Mrs Black, washing up glasses, resolved never to give another party, never, and to divorce her husband and next time marry someone without hypocrisy, possibly from the army, who understood how much more satisfactory it is to kill and die for a cause, in the shadow of some great loyalty, than to try to live for ever in the framework of the personal and the trivial. Presently Dr Black drove Miss Hunter back to the clinic, but not before accusing Mrs Black of unforgivable rudeness to his guest.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE HIGH TOWER IS empty, and silent, except for the wind, which rustles up and down the stairs, in through the empty space where once the great front door stood, and Ruth knocked and the Dobermans barked and the traitor Garcia opened and the end began. Then out goes the wind through a broken windowpane or two. Passing dealers have removed the door, and wandering boys aim stones at the windows. No one likes an empty building. Why should they? It is a rebuke to aspiration. Decay invites dereliction, and vice versa. No one quite believes the ‘Sold’ sticker pasted over the board which says ‘For Sale’. The tower perches too near the edge of the cliff, and the cliff crumbles. Either the cliff has stepped backward, out of the sea, or the tower forward, towards it. Enough to make anyone nervous.

  Mice run in and out of the rooms, and fleas, after the cat and dogs went, made the old carpets flicker and jump for a while. But now they’ve given up and gone. Slugs move happily about the stone kitchen floor.

  Perhaps it was better before. Perhaps anything is better than peace.

  Mary Fisher lingers on in hospital. Her hair has fallen out, as a result of treatment. Garcia and Joan have gone, taking their baby with them, the hole in its heart mended with the last of Mary Fisher’s money. They have gone to live with Garcia’s mother in Spain, to comfort her in her old age, with the money saved and stolen by her son over the dancing years.

  Nicola lives in the village with the science teacher from her school: one Lucy Barker. Nicola loves only women. Andy works as a garage mechanic. His boss has taken him in to live, out of kindness. Andy is indistinguishable from the village boys; he hangs around street corners and longs vaguely for a life he will never have.

  I visited the High Tower when I was having my nose done. I drove through the village in my Rolls-Royce, and by chance I saw Andy, emerging oil-stained from beneath a parked car. I knew he was my son, but I felt nothing. He is nothing to do with me. And I waited outside the house where Nicola lives and saw her emerge: she has Bobbo’s frown and my build. She lurches and lurks; there was a sullen content about her. She will never make a she devil. My children have been sucked into the sea of ordinary humanity, swirled down and under, and are back where they belong: they are unspectacular, and I imagine quite content.

  Old Mrs Fisher, obliged to look after herself, does very well, better than her daughter, which was always her ambition. She lives in the district where she was born, on her own, and manages very well. She visits her daughter once a week. A smelly, waddling visitor, she is feared by the nurses and shakes her head over her daughter and suggests that her illness is the wages of sin. Mary Fisher smiles and pats the old hand that once nursed her. The Sister of the ward is a mature woman, whose first steps back into the world, when wifehood and motherhood were at an end, were through the Vesta Rose Agency. She is fond of Mary Fisher. She looks after her well.

  Mary Fisher is not visited by Bobbo, although surely, on compassionate grounds (for she is dying), they would let him out to do so if he asked. He wants nothing more to do with her. He loved her, and love failed. But he blames Mary Fisher, not love, as he should.

  I stand at the foot of the High Tower and I look out to sea, which is impervious to human influence, and I look inland over the fields and hills, which are not, and which take the beauty into themselves that human eyes grant them. Mary Fisher, in losing this landscape, had added to its loveliness. I know that; I always have. How could Mr Ghengis and Dr Black have given me beauty, except through love?

  I will build up the High Tower. I will tear up the clumps of grass that now grow between the paving stones. I will shore up the cliff, making it safe, but I will look mostly inland and not to sea. I will look out, as Mary Fisher looked out from her bedroom window, sitting up after a night of love with her Bobbo — my Bobbo — to where the new morning sun glances over hills and valleys and trees, and know, as she did, that it is beautiful, and make this my acknowledgment of her, my grief for her, all that I have to give her. She is a woman: she made the landscape better. She devils can make nothing better, except themselves. In the end, she wins.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ON THE NIGHT OF THE party at which the bear escaped Ruth returned to her chaste room at the clinic and refused Dr Black admittance. Mrs Black, said Ruth, with some complacency, would be upset if her husband did not return with reasonable promptness.

