'You do?' Sophi laughed. 'Oh; should I have said something?'

'I don't know,' I admitted.  And indeed I didn't. 'I think it was my uncle Mo,' I said to her.

'What, the one in Bradford, the actor?'

'Well, Spayedthwaite.  But yes.  Yes, that's the one.'

Sophi looked thoughtful. 'So who was he calling?'

'Who indeed?' I nodded. 'Who did he think he was calling, and who's this "her" he's coming for?'

Sophi leaned against the other edge of the doorway, also folding her arms and drawing one leg up under her backside.  We looked at each other for a moment.

'You?' she said quietly, eyebrows flexing.

'Me,' I said, wondering.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I stayed with Sophi that night, lying chastely in her generous arms while she breathed slowly and made little shiftings and mutterings in her sleep.  Her father returned about one in the morning; she stirred when she heard the door, woke and rose, padding downstairs.  I heard their muffled voices and then she returned, giggling quietly as she took off her dressing-gown. 'Drunk as a monkey,' she whispered, slipping back in beside me. 'These golf club meetings…' she snuggled up to me. 'At least he gets a lift home…'

I stroked her hair as she fitted her chin into the angle of my neck and shoulder.  She jerked a couple of times, apologised once, then went quiet again.  I think she was asleep within the minute.  I heard Mr Woodbean come up the stairs, and experienced the fluttering trepidation I'd always felt when I'd stayed over at Sophi's, frightened that he would burst in and discover us together, however innocently.  As ever, his heavy tread creaked on past Sophi's door and along the landing to his own room, and I breathed easily again.

Sophi dreamed beside me, her hand clenching around mine, her breath hesitating, then speeding up a little, then dropping back.

I lay there, unable to sleep despite being deathly tired.  I had been late to bed the previous night, had not so much slept then as fallen into an alcoholic stupor, and had subsequently undergone all the trials and tribulations that had overtaken me.

It already seemed like a week must have passed between sitting in the Jaguar car as it glided past Harrods department store in London and standing on the dark bridge watching the bats fly and hearing the owl call while I listened in vain for the Voice of my God.

Still, I could not sleep, but kept turning over and over in my head all the oddnesses of my recent life:  Morag's apparent avoidance of me, the zhlonjiz business, my Grandfather's lecherous attention, and now Uncle Mo, calling on the telephone, implicated and implicating, filthy drunk, seemingly thinking he was talking to a telephone answering machine when the Woodbeans had never had such a thing, and now presumably on his way, coming for somebody - me?

What was going on?  What was happening to my life?

There had been enough untowardness and nonsense without Uncle Mo getting involved.  Uncle Mohammed is the brother of Calli and Astar; a darkly handsome but prematurely aged early-forties actor who left the Community on his sixteenth birthday to seek fame and fortune in - where else? - London, and achieved a degree of fame before I was born when he landed a part in a Mancunian television soap opera.  An unkind metropolitan newspaper critic, not remotely as impressed with Mo's talent as Mo was, once accused my uncle of putting the ham in Mohammed, which caused something of a fuss in the Moslem community - of which Mo, apostate, was now a part - and eventually required an apology and retraction.  Mo was written out of the television story almost a decade ago and now exists in Spayedthwaite, near the northern city of Bradford, finding acting work very occasionally and - rumour has it - waiting on tables in an Indian restaurant the rest of the time, to make ends meet.

I think my Grandfather was more upset by Mo making his living on television than by his conversion to another faith, but I'm sure both hurt; the record of that first generation of those born into the Faith has not been a good one, with Brigit and Mo joining other religions and Rhea surrendering maritally to the cult of fundamentalist Blandness in Basingstoke.  So much had depended on Calli and Astar and my father, and then he was taken from us by the fire; the full burden fell on my step-aunts, replacing him in some ways as well as their mother and aunt.  I think it is fair to say that but for their dedication and sense of purpose our Order might have stumbled and fallen.

I had met Uncle Mo a few times and thought him a sad creature; we do not ban or banish people, even if they renounce their Faith, so he was still welcome to visit us, and he has done so for each Festival.  He had a surface presentability and heartiness which proved brittle and easily broken; underneath was desolation and loneliness.  I think he might have rejoined us and even come back to stay in the Community, but he had too many ties in the north of England by then, and would have felt uprooted and alien wherever he went, and - by whatever algebra of longing and belonging he applied to his situation - had decided to remain with his chosen allegiance rather than his original persuasion.

The last time he had been here had been for the Festival of Love four years ago, when he had told me frankly he was looking for a wife (but did not find one).  I'd assumed - indeed I'd been quite certain at the time - that he was joking when he'd asked me if I would marry him.  We'd both laughed then, and I am still sure he was only kidding, but now he was on his way here, was he not? 'I come for her,' he'd said.  For whom?  For me?  Morag, maybe?  Somebody else?  More to the point, why?  And at whose behest?

I held Sophi like a drowning man holds a life-belt, so that I squeezed her and made her grunt and mutter.  She stirred in my arms, not quite waking.  I relaxed, content with the tactile reassurance that she was there.  It seemed I could feel the world spinning around me, out of control, meaningless, mad and dangerous, and she was the only thing I had to hold on to.

The sound of the toilet flushing came from along the landing.  I tried to turn the noise into a drain for my swirling thoughts, consigning my confusions, woes and fears to the same watery emptying and so leaving my head empty and ready for the sleep my body craved.  But then the image struck me as absurd, and I found myself shaking my head in the darkness, chiding myself for such tortured foolishness.  I was even able to raise the hint of a smile.

Sleep came for me eventually, after many more reviewings of the long, involved and fractious day, and many more attempts to stop thinking about all the mysteries surrounding me.

I dreamed of a wide, unsteady landscape of shaking bed clothes, and pursuit by something I could not see, forever just over the quivering horizon, but terrifyingly near and threatening.  I was vaguely aware of disturbance and a warm kiss, but when I awoke properly Sophi was long gone and I was alone with an already half-aged day of brightness and showers.

Mr W had gone too.  I used the Woodbeans' bath and made myself some toast and tea.  I read the note - in Sophi's hand - that Grandmother Yolanda had left for me the previous day, giving me the number for her hotel in Stirling and telling me that she had booked a twin room so I was welcome to come and stay.  She'd detailed her flight number and departure time today, too.  I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece; she would be at the airport by now.

I let a shower pass then walked back to the Community under dripping trees.

I nodded to a few Brothers and Sisters, who nodded back - warily, it seemed to me.  I went straight to the office in the mansion house, where Sister Bernadette sat typing slowly at the desk by the door.