'What would you get if she died?'

'I'm not sure. About eighty thousand I think. It could be more.'

He turned away. 'And that's about what we'd need if I were to leave Stella, get a divorce. But Clarissa isn't going to die just to convenience us. Twenty thousand might just save the shop. But that's about all it would do. And why should she part with it? Anyone with an ounce of financial sense would see that it would be throwing good money after bad. It's no use. I can't come this weekend.'

Above them the floor creaked. Someone had come into the shop. He said quickly, gratefully:

'Sounds like a customer. Look, I'll close promptly at five if there's nothing doing and give you a hand down here. We'll get this room together somehow.'

When he had gone she went over and stared out of the window, standing rigidly, grasping the edges of the sink so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her eyes were unfocused, staring beyond the railings, the crumbling stucco on the basement wall, to where the brightly patterned reds, greens and yellows of the fruit stall on the opposite pavement fused and shivered. From time to time feet passed, voices called, the narrow street broke momentarily into life. And still that silent figure at the window stood unmoving. Then she gave a little sigh. The taut shoulders relaxed, the fingers loosened their grip. She took up the woodcut from the draining-board and studied it as if she hadn't seen it before. Then she opened her shoulder-bag and folded it carefully away.

CHAPTER SIX

Simon Lessing stood at the open window of his study at Melhurst and gazed out over the wide lawns to where the river cut its slow stream between the horse chestnuts and the limes. In his hand he held Clarissa's still unopened letter. It had arrived by the morning post, but there had been an excuse for not opening it then. He had had an early practice period. And that had been followed by the sixth-form seminar. He had told himself that he would wait until break. But the morning had passed and now it was the lunch-hour. In less than five minutes the bell would sound. He couldn't delay indefinitely. It was ridiculous and humiliating to be so afraid, to stand like a first-former holding a dreaded school report, knowing that, however long and cunningly deferred, the moment of truth must come at last.

He would wait until the bell actually sounded, and then he would read it, quickly, uncaring and with his mind on luncheon. And at least he could do so in peace. From the middle school upwards, every boy at Melhurst had his own study. The importance of a daily period of silence and privacy was one of the more enlightened precepts of the school's pious seventeenth-century founder and, largely because it had been incorporated into the almost monastic architecture, had endured through three hundred years of changing educational fashion. It was one of the things about Melhurst which Simon most valued, one of the privileges which Clarissa's patronage, Clarissa's money, had procured for him. Neither she nor Sir George had ever considered another choice of school, and Melhurst had made no difficulty about finding a place for the stepson of one of its more distinguished alumni. Its motto, in Greek rather than the more usual Latin, extolled the virtues of moderation, and for three hundred years, in obedience to Theognis' dictum, the school had been moderately famous, moderately expensive and moderately successful. No school could have suited him better. He recognized that its traditions and occasionally bizarre rituals, which he quickly learned and sedulously observed, were designed as much to discourage too personal a commitment as to promote a corporate identity. He was tolerated but left alone, and he asked nothing more. Even his talents were acceptable to the ethos of the school, which, perhaps because of a strong personal antipathy between a nineteenth-century headmaster and Dr Arnold of Rugby, by tradition eschewed muscular Christianity and almost all manifestations of the team spirit and espoused High Anglicanism and the cult of the eccentric. But music was well taught; the school's two orchestras had a national reputation. And swimming, the only physical skill at which he excelled, was one of the more acceptable sports. Compared with the Norman Pagworth Comprehensive, Melhurst seemed to him a haven of civilized order. At Pagworth he had felt like an alien set down without a phrase book in a lawless, ill-governed and alien country whose language and customs, crudely harsh as the playground in which they were born, were terrifyingly incomprehensible. The prospect of having to leave Melhurst and return to his old school had been one of his worst terrors since he began to sense that things were going wrong between himself and Clarissa.

It was strange that fear and gratitude should be so mixed. The gratitude was genuine enough. He only wished that he could experience it as it surely ought to be experienced, a graciousness, a reciprocal benison, free of this dragging load of obligation and guilt. The guilt was the worst to bear. When its weight became almost too much for him he tried to exorcise it by rational thought. It was ridiculous to feel guilty, ridiculous and unnecessary even to feel too oppressive an obligation. Clarissa owed him something after all. It was she who had destroyed his parents' marriage, enticed away his father, helped kill his mother through grief, left him an orphan to endure the discomforts, the vulgarities, the suffocating boredom of his uncle's house. It was Clarissa, not he, who should feel guilt. But even to let this thought creep traitorously into his mind only increased his burden of obligation. He owed her so much. The trouble was that everyone knew just how much. Sir George, who was seldom there, but who, when he was, presented himself to Simon as a silent, accusing personification of all those masculine qualities which he knew were alien to his own personality. He sometimes sensed in Clarissa's husband an inarticulate goodwill which he would have liked to have put to the test if only he could summon the courage. But most of the time he imagined that Sir George had never really approved of Clarissa taking him on and that their secret marital conversations were punctuated with the phrases: 'I told you so. I warned you.' Miss Tolgarth knew; Tolly, whose eyes he dared not meet for fear of. encountering one of those judgemental gazes in which he thought he detected dislike, resentment and contempt. Clarissa knew it, probably to the last penny. Increasingly he had come to feel that Clarissa repented of a generosity which at first had held all the charm of novelty, the magnificent gesture, superbly theatrical at the time in all its eccentricity but which she now saw had lumbered her with a spotty, inarticulate adolescent, ill at ease with her friends; with school bills, holiday arrangements, dental appointments, with all the minor irritations of motherhood and none of its essential compensations. He sensed that there was something she required of him which he could neither identify nor give, some return, unspecified but substantial, which would one day be demanded of him with all the brutal insistence of a tax-collector.

She seldom wrote to him now, and when he did see in his cubby hole that tall, curved hand – she disapproved of personal letters being typed – he had to steel himself to open the envelope. But the apprehension had never before been as bad as this. The letter seemed to have stuck to his hand, to have grown heavy with menace. And then the one o'clock bell clanged out. With sudden vehemence he tore at the corner of the envelope. The pale-blue, linen-based paper which she always used was tough. He wrenched in his thumb and tore a jagged slit through envelope and letter, rough as a lover who cannot wait to know his fate. He saw that the letter was short and his immediate reaction was a moan of relief. If she were throwing him out, if there was to be no last term at Melhurst, no chance of a place at the Royal College of Music, no more allowance, surely the excuse, the justification would require more than half a page. But the first sentence did away with his worst fears.