  Ruth closed her eyes for sleep with the comfortable thought that for a pretty woman the future lay in refusing men rather than submitting to them — or, indeed, hoping for their advances. As a corollary, she reflected, perhaps only a plain woman would be in a position to develop sexual expertise and an appetite for sexual pleasure, as a pretty one would not; but Ruth had had, after all, years enough in which to practise and acquire the latter. She would have the best of all worlds, of heaven and hell. She slept well. She did not hear the shouts and shots as the police tracked down, cornered and slaughtered the bear in the far reaches of the clinic’s grounds: in the pretty, shaded corner where herbicides, fertilisers, insecticides and pumped water, stolen from Colorado, had created an oasis of lush and stunning green, where the facelift patients most loved to raise their bruised countenances to the dappled sun.

  It was the last time Ruth was to sleep soundly for many, many months. The discomfort described by her doctors amounted to acute pain; increasing doses of morphia and major tranquillisers clouded her mind but could not sever the connection between sensation and response. She did not, in fact, wish to be free from the pain: pain, she knew, was the healing agent. It marked the transition from her old life to her new one. She must endure it now, to be free of it hereafter. In most lives pain drags itself out, a twinge here, a discomfort there, idly distributing itself throughout a lifespan. Ruth would have it all now and be done with it. Yet she was aware that it might kill her in transit, so concentrated was it in its sweep and power.

  She screamed in the night, sometimes. They kept pills safely locked up and the windows were laced with elegant steel bars. Not that her plastered legs would take her anywhere, but one never knew. She was not, they had come to the conclusion, an ordinary person. If she could not use her legs perhaps she might choose to walk on her hands?

  There was an earthquake, a nasty rumble, the crust of the earth yearning to split along the line of its weakness, the San Andreas fault. That was the day after the major operation to her femur was performed: life-support systems had to be switched over to the emergency generator. They thought they would lose her in the seconds it took. Ruth observed their pallor, their distraction. When she could speak she said, ‘You needn’t have worried. An act of God won’t kill me.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Mr Ghengis. ‘I don’t imagine He’s on your side.’

  ‘He has the Devil to contend with,’ said Ruth, before lapsing back into unconsciousness.

  Mr Ghengis begged her to be content with two and a half inches taken from the femur but she would not.

  A violent electrical storm on the eve of the second major operation fused the power supply again. Such storms were not unusual in the area. The sudden darkening of the day, the violent clouds tumbling through the unnatural dark, the rifts of sudden, piercing light: but this was, unusually, a dry storm. No rain fell to gladden the heart hereafter, in the sudden sprouts of green and general giddiness which could be expected to compensate for the earlier terror.

  ‘God’s angry,’ said Mr Ghengis, suddenly frightened, longing to go back into obstetrics. ‘You’re defying Him. I wish we could stop all this.’

  ‘Of course He’s angry,’ said Ruth. ‘I am remaking myself.’

  ‘We’re remaking you,’ he said sourly, ‘and in one of His feebler and more absurd images, what’s more.’ He had come to hate the photograph of Mary Fisher.

  Electricians worked all through the night checking the circuits that worked the pumps and levers and valves that could imitate, if only temporarily, and on a part-by-part basis, not as a gestalt, the workings of the human body.

  ‘The only thing we can’t control,’ said Mr Ghengis, ‘is the spark, the little spark of life. But we’re working on it. And of course the weather.’

  ‘You’re going to have trouble with your legs for the rest of your life,’ Mr Ghengis warned her, for the last time. ‘You’ll have to be on blood-thinning medication; there’ll always be a danger of clotting; and God knows how the abbreviated arteries will hold — the muscles will probably go into spasm. You’re mad.’

