Ruth’s half-sisters Miranda and Jocelyn did well enough at St Martha’s, especially in Greek dancing, which they demonstrated very sweetly at end-of-term concerts. Ruth was useful, too, on such occasions, shifting props. ‘You see,’ the nuns said, ‘everyone has a value. There is a place for everyone in God’s wonderful creation.’

  Shortly after Ruth moved into the hostel, her mother left home. Perhaps she too felt driven into a corner by the ever-growing train set, or was disappointed by the lack of sexual enthusiasm so often displayed by those who get caught up in this rewarding hobby, or perhaps it was—as Ruth imagined—that the sudden absence of the daughter set the mother free. At any rate Ruth’s mother ran off with a mining engineer to Western Australia, on the other side of the world, taking Miranda and Jocelyn with her, and Ruth’s step-father presently made do with a woman of fewer expectations, who saw no particular reason why Ruth should visit. Ruth, after all, was not a blood relative, not remotely family.

  These facts, coming to Brenda’s notice by way of Angus, made her feel sorry for the girl.

  ‘She needs a helping hand!’ said Brenda. Ruth was always the one at the switchboard when Brenda rang through early, late, or in the lunch hour, courteous, calm and efficient. The other girls would be out shopping for little scarves and earrings and eyeshadow and so forth and all on Angus’s time (no wonder he was so often bankrupt); but never Ruth. ‘I was once an ugly duckling,’ Brenda said to Angus, then. ‘I know what it feels like.’

  ‘She’s not an ugly duckling,’ said Angus. ‘Ugly ducklings turn into swans.’

  ‘I think,’ said Brenda, ‘the girl needs a proper home at this, the turning point in her life. She could stay with us. I could help her make the most of herself and she could do a little cooking and cleaning in the evenings, after work, in return. And I really have to have someone for the ironing. She would pay rent, too, of course. She is a very proud girl. Probably about a third of her wages.’

  ‘There isn’t room,’ said Angus. The house they lived in was very small, which was how they both felt comfortable. But Brenda pointed out that while Bobbo was at college his room was empty during term-time.

  ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘An empty room just feels wrong.’

  ‘You’ve lived in so many hotels,’ he said, ‘you’re beginning to think like an hotel manager. But I know what you mean.’

  Brenda and Angus both felt, but did not quite like to say, that Bobbo’s childhood and dependency had been going on for a long time: for too long, in fact. His room should by now be free, surely, for them to use as they wished. Parenthood could not go on for ever. And if they wished to fill the room up Ruth would do the filling very well indeed. ‘Bobbo can always sleep on the sofa,’ said Brenda. ‘It’s very comfortable.’

  Bobbo was surprised and annoyed, coming home for Christmas, to be offered a sofa for a bed, and to find his old schoolbooks moved out of his cupboard to make way for Ruth’s flat, trodden-down shoes.

  ‘Look upon Ruth as a sister,’ said Brenda. ‘The sister you never had!’

  But Bobbo had that preoccupation, common to the only child, a fascination with sibling incest, and took his mother’s words as justification for the fulfilling of his fantasies and crept into what after all was his own bed, by dead of night. Ruth was warm and soft and broad and the sofa was cold and hard and narrow. He liked her. She never laughed at him, or despised his sexual performance, as did Audrey Singer, the girl whom Bobbo currently loved. Bobbo felt that his seduction of Ruth, this vast, obliging mountain, served Audrey right.

  It was sexual suicide of the most dramatic kind.

  ‘See what you have done!’ he said, in his heart, to Audrey.

  ‘See what you have driven me to! Ruth!’

  ‘See,’ he said to his mother, in his heart, killing off any number of birds with one stone, ‘see what happens when you turn me out of my own room, my own bed. I’ll simply climb back into it, no matter who’s there.’

