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canal beyond the window, privately and indulgently constructing this child, its eyes its hair its sayings the school to which it will go its clothes…
    Today, in north London, taking the black plastic bag outside the back door, such games are no longer played. The wisdoms of today cloud the reflection, lying across that frame of the Venetian bedroom like slides flung down one upon another. Steven's profile against the flashing poplars of a French road, swish-swish, the kilometres ticking away, another twenty-five to go, another fifteen… Zoe, lying against huge feather pillows, saying, ‘Give us a kiss…’
    She put the plastic bag down beside the dustbins and the growing heap of domestic rejections alongside. This paring down of possessions gave her a dour satisfaction. She stood staring at the line of rooftops opposite. The sky had the immense and translucent look of city skies; aircraft crawled across it. The skimpy front gardens of the houses were shabby with London summer, offering tattered leaves and grass pocked with litter. The pavement was planted at regular intervals with young trees girdled by little wire fences, products of the energies of the local Residents' Association, of which Steven had been for some years the inactive President. They can have my name, he said crisply, but not my time, I'm afraid; the arrangement was apparently agreeable to all. The trees were flourishing, in copious leaf and un-vandalized.
    A neighbour walked past, smiling awkwardly as she caught sight of Frances. She had never succeeded in making more than peripheral contact with others in the street. Those who knew of Steven tended to be intimidated; those who did not were puzzled at their failure to match the house. Living somewhere like that, they should have appeared richer or smarter. Steven, in any case, was both bored and irritated by random social contacts. He was impatient with the foolish and disliked being exposed to the curious responses that the well-known arouse in others: lust, prurience, hostility and aggression. He had perfected the art of avoidance; entering a room, he would select at once those to whom he wished to talk, and slide quite unobtrusively away from everyone else. He seldom gave offence, oddly enough; he was adept at simply disappearing, not being at hand, slipping from the room. The neighbours had seldom seen more of him than a departing back and an undiscriminating smile. Frances, tarred with Steven's inaccessibility, was on equable but distant terms with them. Content with her life, she did not really wish it otherwise, but disliked the idea of being thought aloof.
    In a few weeks, now, she would leave this street behind. It would become, simply, another landscape in the head. She tied the neck of the plastic bag more tightly, rearranged a stack of cardboard boxes, and went back into the house. She had to go out, to attend the meeting of a committee arranging a series of lectures in Steven's memory.
    ‘Hi!’ said Zoe. ‘Fred! Long time no talk to you. Where are you? We have a stinking awful line, I can hardly hear you. What? Milan. What the hell are you doing in Milan – covering the Scala season? What's a self-respecting political correspondent doing in Milan? Sorry – spell that one out, I didn't get it. Yes, I have a nephew called Harry Brooklyn.’
    She wrote, fast. ‘Just give me this slowly, Fred, and shout, do you mind. Right. Yes, I've got that. Jesus… Well, thank God for that at least. Give me that hospital's name again. Which lot of nuts was this? Oh hell – what does it matter… No, you were absolutely right to call me first. Thank you. When exactly was this? Good – I can get to her before she sees a paper. Yes, sure I'll let you know.’
    The sound of Frances's telephone beginning to ring was drowned by her slam of the front door. She walked quickly down the street to the bus-stop; she would have preferred to leave the planning of these lectures entirely to those involved, feeling