  That morning she had a financial report from her advisors, ‘Then I am a mad multi-millionairess,’ she said, ‘and you will do as I say.’

  Medical journalists, of the kind who roam the surgeries of the world in search of yet more bizarre transplants and the laboratories in search of two-headed dogs and giant mice, congregated around the clinic. But Ruth had covered her tracks well; they could find out nothing about her, neither her nationality, her marital status, nor her age. She was a woman who wanted to be shorter: that was all they knew. They stole the clinic’s records, but could find no history for Marlene Hunter. There was a flurry of articles and features on height as a function of character and a moulder of personality; on short men who became generals and tall women who became nobody, and on which came first, looks or personality. How dogs grew to look like their masters; wives and husbands like each other; adopted children like adoptive parents. These facts were discussed, and dismissed, since there was nothing anyone could do about them. The world lost interest.

  Ruth hovered, moaning, drifting, on the edge of life and death. Another electrical storm seemed to stimulate her into life, lightning hit the clinic’s TV aerial and for at least six hours there was no TV reception. Ruth opened her eyes at the initial bang and during the next few hours her temperature fell to normal, her blood pressure rose, her heart steadied and she sat up and demanded food. Dr Black, who had dropped the image of Venus on her conch since Ruth’s rejection of him, was heard to refer to her as Frankenstein’s monster, something that needed lightning to animate it and get it moving. He was assumed to be referring to Mr Ghengis as Frankenstein, not himself; the relationship between the two men had deteriorated recently.

  It was nine months before Ruth could take so much as a step. Mr Ghengis wanted to wait for a further three months before beginning on the arms, but she insisted that they be done at once. She was, she said, beginning to be bored.

  She had relented and learned French, Latin and Indonesian during her convalescence. She had given herself courses in World Literature and Art Appreciation. She had done all the sensible things his patients always believed they would do when confined to bed and with time to spare, but almost never did. There had been one attempted suicide on her account, by a young trainee nurse whose doctor boy friend used to linger over-long in Ruth’s room.

  Ruth received a letter from home, black-edged. It was from Garcia. This time she did not weep, she smiled. ‘My friend is dead,’ she said. ‘Long live my friend.’

  She flew home for the funeral; she made much use of a wheelchair, but every day could take a step or two more, and use her hands more freely. She had lost sensation in two fingers and the scarring on legs and upper arms was still noticeable. It was winter; it did not matter. She was rich enough, in any case, to follow winter around the world, if it suited her. She measured, in height, five foot six and a half inches high: round the bust, thirty-eight inches, the waist twenty-four inches, and the hips thirty-seven. Cortisone injections, given at intervals, gave her pretty face a childish innocence, subverting the harshness of experience, and kept her hair luxuriant.

  Ruth went to Mary Fisher’s funeral wearing silky black, and diamonds. She went in a Rolls-Royce, and did not get out, but watched the funeral from a distance, sitting in the car. The cemetery was by the sea: wind blew spray against the windows. The words of the preacher were forced back into his mouth. A handful of people, a few old friends and former colleagues, gazed and tried to listen. Old Mrs Fisher, ever curious, came over to Ruth’s car to investigate, and stared in through the glass with rheumy eyes, and gestured to Ruth to wind down the window. Ruth obliged, though she did it by pressing a button.

  ‘I thought it was her for a moment,’ said old Mrs Fisher. ‘Just like her to send her own ghost to her funeral! Poor little slut. Well, out of the slime, back to it. But I saw her out! I always knew I would.’ And she hunched back into the wind, to her daughter’s graveside, where Ruth thought she saw her weeping.

  Nicola and Andy were not present. They were not, after all, flesh and blood. And had Mary Fisher not destroyed their home, their mother and their father? Make amends even as Mary Fisher had, these things could not be undone.

  Bobbo was there, between two warders. He was not handcuffed; there was obviously no need. His eyelids had thickened, and his hair turned grey. He seemed to be sleepwalking, unable to comprehend the meaning of the open grave, or indeed of anything much. He saw Ruth on the arm of her chauffeur.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m your wife,’ she said, and held him with her young, enchanting eyes, and smiled her sweet new smile.

