and that was about it. I knew our marriage was crumbling anyway, and I couldn't ruin May's career to keep it going for a few months. We had no future. The fact that May had brought our marriage to the brink of disaster by associating with a ruthless little pirate like Jean only made me more convinced I had to move on. Leaving you was the hardest thing of all, but I couldn't stay with you without ruining May and myself. Next morning I got the first underground train to Heathrow, collected my ticket and got on the plane.”

“Do you think you were watched?”

“I don't know. I didn't even think about it. Maybe Jean knew someone at Heathrow. Maybe she got in her car—alone or with a friend—and went down to keep watch herself and make sure I got on. It would be like her: she loved action, the chase, doing unusual things herself.”

“Why do you mention a friend?”

“Because all the time during the phone call, I could hear voices in the background, and all of them were women's voices. I wondered if she was ringing from the club for lesbians that met in Halifax every Friday. Sapphonics, they called it. But I've no reason to think she had an accomplice.”

“One thing: you mention Jean possibly driving down herself. She and May met when May offered her a lift. What was Jean doing by the time your marriage split up?”

“Oh, she'd left the tax office and gone into business—got a nice little job with a textile firm, a well-paid job. She had a little sports car, bright red and zippy.”

“And now she's gone into the church. I wish I could understand Jean.”

“I wish I'd understood her, back then. I must say that if she's gone into the church in the sense I think you mean, the Church of England has changed a hell of a lot since I lived in England.”

John cleared away the plates, and they by tacit agreement changed the subject. They talked about Australia, how he had come to love it, how his style of cartooning had changed, how the jokes had become more vitriolic as he had come to hate Australian politicians, how the sacking of Gough Whitlam soon after he arrived had made his name as a political cartoonist and he had never looked back. He was enormously chuffed that Eve had seen and liked his initial reaction to the sacking.

“To think it's led you to me! . . . But I always did love a political earthquake. Even now, when a new scandal is brewing, my cartoon finger starts itching and soon some newspaper or other phones me up and offers me nice little sums to return to the fray.”

“And you do,” said Eve.

“Yes, I do. I can't resist.”

Later he and Eve walked back to the Ocean View, and he kissed her on the step of her room. She felt unusually
happy, and was sure her body told her that he was happy too, that a change had come over his life, in its last phase, that was infinitely to his taste.

Going to bed, Eve had a sense of having been made whole.

The rest of the week was for Eve a time of the sharpest pleasures she thought she had ever known. First she was shown the coast by one who knew it better, in more closely observed detail, than most natives of the area knew it. Then they drove—Eve drove—down to Sydney, and she was shown, again, things that only an artist—sometimes only a satirical artist—would know about and appreciate. The spring sun was warm, the occasional breeze was welcome, and the days passed in happiness, community of tastes, and endless new experiences in food, in animals and vegetation, in people and their habits and assumptions. John was showing off his Australianness.

“You must come again, and properly,” said John. “And bring your Indian boyfriend.”

“I'm not sure he could get away. Policemen always seem to get their leave canceled at the last moment. Anyway, would he be allowed in?”

“If he's got a British passport, he shouldn't have any difficulty.”

Eve screwed up her face.

“Imagine the awfulness of making the flight, being turned away by immigration, then having to do it backward.”

“It wouldn't happen. Anyway you could make damned sure in advance that it
wasn't
going to happen.”

“You're ignoring the fact that planes fly in the other direction. Have you never had an urge to see the places that you knew again?”

John shook his head violently.

“I can honestly say no. Or not since the early months out here. To tell you the truth, it was the last months back there that made me ready for a completely new start, and that's what happened. I've never wanted to retrace my steps.”

“It's not the police, is it? Surely once you were out of the country, Jean would have retrieved the pornography and the police would never have been involved.”

“No, it's not the police. It's nothing about England. It's about me.”

The subject of John's departure from England and Eve's life there came up now and then, but casually, a matter of detail, rather than anything central or vital. One time when they were talking about the McNabbs' early years in Crossley, Eve asked John who would know most about them.

“Is George Wilson still alive? May's colleague at the school?” he asked.

“Yes, he was at the funeral.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“A bit.”

“Try again. He's not a gossip by nature, but he's quiet and trustworthy and he gets told things. He was devoted to your mother, and he might be willing to pass on what he knows to you. It's worth a try.”

