‘Don’t be upset.’ In the mirror, she held out a hand to me. ‘There’s not anything you can do.’

A dark line drawn behind her on the bed turned into the stick I had been given by Brond. I had not brought it into that room. There was no time to warn her, perhaps there was no need, as the door came open. Like children, we stared at the shining weight of the gun in Kennedy’s hand.

‘Oh, you impossible bitch,’ he said. It was a voice full of love and rage and hopelessness.

‘I’ll go with you,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to hurt him.’

I went towards her. Even now I believe it was because I misunderstood which of us needed protecting.

‘You cowardly bastard!’ he shouted and I realised he could not fire because I was too close to her. I think he called me a coward again, but all my fear had left me. I picked up Brond’s unlucky stick and a turn shook free the blade.

He was coming towards me, trying, I suppose, to get some safe angle from which he could fire but Jackie kept turning with him. I even had time – I was in such control – to realise what Brond had brought about in giving me the stick; by death or guilt both Kennedy and myself were to be silenced. He knew my fatal temper and he had given me a weapon with which I could kill or get myself killed, but I would laugh in his face. He knew my temper but not the speed of my mind or the athlete’s strength in my body. I was young and nothing was impossible to me, and as Kennedy came forward I took him with the sword point on the wrist. He was to be disarmed and no great harm done. That was a thing impossibly exact, but I was mad with confidence and the gun fell out of his hand.

Brilliantly coloured blood came out of him in gusts as he tried to kill me with his hands. The heart, that tough muscle, becomes its own murderer when an artery is cut. Untended or if there were no natural defences, it would empty the body. He came at me and I did not understand what had happened. I even had a moment of terror that the blood was mine. I had nothing to defend myself for as he went for me a shock went up my arm and the stick was snatched out of my grasp. The bed took me behind the knees and I went back with him on top. He might have strangled me but it was my fortune that the nerve in his wrist had been cut so that the four fingers of his right hand would not close. I rolled and carried both of us off the end of the bed. As we landed I came down on him with all my weight and it seemed to stun him. With each heartbeat blood spurted from his outflung wrist. All I wanted was to save him. I knew that a tourniquet above the elbow might stop the blood but that the arm would at once begin to die. I did not lack knowledge. As he lay still, I pulled down the wadded sheet and pressed with all my strength on his wrist. The sheet soaked and I gathered more and pressed. The curtain of blood over my eyes put a drench of scarlet over walls, roof, bed, everywhere. The only bloodless thing in the room was his face, like a white parcel emptied and thrown aside. I thought I had saved him until I heard a whisper under the mingled thunder of our breath. On the white front of his shirt there was a small unremarkable shape like the lips of a child opening on a sigh.

At last I had to look up at Jackie. In the mirror of her eyes – not Jackie but Val, Michael Dart’s wife – I saw a man of blood on his knees beside a corpse.

SEVENTEEN

I had nothing to do with Peter Kilpatrick’s death and for it I had been arrested and interrogated and put in the shadow of imprisonment. I knew less than nothing about the assassination and I had fallen into the hands of secret police and been threatened in the hotel; the impress on a bed of the man haunted me and with it a dead face from under a pile of sacks. I had killed Kennedy; I had stabbed him and he had spouted blood; I had stabbed him and he drowned in a cupful of it; and that night I was returned to my father’s house and woke the next day in the bed I had slept in as a boy.

The window rattled in its frame. In any kind of wind, it had done that ever since I could remember. I had never noticed before how it sounded like hasty footsteps. Everything familar looked strange that morning. This was my bedroom, Jess, my sister, had the tiny room across the landing; downstairs, the kitchen was the only other room in the house and my parents slept there in the bed set into a recess in the wall. The ceiling of my bedroom sloped and bumped to fit under the roof; Jess’s room was even worse. Her bed was unmade and clothes and schoolbooks lay in a casual archipelago; at her age I had been forced by my mother to be tidy. With a small shock, I recognised the clock on her bedside table: the alabaster lady. Jess must have persuaded my mother to let her take it from its pride of place downstairs. Green marble and on top of it a woman in white drapery, Grecian, flowing – the alabaster lady I called her to myself: the word was like an incantation – alabaster, alabaster. Her breasts were bare and nothing else like that was ever allowed in the house. For years it puzzled me until I decided that probably they had never noticed. Once when I was about seven I went down in the middle of the night and took her back to bed with me. I held her between my legs and fell asleep, but when I woke she was gone. I was terrorised by shame but neither of them ever mentioned it.

I put out a finger and touched her cheek and two little breasts of stone.

It was always dark in the kitchen. The ceiling was low and the wooden beams seemed to pull it down towards your head. There was a small window at either end, but the back one looked out on a bank of earth and the tree that hung its branches over the house. Even on sunny days I wanted to put on the light. When I did, my mother would put it out: we could not afford it. She had spent her married life in this room.

‘Ten o’clock. I slept in this morning.’

I had always to apologise for sleeping late. With the hours my father worked, it seemed indecent to lie in bed.

‘This morning,’ she said looking up at me from where she knelt. She was wiping round the hearth. ‘This morning. Well, you’d an excuse.’

I tried to keep my back to her while I cut and made a sandwich of cheese.

‘There’s an egg.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘This is fine.’

I poured milk into a glass and chewed looking out of the window as if there might be something new and surprising to see. The sandwich tasted like cardboard.

‘Who was he?’

I remembered her face last night as she tried to see past me to where Primo bulked in the dark at the end of the path.

‘Just a friend. He gave me a lift home.’

‘You told us you had a job.’

‘I had a job.’

‘How could you be here if you have a job?’

Her voice was thin and querulous like an old woman’s. I put what was left of the sandwich wastefully back on the plate hoping she would not notice.

‘My friend’s a kind of doctor. He advised me to stay here for my health.’

‘Just a kind of doctor? And what does that mean?’

‘Till classes start again. I’d like to stay till it’s time for next year’s classes.’

‘Something’s wrong.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said without looking round at her. ‘I’ll walk up and see Dad. He’ll be up past the brig?’

Turning from the window, everything in the room was dark.

‘I’ll not be long.’

But she followed me to the door.

‘You’ve spoiled your chance.’

‘What?’ My voice cracked like an angry child’s. It was as though she were laying a curse on me.

‘Tell him your lies. You’ve spoiled your chance.’

She closed the door in my face.

Beyond the bridge were fields of crops. On our side of the burn, there were cattle and some sheep. I walked slowly in the warm sun. The bridge was three broken planks wide. Even since last summer, it had got worse. It would be made to last, though, till it rotted into the water. On the other side, sparrows balanced on the feathery heads of barley. They rippled into the air as I went by, resettling as the wind stroked the yellow swell back and forward. I heard my father before I saw him.