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photographed.”
    His disdainful grimace made him seem younger to Kathy. “I just want you to look your best for everyone who’ll see you,” she said as he tramped out of the room.
    She followed as far as the front door. He turned to frown at her from the end of the short cracked path, but she was seeing how much he resembled her except for his hair that she trimmed every month: the face even broader than the bones required until it trailed off at the comedown of a chin, the pale blue eyes that were wider still with whatever emotions they fronted. Once Monty had written a poem called “Four Eyes” that pretended to be about spectacles until the eyes proved to be hers and their son’s. “I’ll bet the press arrive the moment you’re out of sight,” she said.
    He hunched his shoulders towards his large protruding ears, the sole feature she could hold Monty responsible for, and hurried up the track across the road. In seconds he was hidden like a beast in a jungle, though not before the unyielding sunlight clamped itself to Kathy’s scalp. She ought to have suggested he wear a hat. There was no sign of anybody in the one-sided street, and so she retreated into the house.
    Dudley had spent the last half-hour in leafing through his old true crime magazines, but they’d inspired him only to critical sniggers. She retrieved the magazines from the sofa and the floor and dropped them in the pine rack by the television. Since the contract for his story had arrived he’d been untidier than ever. She would rather this was deliberate than unconscious; she didn’t like to think he might be less than fully in control of hismind. At least she was as sure as she could be that he’d never taken drugs—not like her and Monty years before their son was born. If he sometimes stayed in his room for hours without even switching on his computer, no doubt he was reading. If he wanted to keep his girlfriend Trina to himself, perhaps that would change. Only his secret panics reminded her of her LSD experience, of the night that she’d been convinced would never end as she became aware how infinite the dark was, how the passage of time would simply put more stars out, not least the sun. Monty had been scribbling poems that the daylight would show to be incomprehensible; he’d been as distant and preoccupied with his writing, she thought, as he’d grown later in their marriage. Surely their single night of indulgence hadn’t affected Dudley, but her fear that it might have was never far away. It took her to the kitchen to splash cold water on her face and drink a glassful to clear her mouth of a reminiscent metallic taste. She was resting her hands against the relatively cool interior of the steel sink to rid them of prickling when the doorbell rang.
    She hoped Dudley had forgotten his key. She had to produce a less reproachful smile at the sight of two people on the path, an oval-bodied balding red-faced man as middle-aged as her with a thin fawn cardigan draped over the camera bag that dangled from his stubby neck, and a small slim woman Dudley’s age or younger. She had cropped gently spiky bright red hair, a compact delicate instantly friendly face, and wore a pale grey lightweight suit down to almost her knees and a white blouse with a silver brooch at the throat. “I’m awfully sorry we’re late,” she said. “We got off at the wrong station. We thought you’d be Bidston. I’m Patricia. This is Tom.”
    “Kathy. My son thought you’d let him down.” Kathy gave this a moment to make its point before adding “Come in and I’ll get him back.”
    She indicated the front room as she lifted the phone from thelittle high pine table. Six pairs of rings brought her his voice, but all it said was “Dudley Smith. I can’t talk now. Leave me a message.”
    “Dudley, they’re here. Hurry up and pick this up and come back.”
    The journalist and the photographer sat forward on the sofa with interrogative wicker creaks.