“Would you mind?” said Maurice, without looking up.

“What?”

“Not.”

“What?”

“Smoking.”

“And good morning to you too,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Outside at least?” said Morris.

“In my own house I’ll smoke where I want.”

“The smell lingers,” said Maurice. “People can smell it on my suits.”

Mrs. Morris chose not to respond.

“Have you called her?” said Maurice.

“Yes.”

“I’m away here in half an hour,” said Maurice. He batted away the smell of smoke. “Sleeping late again.”

“It’s a Saturday, Maurice.”

“She has hockey.”

“She’ll be down in a minute. She’s probably having a shower.”

“If she’s expecting a lift-” said Maurice.

“I can take her in later,” said Mrs. Morris, taking another long draw on her cigarette.

Maurice tutted.

“She shouldn’t miss breakfast,” he said.

“Relax, Maurice. She won’t miss breakfast.”

“Most important meal of the day,” said Maurice. “You can’t expect to perform at your best if you haven’t-”

“She’ll be fine,” said Mrs. Morris. “Stop fussing.”

“If you want to be on the top of your game you need to-”

“We’ve heard it all before, Maurice,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Fine,” said Maurice, looking at his watch. “Twenty-five minutes, or I’ll be late.”

“For what?”

“It’s a breakfast meeting.”

“At the golf club?”

“That’s right.”

Mrs. Morris snorted.

Maurice liked to get together every weekend with a few friends and fellow businessmen to play golf and to laugh loudly at one another’s slightly off-color jokes and to sit in the club house and enjoy a few drinks. This was Maurice’s downtime, among men who never spoke of their emotional lives or of their families-companions rather than friends. People you could trust; people you could do business with.

They sat and sipped coffee in silence.

“I met the librarian yesterday,” said Maurice.

“The who?”

“The librarian who’s been lending her those books.”

“What books?”

“Those books she’s been reading.”

“What books are you talking about?”

“Adult sort of books.”

“Adult books?” Mrs. Morris’s eyes flashed, and she raised an already raised and plucked eyebrow. “She’s not mentioned any adult books to me.”

“I don’t mean that sort of book. I mean…not children’s books.”

“Maurice! She’s not a little girl anymore.”

“I know she’s not a little girl anymore.”

“So. She can read whatever she likes.”

“I don’t think she should be able to read whatever she likes.”

“Why not?”

“She’ll get ideas.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“About…things. You know.”

“Don’t all books have ideas, Maurice?” Mrs. Morris sighed.

“Yes, but I mean ideas about…sex.”

“Chip off the old block, then, eh?”

Maurice reddened: being reminded of his infidelities was the one thing that could cause him embarrassment.

Mrs. Morris let Maurice’s embarrassment fully ripen before continuing. “So, she’s been reading the Kama Sutra, has she?”

“Good god, no!”

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

“No!”

“Well, she wouldn’t need to get that from the library. She could borrow my copy. Along with The Joy of Sex and-”

“Sssh! She might hear you!”

“She’s still in bed.”

“Good.”

“You wanted her up a minute ago.”

“Anyway, I told him what I thought.”

“Who?”

“The librarian.”

“Oh. Well, good for you, Maurice. Keeping the lower orders in their place. Librarians, lending people books? I don’t know. What’s the world coming to?”

Maurice ignored his wife and glanced up at the TV; his friend was still there on the sofa.

“Has she talked to you any more about her plans?” said Maurice.

“What plans?” said Mrs. Morris.

“Her GCSEs. Is she making any other plans you know of?”

“No.”

“So?” said Maurice.

“She wants to stick with the art and media studies,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Mickey Mouse courses.”

“If she wants to go to the art college-”

Maurice huffed.

“There’s nothing wrong with the art college,” said Mrs. Morris.

“Art college!” said Maurice. “She’d be better doing law.”

“She doesn’t want to do law.”

“She’ll come round,” said Maurice.

“Not if you’re nagging at her she won’t come round.”

“I didn’t work all these years so my daughter could-”

“It’s nothing to do with you, Maurice.”

“It’s everything to do with me!” said Maurice.

“She’d be fine at art college.”

“Doing what? Hanging around a bunch of dope-smoking layabouts!”

“Layabouts? Nobody says ‘layabouts’ anymore, Maurice.”

“I say ‘layabouts.’”

“Anyway, she’s got years to work it all out.”

“You have to plan ahead for these things, I keep telling you.”

“Maurice, you go on ahead and get yourself elected, and let me worry about her.”

“She’s had a five-star education. Pony, clubs, the best of everything. When I was growing up on Corporation Street I’d have given anything to-”

“Maurice, please. You’re on repeat. You’re making a speech to me. I’m your wife. Remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“And I’ve not had my coffee yet. So let’s not get into all this now.”

“Fine.”

Mrs. Morris stubbed out her cigarette and took a final sip of her coffee.

“She’ll be late,” said Maurice, “if she doesn’t get up soon.”

“She won’t be late! Now, just leave her be. God, you’re such a control freak.”

Maurice was not a control freak. He had, for example, left much of the design and furnishing of the interior of the house to Mrs. Morris, whose tastes in home furnishings ran rather to the exotic. Left to his own devices, Maurice would have tended toward basic dictator chic-chandeliers and gold plates, with brocaded curtains and brand-spanking-new mahogany. Pamela had more bohemian tastes: tapestries, antiques, curiosities. He’d even allowed her to paint a mural on the kitchen wall, bold and Bloomsbury-style, when they first bought the house, depicting the mountains of Mourne and the cottage they had there and which they used as their bolt-hole. But the kitchen had since been vigorously extended with steel and glass and a table which could accommodate a large, catered dinner party, and the Mournes mural with its little cottage had long since disappeared.

They sat in silence, the two of them, sipping their coffee, as distant as any long-married couple. Maurice looked at his watch.

“All right,” said Mrs. Morris. “I’ll go and get her up.”

“Thank you,” said Maurice.

The right order had reestablished itself.

As he explained to the police and to the press later that day, the first thing Maurice Morris knew about his daughter’s disappearance was the sound of his wife screaming.

8

Sundays were always the real challenge for Israel in Tumdrum. On Sunday, Tumdrum’s sheer Tumdrumness somehow intensified: the place seemed to hum not only with its average everyday senselessness and pointlessness, but with an extra tone, a deep overtone or undertone-a void-of doom, as though a dark-cloaked chorus had arrived and was lamenting the steady encroachment of catastrophe in the last scenes of some long, depressing opera about the terrible fate of Everyman: Sibelius, Benjamin Britten, Don Giovanni, Simon Boccanegra. O Tumdrum! Weh mir! Weh mir! And on Sundays, as a consequence, with the thrum of doom in his ears, Israel always suffered from a combination of queasiness, headaches, and a nausea of a kind both physiological and philosophical that would doubtless be familiar to anyone who’d been out on a Saturday night drinking, or at an amateur production of a play by Harold Pinter, or at home listening to the Saturday night play on Radio 4: He was a man of sorrows, despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief.

Sometimes, to dispel the Sunday doom and anxieties Israel would go to the pub-the First and Last. But it only ever made things worse-the First and Last leaned more toward the Omega than the Alpha-and anyway, in the end he would always have to return home, to the converted chicken coop, his room like a prison cell, no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, a room that Israel had worked on and worked on over the past year and had managed to transform into a…room no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare brick walls and a concrete floor and an asbestos roof, with rugs and a bed and some books. A room of his own, to be sure, with his own enamel plates and cups. But no window. Fortunately, he wanted no window. For there was nothing out there to see.