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young to know them, of course, and by the time I came to read the endless rehashes of the lives of the stars and to see the Warhol multiples in the colour supplements, the pop-art images of Marilyn and Liz and Lisa had become bourgeois collectors’ items in themselves . But by then the whole glow of that era had faded anyway, and bad imitations started to appear everywhere. The age of iconoclasm and idol-worship had gone.
    The faces of Lisa Crane are blurred by the printmakers’ hand, lipstick smudged over the endlessly repeating smile,eyes the cheap blue of pictures that come plopping out of a polaroid or an airport machine.
     *
    I stand, observing the reverent hush, by the table, glass-topped, where more of the incunabula are laid out; and Mr and Mrs Neidpath, murmuring they’ll be back in a minute, retreat into the servants’ quarters of the house. I wonder – while part of me frets over the taxi waiting by the thick screen of laurel bushes at the top of the drive, and another part of me feels a dead tiredness, a sadness that my quest for Muriel has ended in a dead end – I wonder also what it would have been like to have lived then and to have been Lisa Crane.
    But it’s impossible to imagine. The letters from John Lennon; the coat, in violent colours, given to Lisa by Jimi Hendrix; the photos signed by Dylan. How did she feel, this star who had no need to be a star, whose wealth and power and beauty made her few appearances on screen talked about and commented on with a ferocity denied even the most famous? Did she regret the passing of time? Where is she living now?
    And I realize, as I stand enfolded in that artificially recreated glow, in that exotic shrine in a plain old house in the English countryside, that I don’t know whether the famous Lisa Crane is alive still or not – and why should I care to know?
    The stifling atmosphere of the narcissism of another age makes me want only to fight my way out of this mausoleum into fresh air.
    I know nothing of this place. I have never been here before.

SEVEN
    The night I arrived in England – the night of 20 June – was as unexpected in its outcome as the afternoon had been, my early half-acknowledged memories of the place becoming quickly overlaid by the contrived memories of a woman who was a monster, whether she was alive or dead. And so this tentative sense of déjà vu was cancelled, making a mockery of my journey, reminding me yet again, if I needed reminding , that my childhood was well and truly buried and that wherever I might choose to look for myself, I would find only evidence of another life.
    I suppose some stubborn wish still lingered in me, drove me up the wide flight of stairs, rather than out through the whispering green door into the beginnings – at least – of the world of today, a world with telephones and a taxi sitting on the narrow road that makes a black line between the river and the downs. Some vague hope that my grandmother had lived and worked here once, at least; had left a memento perhaps, a clue as to where I might find her now, made me hold the wide, pale oak banister as I went upstairs thickly carpeted like the museum/hall below. A wish made me go, even if it were to have a gloomy answer (and I feared, for some reason, the little Norman church I had spied from the cobbled courtyard, the line of graves where Muriel might, just conceivably, be buried). I had to know, and I climbed to the top of the flight and walked as if by instinct to a doorthat was left ajar, a glimpse of bed and lace quilt visible beyond.
    The room was succumbing, as the hall beneath had already, through the thickness of wistaria and clematis pressing against panes that were small and diamond-shaped, to an evening gloom; but here, one storey higher, the sun came in a direct shaft that made me think of the dawn rites at Stonehenge – ahead of where I stood and probably not more than half a mile away as the crow flies. The orange beam of light blinded me