  Ruth was happy enough with the arrangement. She hugged the knowledge of her secret love to her heart, and felt healed, and a great deal more like everyone else, just taller, which didn’t after all notice when she was lying down. When her step-father’s new wife rang at Christmas to see how she was getting on she was able to reply, with truth, that she was getting on perfectly well, thus enabling the guilty couple to forget her properly. Ruth’s mother presently wrote to say this would be the last letter ever, since her new husband wished her to put her past behind her, and they both now belonged to a wonderful new religion which required total obedience from the wife to the husband. In such acquiescence, wrote Ruth’s mother, lay peace. She gave her blessing (and the Master’s too, for she had been allowed to consult him personally about Ruth: the Master was the Oneness’s representative on this earth as the wife was the husband’s representative) and was thankful that Ruth was now fully grown and able to look after herself. She was more worried about Miranda and Jocelyn, who were still so young, but the Master had told her everything would be all right. This letter was a last, final, loving goodbye.

  ‘Our parents,’ said Bobbo, ‘are sent to try us!’ He enjoyed Ruth’s dependence upon him: the way her dark, deep, bright eyes followed him about the room. He loved to sleep with her; she was a warm, dark, eternal sanctuary and if the light was on he could always shut his eyes.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll get married,’ said Brenda to Angus, ‘and both move out.’

  Ruth used up rather more hot water than Brenda had anticipated, especially in the bath. In hotels hot water comes free, or appears to.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ said Angus. ‘A boy like Bobbo needs to marry wisely, with an eye to money and connections.’

  ‘I had neither,’ said Brenda, ‘and yet you married me!’ And they kissed, longing to be alone together, to be without the younger generation.

  Bobbo went back to college, passed the last of his accountancy exams, came home and contracted hepatitis. Ruth found that she was pregnant.

  ‘They’ll have to get married,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m far too old to be nursing an invalid.’ Ruth was sleeping on the sofa while Bobbo was ill, and had broken its springs.

  ‘Marriage!’ said Bobbo, appalled.

  ‘She’s a peach amongst women,’ said Brenda. ‘I don’t know how your father will manage without her. She’s efficient and conscientious and good.’

  ‘But what will people say?’

  Brenda pretended not to hear and put the house up for sale. She and Angus were moving back into an hotel, now Bobbo could stand on his own feet. Audrey Singer announced her engagement to another. Bobbo drank half a bottle of whisky, had a bad relapse, and married Ruth when she was five months pregnant. Hepatitis is a depressing and debilitating illness, and it seemed to Bobbo, at the time, that his mother was right and one wife was much like another. The great advantage of Ruth was that she was there.

  Ruth wore a white satin wedding gown to the Register Office and Bobbo realised perhaps he was wrong. There could be a considerable difference between one wife and another. He thought he saw people sniggering. As soon as the baby was born, she conceived the next.

  After that Bobbo insisted that Ruth should wear a coil and looked around for more suitable recipients of his affection and sexual energy. As the effects of hepatitis faded, he found them easily enough. He did not like to be dishonest or hypocritical and would always tell Ruth what had happened and what would happen next, if he could manage it. He told her that she too was free to experiment sexually.

  ‘We’ll have an open marriage,’ he’d told her before they were married. She was four months into pregnancy and still being rather sick.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That we must both live our lives to the full and always be honest with each other. Marriage must surround our lives, not circumvent them. We must see it as a starting point, not a finishing line.’

  She’d nodded in agreement. Sometimes, to stop herself being sick, she would hold her mouth together with her fingers. She did it now, while he talked about personal freedom. He wished she wouldn’t.

  ‘True love isn’t possessive,’ he explained to her. ‘Not our kind of domestic, permanent love. Jealousy, as everyone knows, is a mean and ignoble emotion.’

  She had agreed and run to the bathroom.

  Presently, rather to his dismay, he found the pleasure of sexual experiment enhanced by the knowledge that he would eventually report it to his wife. He stood outside his own body as witness to erotic events. It made the excitement greater and the responsibility less, since he could share it with Ruth.

  It was obvious to both of them that it was Ruth’s body which was at fault, for what she saw as difficulties and he did not. He had married it perforce and in error and would do his essential duties by it, but he would never be reconciled to its enormity, and Ruth knew it.

  Only his parents seemed to expect him to be faithful and kind, as Angus was to Brenda and Brenda to Angus. They treated Bobbo and Ruth as proper husband and wife; not somehow accidentally espoused.