Another time, Eve never could remember how, the subject of Jean Mannering's family background came up.

“Her parents kept the general store in Crossley. I suppose these days you'd call it a corner shop.”

“These days there isn't such a thing in Crossley. Everyone goes to the supermarket two miles out of the village.”

“Anyway, they more or less showed Jean the door.”

“Like the Menzies figure in your cartoon?”

“Not quite. There was no illegitimate child, of course, and they didn't say they never wanted to see her again. They just said they didn't want her living there. People criticized them a lot about that. Rumors were going around about Jean's sexual tastes, and some of the more liberal minded said they were punishing her for being lesbian. I don't think it was that at all.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I think the Mannerings were fed up with being organized, told what to do, dragooned into doing it. Jean was incurably bossy. More bossy than May. Give her a friend, show her a colleague, and Jean would turn them into underlings. Maybe she's changed, but I doubt she could.”

“She may have got more subtle about it,” said Eve. “I didn't sense a bossiness.”

“Yes, sometimes people do get more subtle with age. But it's the means that change, not the ends.”

In between sightseeing they visited the offices of the
Australian Guardian,
several drinking holes frequented by
journos, and they ate well at John's favorite restaurants and bars. Everywhere he found friends, and Eve wondered at the way he had Australianized himself in everything except his accent. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every sordid little deal or quid pro quo that national and state politicians kept well hidden from the general public. “He owes him one” was his favorite summing up of the relationship between two typical party politicos. Eve thought she was getting a brilliant overview of the underbelly of Australian statecraft.

On the night before she flew home, they arrived at the hotel to find the receptionist had attached a message to Eve's room key. She looked at John and raised an eyebrow. She detached the paper and looked at it:

Evelyn Southwell found dead. Can't wait to see you.
OMKAR
.

“Well,” said her father, “I said she'd done a lot better than May. The old sinner should be grateful for all those extra years.”

“I think there might be more to it than that, Dad. Omkar says ‘found dead.' I think he was trying to tell me something without being too explicit.”

Whether or not the receptionist had registered the “found dead” she certainly had noted “Dad.” Till then she had put them down as lovers ill-matched in age. Eve only remembered what she had said when she was having a long bath in her room. Saying the word so naturally, without premeditation, pleased her. She was awarding John his place in her life. She was also staking a claim in his.

She had plenty of time to meditate on this the next day, when she caught her plane from Sydney and settled back into the attitude of cogitation that had been so difficult on her way out. Now at least she had two new subjects for meditation, and that of her father and the late establishment of links between them gave her unlimited satisfaction. In fact, she decided, happiness would be a better word. She believed he was a generous and civilized man, and even if he had not been her father, she would have been happy and proud to be his friend.

Then there was Evelyn Southwell. Her death certainly bore thinking about. She felt quite certain that if, say, she had died after a stroke, Rani would not have bothered to send her a telephone message. She decided she ought to get her thoughts in order. First she remembered back to their interview, and after she had focused on two or three things she recalled of the encounter, things Evelyn had said, she thought she had better be more ordered. She got out a notebook and pen and set down what she remembered, the subjects they had covered and the sequence in which they were discussed. Then she noted any memorable things that Evelyn had said. By the time she had finished, she felt she had the entire conversation fixed in her mind.

Then, after some thought, she added some notes on the subsequent conversation with Jean Mannering.

Why, she wondered, if there was anything suspect about Evelyn Southwell's death, did she instinctively consider the possibility that Jean Mannering had anything to do with it? The only answer she could come up with was that years ago—three decades and more ago—the
two women had apparently been in conflict over her mother.

And her mother, apparently, had not been attracted to either Jean or Evelyn in the way they had wanted her to be attracted. It was odd, but Eve had no evidence that Evelyn and Jean had ever done more than have brief encounters with each other. She seemed to be straying into the realm of, at least, the far-fetched.

Eve herself felt more dead than alive when at last, after two rotten films, several meals of tasteless food, insipid conversation and
The Four Seasons
on the music channel, they arrived at Manchester Airport. In so far as her spirits could rise at all they rose at the sight of Omkar waiting with a small knot of other people at the exit from customs. They kissed with all the enthusiasm Eve could muster and Omkar took her case.