The Hunters' house was Victorian and although it had every modern comfort it still had all its original fireplaces and doors and cornices, which Dr Hunter said was a miracle. The front door had coloured glass panels, starbursts ofred, snowflakes ofblue and rosettes of yellow that cast prisms of colour when the sun shone through. There was even a full set of servants' bells and a back staircase that had allowed the servants to scurry around unseen. 'Those were the days,' Mr Hunter said and laughed because he said if he had been alive when the house was built he would have been making fires and blacking boots, 'And you, too, probably, Reggie,' while 'Joanna' would have been 'swanning around upstairs like Lady Muck' because her family came from money.

'It's all gone,' Dr Hunter said when Reggie looked at her enquiringly.

'Unfortunately,' Mr Hunter said.

'Bad investments, nursing-home bills, squandered on trifles,' Dr Hunter said, as if the getting and spending of money was meaningless. 'My grandfather was rich but profligate, apparently,' she said.

'And we are poor but honest,' Mr Hunter said.

'Apparently,' Dr Hunter said.

Actually, Dr Hunter admitted one day, there had been some money left and she had used it to buy this 'very, very expensive house'. 'An investment,' Mr Hunter said. 'A home,' Dr Hunter said.

The kitchen was Reggie's favourite room. You could have fitted the whole of Reggie's Gorgie flat into it and still had room for swinging a few elephants if you were so inclined. Surprisingly, Mr Hunter liked cooking and was always making a mess in the kitchen. 'My creative side,' he said. 'Women cook food because people need to eat,' Dr Hunter said. 'Men cook to show off.'

There was even a pantry, a small, cold room with a flagged floor and stone shelves and a wooden door that had a pattern of cut-out hearts on the panels. Dr Hunter kept cheese and eggs and bacon in there, as well as all her tinned and dried goods. 'I should make jam,' she said guiltily in the summer. 'A pantry like this begs for homemade jam.'Now that it was nearly Christmas she said, 'I feel bad that 1 haven't made mincemeat. Or a Christmas cake. Or a pudding. The pantry is begging for a pudding, wrapped in a cloth and full ofsilver sixpences and charms.' Reggie wondered if Dr Hunter was thinking about her own Christmases when she was a child but Dr Hunter said, 'Heavens, no.'

Reggie didn't think that the pantry was begging for anything, except possibly a bit ofa tidy. Mr Hunter was always rooting through there, looking for ingredients and spoiling Dr Hunter's neat ranks of tins and jars.

Dr Hunter ('Call me Jo'), who didn't believe in religion, who didn't believe in 'any kind oftranscendence except that of the human spirit', believed most firmly in order and taste. 'Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,' she said to Reggie when they were filling a pretty little vase (,Worcester') with flowers from the garden. Reggie thought she meant someone called Maurice, probably a gay friend, until she noticed a biography ofWilliam Morris on the bookshelf and thought, duh, stupid, because of course she knew who he was. Twice a week a cleaner called Liz came in and moaned about how much work she had to do but Reggie thought she had it pretty easy because the Hunters had everything under control, they weren't housework Nazis or anything but they knew the difference between comfort and chaos, unlike Ms MacDonald whose entire house was a 'repository ofjunk' -bits of old crap everywhere, receipts and pens, clocks without keys, keys without locks, clothes piled on top of chests, pillars ofold newspapers, half a bicycle in the hallway that just appeared there one day, not to mention the forest's worth of books. Ms MacDonald used the imminence of the Rapture and the Second Coming as an excuse ('What's the point?') but really she was just a slovenly person. Ms MacDonald had 'got' religion (goodness knows where from) shortly after her tumour was diagnosed. The two things were not unrelated. Reggie thought that if she was being eaten alive by cancer she might start believing in God because it would be nice to think that someone out there cared, although Ms MacDonald's God didn't really seem the caring sort, in fact quite the opposite, indifferent to human suffering and intent on reckless destruction.

Dr Hunter had a big noticeboard in the kitchen, full of all kinds of things that gave you an insight into her life, like an athletics certificate that showed she had once been a county sprint champion, another to show that she reached Grade 8 in her piano exams and a photograph (,when I was a student') of her holding aloft a trophy, surrounded by people clapping. 'I was an all-rounder,' Dr Hunter laughed and Reggie said, 'You still are, Dr H.'

There were photographs on the noticeboard that charted Dr Hunter's life, some of Sadie over the years, and lots of the baby, of course, as well as one ofDr and Mr Hunter together, laughing in the glare of foreign sunshine. The rest of the noticeboard was a medley ofshopping lists and recipes (Sheila's Chocolate Brownies) and messages that Dr Hunter had left to herself -Remember to tell Reggie that Joe Jingles is cancelled on Monday or Practice meeting changed to Fri PM. All the appointment cards were pinned there too, for the dentist, the hairdresser, the optician. Dr Hunter wore spectacles for driving, they made her look even smarter than she was. Reggie was supposed to wear spectacles but on her they had the opposite effect, making her look like a complete numpty, so she tended only to wear them when there was no one else around. The baby and Dr Hunter didn't count, Reggie could be herself with them, right down to the spectacles.

There were a couple ofbusiness cards on the noticeboard as well, stuck up by Mr Hunter on returning from 'working lunches', but really it was Dr Hunter's noticeboard.

A woman had come to see Dr Hunter yesterday afternoon. She rang the doorbell two minutes after Dr Hunter came home and Reggie had wondered if she had been parked nearby, waiting for Dr Hunter to arrive.

Reggie, the baby balanced on her hip, led her into the kitchen and went to tell Dr Hunter, who had gone upstairs to get changed out of the black suit she always wore for work. When Reggie came back downstairs the woman was examining the noticeboard in a way that Reggie thought was too presumptuous for a stranger. The woman looked a bit like Dr Hunter, same dark hair that skimmed her shoulders, same slim build, a bit taller. She was wearing a black suit too. She wasn't the Avon lady, that was for sure. Reggie wondered if she would ever have a life where she got to wear a black suit.

Dr Hunter came into the kitchen and the woman took a card from her bag and, showing it to Dr Hunter, said, 'Can I have a word?' and Dr Hunter said to Reggie, 'Can you look after the baby for a few minutes, Reggie?' even though the baby was doing his suicidal starfish thing, his little plump arms held out to Dr Hunter like he was asking to be rescued from a sinking ship, but Dr Hunter just smiled at him and led the woman away into the living room and shut the door. Dr Hunter never ignored the baby, Dr Hunter never took anyone into the living room -people always sat at the big table in the comfY kitchen. For a minute Reggie worried that the woman had something to do with Billy. She would be revealed as the sister of Bad-Boy Billy and would be cast out. Reggie had never mentioned to Dr Hunter that she had a brother. She hadn't lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life, which was what he did to her, after all.

The dog tried to follow but Dr Hunter shut the door in her face without saying anything to her, which was so not Dr Hunter, and an exiled Sadie sat down outside the door and waited patiently. Ifa dog could frown she would have frowned.