  Ruth had wheeled the babies’ pram around the park and taken comfort from licks of their ice lollies and read romantic novels, amongst them those by Mary Fisher; and Bobbo had got on in the world.

  Shortly after they had moved in to Eden Grove Bobbo had seen Mary Fisher across a crowded room at his own party and she had seen him and said —

  ‘Let me be your client.’

  And he had said —

  ‘At once.’

  — And the past paled for Bobbo, including even the agony and ecstasy of Audrey Singer, and the present became all powerful and the future full of wonderful and dangerous mystery.

  This was how the affair began. Bobbo and Ruth gave Mary Fisher a lift home from the party. Mary Fisher had parked her Rolls-Royce impetuously, the sooner to enjoy herself, but unfortunately, for she had obstructed the flow of city traffic, and while she flickered and glittered at her host, the police arrived to tow the vehicle away.

  She would, she said, send her manservant Garcia in the morning to retrieve the foolish thing. In the meantime, she said, could Bobbo and Ruth give her a lift back, since they were on her way home?

  ‘Of course!’ cried Bobbo. ‘Of course.’

  Ruth thought that Mary Fisher somehow meant she was on their way home, but when Bobbo stopped on the corner of Eden Avenue and Nightbird Drive to drop Ruth off, realised her mistake.

  ‘At least take her to the door,’ protested Mary Fisher, in an act of condescension which Ruth was never to forgive, but Bobbo said, laughing —

  ‘I don’t think Ruth is a natural rape victim, somehow. Are you, darling!’ and Ruth said, loyally, ‘I’ll be perfectly all right, Miss Fisher. It’s just that we live in a dead end and reversing’s so difficult in the dark! And we’ve left the children without a baby-sitter: I really must get back as soon as possible.’

  But they weren’t listening, so she got out of the back — Mary Fisher was in the front, next to Bobbo — and before the door shut heard Mary Fisher say — ‘You’ll never forgive me. I live ever such a way away. Almost to the coast. Actually, on the coast itself,’ and Bobbo said — ‘Do you think I didn’t know that?’ and the door closed and there Ruth was, standing in the dark, while the car zoomed away, and the powerful red rear lights shot off into blackness. Bobbo never drove like that with her: thrum, thrum! And she never caused Bobbo any inconvenience: never asked for a lift here, or an errand there: he always made such a fuss if she did. How did Mary Fisher dare? And why did her presumption charm him, and not offend him? A lift to the coast while Ruth would walk in the rain, rather than delay Bobbo fifteen seconds.

  She went home and thought about it, lying awake all night, and of course Bobbo did not come home, and in the morning Ruth shouted at the children, and then told herself it wasn’t fair to take her distress out on them, and got herself under control, and ate four toasted muffins with apricot jam when the house was quiet and she was alone.

  Bobbo came home very tired and missed dinner and went straight to bed and fell asleep and didn’t wake until seven the next morning when he said, ‘Now I know what love is,’ and got up and dressed, staring at himself in the mirror as if he saw something new there. He was away the next night, and after that two or three nights every week.

  Sometimes he’d say he was working late and staying over in town; but sometimes, if he was very tired or very elated, would confide that he’d been with Mary Fisher, and he’d talk about the dinner guests — famous people, rich people, whom even Ruth had heard of — and what there’d been to eat, and the witty, charming, naughty things Mary Fisher had said, and the dress she’d worn, and what it was like afterwards, when at last he could take it off —

  ‘Ruth,’ he’d say, ‘you’re my friend; you must wish me well, in this. Life is so short. Don’t begrudge me this experience, this love. I won’t leave you; you mustn’t worry, you don’t deserve to be left; you are the mother of my children: be patient, it will pass. If it hurts you, I’m sorry. But let me share it with you, at least —’

  Ruth smiled, and listened, and waited, and it didn’t pass. She wondered, in the quiet days, about the nature of women who cared so little for wives.

  ‘One day,’ she said, ‘you must take me to dinner at the High Tower. Don’t they find it strange that your wife is never there?’

  ‘They’re not your sort of people,’ Bobbo said. ‘Writers and artists and things like that. And no one who’s anyone gets married, these days.’

