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cannibal. By contrast Mrs Head was again made to feel a little bit bad by finishing her portion entirely and wiping up the juices with some bread.

CHAPTER THREE
    The rest of the evening followed a well-established pattern, though Tory couldn’t rid herself of the lingering suspicion that she had been transformed in some irrevocable way. It was a similar feeling to the aftershock of being kissed for the first time (Clarence Dundry, chief teller at her father’s bank, on the common after a tea of kidneys and lemonade at the English Rose Tea Rooms). She would look at her face in the mirror and say, ‘Tory Head has been kissed by a man,’ and wonder why the face looking back at her was the same face that had always looked back at her, and not a different one, a woman’s one. Now she might look in the mirror and say,
    ‘Tory Pace has eaten human flesh and no longer deserves to live amongst civilized people,’ but again it would have been the same tired face that had looked back at her for the last ten years. The tired, drawn face of the mother-of-three and wife-to-one.
    She changed her clothes and brushed her hair, then went into the living room to write some letters at the escritoire. She wrote letters nearly every day, usually to the children, a separate letter each. This torrent of postage was met with a trickle in reply, but she didn’t expect much more. At first they had written brave, unhappy letters from the Cotswolds. Paulette, her older daughter, had written, ‘Do not worry about us, Mother. I have devised a machine for disarming ogres. It uses trick chocolate …’
    Tom, her studious eldest, had written, ‘ We are very sorry that
    Father is dead, but we doubt he would have wanted to be part of a world like the one that is taking shape around us …’
    This letter had alarmed Tory. While she herself had decided that Donald was no longer alive, she couldn’t remember passing this belief on to the children. And they seemed to have accepted it so matter-offactly, or at least Tom had. But then none of them had been particularly close to their father, or had appeared especially fond of him.
    She tried hard to imagine her son. It had become difficult. She didn’t have any recent photographs. She remembered him more by his actions than his appearance: she could picture him changing the wheel of his bike, or mixing things in a test tube from his chemistry set, or plotting the passage of sunlight across the living room, or sitting in a corner of the kitchen with his face hidden behind a big, serious book. The only feature she could recall with certainty was his spectacles, because they were so black and heavy-framed. She tried to imagine him explaining the death of their father to the two girls, in his matter-of-fact way. She imagined that they had sat under a haystack, the girls sobbing while Tom spoke: ‘There’s no point in crying, you know. There’s a war on and people have to die. That’s the whole point of a war …’
    She sometimes wondered why she bothered writing to her clever son at all. He clearly found her letters unsatisfying. She was reading his most recent one to her, which began
    Dear Mama,
I refer you to your letter dated 16–1–41, in which you tell us about your work at Farraway’s Gelatine Factory. Your most recent letter (dated 21–3–41) repeats a lot of this information. There is really little point in writing to us unless you have something new to tell.
        I have bought a magnifying glass.
        Yours sincerely
        Tom
    He seemed to think he was writing on behalf of the girls as well. They rarely wrote, and when they did, the results were even briefer. Albertina, her youngest, had once written her the following:
        Dra Mama,
        I cant think of anything to rite
        Your truly
        Albertina
    ‘At least she’s honest,’ Mrs Head had said, and it had amused Tory, seeing the sweated labour evident in every crooked down-stroke. In fact it had moved her to