  ‘My wife died,’ he said, ‘long ago.’

  He seemed to want to move away, and turned, but the warders took an arm each, alert to his sudden animation, and held him so that he had no choice but to look at her again.

  ‘You are my wife,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I seem to have trouble remembering things. But there was someone called Mary Fisher. Aren’t you her?’

  ‘This is Mary Fisher’s funeral,’ said one of the warders, as if to a child. ‘So how can that be Mary Fisher?’

  They apologised to Ruth and took their prisoner, who was by now clearly upset, away. He needed, they felt, more sedation. He was being treated for depression, as it was, with electric shock therapy.

  Bobbo was glad to go. The outside world was always full of dreams — flickering out of vision and into nightmare and back again. Prison at least was real, and safe.

  Ruth employed good lawyers, who set about securing Bobbo’s release. She considered returning the capital sum originally embezzled, but decided against it. Serene men of good intention now ran the parole board: they were not concerned with money any more than Ruth was with abstract virtue. Bobbo would be set free soon enough.

  She employed architects and builders; carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers and plumbers to work on the High Tower. Constructional engineers, shoring up the cliff, had managed marginally to alter the configuration of the entire harbour so that the force of the waves was no longer directed at the tower. So teatime would be less dramatic, but at least safe. She employed a landscape designer and a handful of jobbing gardeners to restore the beauty of the grounds. She paid them well. The front door was replaced — the architect found a sturdy chapel door which fitted well and looked good. She traced and brought back the Dobermans and had both animals neutered. Advancing age had now sobered them considerably. She wrote to Garcia, asking if he would consider returning to the tower to work.

  A letter presently came from Garcia accepting Miss Hunter’s offer of employment. He would come without wife and child, however: they would stay behind in Spain to keep his old mother company.

  Ruth returned to the Hermione Clinic for continued physiotherapy and a few minor bodily adjustments: an ingrowing toenail was seen to; broken veins on the cheeks needed more laser treatment; facial moles kept struggling to reappear.

  ‘First in,’ as Mr Ghengis remarked, ‘last out.’

  Dr Black had handed in his notice. He and Mrs Black were going to the Third World: he to work among deprived and underprivileged humans, she among the crocodiles.

  ‘If he wants to waste his God-given talents doing what any half-trained nurse could do,’ Mr Ghengis remarked, ‘that’s up to him.’

  It seemed to Ruth that at last the time had come to return to the High Tower. She could walk with ease, even run a little. She could lift a two-pound weight in either hand. Her circulatory problems were under control. She no longer needed the Hermione Clinic. She no longer needed anyone. She danced with Mr Ghengis in the dew of the morning, as the sun rose red and round over the escarpment, and with every step it was as if she trod on knives; but she thanked him for giving her life and told him she was going.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  NOW I LIVE IN THE High Tower, and the sea surges beneath as the moon circles and the earth turns, but not quite as it did. Garcia has to clean a different set of windows; the spray falls differently: he marvels at it. Even nature bows to my convenience. I pay him the same as did his previous employer. What was once too much is now too little: inflation has eaten away at its value, but he doesn’t realise it and I haven’t told him. Why should I? If you want to keep servants you must treat them badly. The same, I find, applies to lovers.

  Garcia comes often to my bedroom at night, knocking and whispering with love. Just occasionally I let him in. I make sure Bobbo knows, and suffers; that is the only pleasure I take in Garcia’s body. To join with him is a political, not a sexual act, for me if not for him. How emotional men are!

  Bobbo loves me, poor confused creature that he has become, pouring my tea, mixing my drinks, fetching my bag. He has us both in the one flesh: the one he discarded, the one he never needed after all. Two Mary Fishers. His eyes grow dull, as if he were already an old man. That is what humiliation does. He could have something done about his thickening eyelids, of course; he could have plastic surgery and be young again, but he would have to ask me for the money. I wait for him to suggest it, but he doesn’t. How weak people are! How they simply accept what happens, as if there were such a thing as destiny, and not just a life to be grappled with.