  But he must have passed the remark on to Mary Fisher, for presently Ruth was asked to the High Tower. There were only two other guests: the local solicitor and his wife and both elderly. Mary Fisher said the others had cancelled at the last moment but Ruth did not believe her.

  Bobbo had done his best to stop Mary Fisher issuing an invitation to Ruth, but had failed.

  ‘If she’s part of your life, darling,’ said Mary Fisher, ‘I want her to be part of mine. I want to meet her properly, not just as someone you discarded on a street corner in the middle of the night. None of my heroines would stand for that! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. We’ll make it one of the duty dinners, not the fun ones.’

  Sometimes Bobbo asked Mary Fisher why she loved him. Mary Fisher said it was because he was lover and father and what was forbidden and what was allowed all rolled into one, and anyway love was mysterious, and Cupid was wilful and why did he want to know, couldn’t he just accept?

  Bobbo did. Ruth came to dinner. She’d tripped and blushed and the hairs on her upper lip and chin caught the light at dinner: she had spilled wine on the tablecloth and said the wrong things to the wrong people, surprising and upsetting things.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she’d said to the solicitor, ‘that the more police there are the more crime there is?’

  ‘You mean,’ he’d said, kindly, ‘the more police, the less crime. Surely.’

  ‘No, not surely at all,’ said Ruth, excitedly, spinach quiche slobbering down her chin, and Bobbo had to silence her with a kick under the table.

  Sometimes Bobbo thought that Ruth was mad. It wasn’t just that she didn’t look like other people: she couldn’t be relied upon to act like them either.

  Bobbo feared that since Mary had properly met Ruth she had cooled a little towards him. It did no one any good to be associated with the unhappy and unfortunate. Love, success, energy, health, happiness went round in a closed circle, self-perpetuating and self-energising, but precariously balanced. Alter one spoke of the wheel and the whole machine could falter and stop. Good fortune so easily turns to bad! And now he loved Mary Fisher and he loved Mary Fisher and he loved Mary Fisher and his parents had come to dinner and his wife had wept and made a scene, and thrown the dinner about and he did not like her at all. Ruth stood between him and happiness: full square! And in all the history of marriage had there ever been such full-squaredness?

  Bobbo had said to Mary Fisher, ‘Mary, don’t you feel guilty about having an affair with a married man?’

  And Mary had said, ‘Is that what we’re having, an affair?’ and his heart had pounded in terror, until she’d added, ‘I thought it was more than that. It feels like more than that! It feels like for ever,’ so that joy had silenced him, and she’d gone on to say, ‘Guilty? No. Love is outside our control. We fell in love: it is no one’s fault. Not yours. Not mine. And I suppose because Ruth expects nothing, she will never have anything. We can’t spoil our lives because she was born with so little joy. You acted out of kindness when you married her, and I love you for it, but now, my love, be kind to me. Live with me. Here, now, for ever!’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘They are Ruth’s crown, and her jewels. They are her comfort. She is so lucky. I have no children. I have no one except you.’

  She said what he wanted to hear. It was entrancing. And now he sat at a suburban table, with his mother, his father, and his past and thought of Mary Fisher, and how she needed him, and longed for a future, and Ruth came in at last with the soup tureen.

  Ruth’s brave smile faltered over the soup. Her parents-in-law stared up at her in calm and pleasant anticipation. And Ruth gazed at the three dog hairs in that greyish foam which is good mushroom soup, thickened by cream and put through the blender.

  The dog’s name was Harness. Bobbo had bought him for Andy on Andy’s eighth birthday. Ruth looked after him. Harness did not like Ruth. He saw her as a giantess, an affront to the natural order of things. He accepted the food she gave him, but he slept where she told him not to, slunk under cupboards and snapped at searching hands, chewed the upholstery and set up a din if left anywhere he did not want to be. He shed hairs, stole food, ate butter by the pound (when he could find it) and vomited it up directly. Bobbo, on those Sundays he was at home, loved to go walking with Harness in the park, and Andy would go too, and father and son would feel happy and ordinary and comfortable. Ruth would stay behind, removing dog and cat hairs from fabric of one kind or another with a special vacuum brush, battery powered. She did not like Harness.