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changed the basic assumption at a stroke. 'I don't know,' he said, happy to be done with the game now that he'd shown his arm. 'You really mustn't take me too seriously, Helen. I try not to.' The boy at Purcell's side tittered.

     

     

      'Maybe it's simply taboo material,' Archie said.

     

     

      'Suppressed - Daniel prompted.

     

     

      'Not the way you mean it,' Archie retorted. 'The whole world isn't politics, Daniel.'

     

     

    'Such naiveté.'

     

      'What's so taboo about death?' Trevor said. 'Bernadette already pointed out: it's in front of us all the time. Television; newspapers.'

     

     

      'Maybe that's not close enough,' Bernadette suggested.

     

      'Does anyone mind if I smoke?' Purcell broke in. 'Only dessert seems to have been indefinitely postponed - '

     

     

      Helen ignored the remark, and asked Bernadette what she meant by 'not close enough'?

     

      Bernadette shrugged. 'I don't know precisely,' she confessed, 'maybe just that death has to be near; we have to know it's just round the corner. The television's not intimate enough - '

     

      Helen frowned. The observation made some sense to her, but in the clutter of the moment she couldn't root out its significance.

     

     

      'Do you think they're stories too?' she asked.

     

     

      'Andrew has a point - ' Bernadette replied.

     

     

      'Most kind,' said Purcell. 'Has somebody got a match? The boy's pawned my lighter.'

     

     

    ' - about the absence of witnesses.'

     

      'All that proves is that I haven't met anybody who's actually seen anything,' Helen countered, 'not that witnesses don't exist.'

     

      'All right,' said Purcell. 'Find me one. If you can prove to me that your atrocity-monger actually lives and breathes, I'll stand everyone dinner at Appollinaires. How's that? Am I generous to a fault, or do I just know when I can't lose?' He laughed, knocking on the table with his knuckles by way of applause.

     

     

      'Sounds good to me,' said Trevor. 'What do you say, Helen?'

     

      She didn't go back to Spector Street until the following Monday, but all weekend she was there in thought: standing outside the locked toilet, with the wind bringing rain; or in the bedroom, the portrait looming. Thoughts of the estate claimed all her concern. When, late on Saturday afternoon, Trevor found

     

    some petty reason for an argument, she let the insults pass, watching him perform the familiar ritual of self-martyrdom without being touched by it in the least. Her indifference only enraged him further. He stormed out in high dudgeon, to visit whichever of his women was in favour this month. She was glad to

    see the back of him. When he failed to return that night she didn't even think of weeping about it. He was foolish and vacuous. She despaired of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes; and what worth was a man who could not be haunted?

     

      He did not return Sunday night either, and it crossed her mind the following morning, as she parked the car in the heart of the estate, that nobody even knew she had come, and that she might lose herself for days here and nobody be any the wiser. Like the old man Anne-Marie had told her about: lying forgotten in his favourite armchair with his eyes hooked out, while the flies feasted and the butter went rancid on

    the table.

     

      It was almost Bonfire Night, and over the weekend the small heap of combustibles in Butts' Court had grown to a substantial size. The construction looked unsound, but that didn't prevent a number of boys and young adolescents clambering over it and into it. Much of its bulk was made up of furniture, filched, no doubt, from boarded up properties. She doubted if it could burn for any time: if it did, it would go chokingly. Four times, on her way across to Anne-Marie's house, she was waylaid by children begging for money to buy fireworks.

     

     

      'Penny for the guy', they'd say, though none had a