It’s the fragrance of last year’s apples and the smell of the insides of very old books with a base note of dead, wet rose-petals. It’s the distillation of loneliness, an incredibly sad smell, the essence of sorrowfulness and stoppered-up sighs. If it were a commercial perfume it would never sell. Imagine people being offered testers at brightly lit perfume counters, ‘Have you tried Melancholy, madam?’ and then spending the rest of the day with the uncomfortable feeling that someone has placed a cold pebble of misery in their stomachs.

‘There, next to my left shoulder,’ I tell Audrey (my friend), and Audrey breathes deeply, and says, ‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Audrey (also my next-door neighbour) shakes her head. Charles (my brother) makes a ridiculous snout and snuffs like a truffling pig. ‘No, you’re imagining it,’ he says and turns away quickly to hide his suddenly sad-dog face.

‘Dearie me,’ Mrs Baxter says, frowning as she tries to imagine this.

‘By the time I’m seventy,’ I calculate darkly, ‘I’ll be over eleven feet high. I’ll be a fairground attraction.’ The Giant Girl of Glebelands. ‘You’re a real woman now,’ Mrs Baxter says, surveying my skyscraper statistics. But as opposed to what? An unreal woman? My mother (Eliza) is an unreal woman, gone and almost forgotten, slipping the bonds of reality the day she walked off into a wood and never came back.

‘You’re a big girl,’ Mr Rice (the lodger) ogles me nastily as we squeeze past each other in the dining-room door. Mr Rice is a travelling salesman and we must hope that some day soon he will wake up and find that he’s been transformed into a giant insect.

It’s a shame that Charles has stuck at such an unheroic height. He claims that he used to be five foot five but that the last time he measured himself, which he does frequently, he was only five foot four. ‘I’m shrinking,’ he reports miserably. Perhaps he is shrinking, while I keep on growing (there’s no stopping me). Perhaps we’re bound together by some weird law of sibling physics, the two ends of a linear elastic universe where one must shrink as the other expands. ‘He’s a real short-arse,’ Vinny (our aunt) says, more succinctly.

Charles is as ugly as a storybook dwarf. His arms are too long for his barrel-shaped body, his neck too short for his big head, an overgrown homunculus. Sadly, his (once lovely) copper curls have turned red and wiry and his freckled face is now as pocked and cratered as a lifeless planet, while his big Adam’s apple bobs up and down like a Cox’s Orange Pippin at Hallowe’en. It’s a shame I can’t transplant some of my inches, I have far more than I need, after all.

Girls are not attracted to Charles and so far he hasn’t managed to persuade a single one to go out with him. ‘I’ll probably die a virgin,’ he says mournfully. Poor Charles, he too has never been kissed. One solution, I suppose, would be for us to kiss each other, but the idea of incest – though quite attractive in Jacobean tragedy – is less so on the home front. ‘I mean, incest,’ I say to Audrey, ‘it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ she says, her sad doves’ eyes staring at some point in space so that she looks like a saint about to be martyred. She is also one of the unkissed – her father, Mr Baxter (the local primary school headmaster), won’t let a boy anywhere near Audrey. Mr Baxter, despite Mrs Baxter’s protestations, has decided that Audrey isn’t ever going to grow up. If Audrey does develop womanly curves and wiles then Mr Baxter will probably lock her at the top of a very high tower. And if boys ever start noticing those womanly curves and wiles then it’s a fair bet that Mr Baxter will kill them, picking them off one by one as they attempt to scale the heights of Sithean’s privet and shin up the long golden-red rope of Audrey’s beautiful hair.

‘Sithean’ is the name of the Baxters’ house. ‘She-ann’, Mrs Baxter explains in her lovely douce accent, is a Scottish word. Mrs Baxter was once the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister and was brought up in Perthshire (‘Pairrrthshiyer’) which accounts no doubt for her accent. Mrs Baxter is as nice as her accent and Mr Baxter is as nasty as the thin dark moustache which outlines his upper lip and as bad-tempered as the foul pipe he smokes, or ‘a reeking lum’ in Mrs Baxter’s parlance.

Tall and gaunt, Mr Baxter is the son of a coal miner and still carries a seam of coal in his voice, despite his tortoiseshell glasses and his tweed jackets with leather-patched elbows. It’s very difficult to say how old he is without knowing. Mrs Baxter knows how old he is though, she’d be hard put to forget as Mr Baxter makes a point of reminding her often (‘Remember, Moira – I am older than you and I do know more’). Both Audrey and Mrs Baxter call Mr Baxter ‘Daddy’. When she was a pupil in his class, Audrey had to call him ‘Mr Baxter’ and if she ever forgot and called him ‘Daddy’, he would make her stand at the front of the class for the rest of the lesson. Neither of them calls him ‘Peter’ which is his name.

‘I think she was very tall,’ Charles says, forgetting perhaps how very small he was last time we saw her. ‘Are you sure she wasn’t red-headed?’ he adds hopefully.

‘Nobody was red-headed,’ Vinny says decisively.

‘Somebody must have been.’

If my mother was going to come back wouldn’t she come back in time (as it were) for my sixteenth birthday?

It’s as if Eliza never lived, there are no remnants of her life – no photographs, no letters, no keepsakes – the things that anchor people in reality are all missing. Memories of her are like the shadows of a dream, tantalizing and out of reach. With Gordon, ‘our dad’, the one person whom you might expect to remember Eliza best, there’s no conversation to be had at all, the subject makes him mute.

‘She must have been off her head (or ‘aff her heid’) to leave two such bonny children,’ Mrs Baxter opines gently. (All children are bonny to Mrs Baxter.) Vinny verifies, frequently, that our mother was indeed ‘off her head’. As opposed to ‘on her head’? But then if she was on her head she would be upside down – and therefore also mad, surely? Perhaps ‘off her head’ as in no longer being attached to her head? Perhaps she is dead and wandering around on the astral plane with her head tucked underneath her arm like a music-hall ghost, exchanging pleasantries with the Green Lady.

If only we had some maternal souvenirs, some evidence to prove she once existed – a scrap of her handwriting, say. How we would pore over the dullest, most prosaic of messages – See you at lunchtime! or Don’t forget to buy bread – trying to decipher her personality, her overwhelming love for her children, searching for the cryptically encoded message that would explain why she had to leave. But she’s left behind not a single letter of the alphabet for us from which we can reconstruct her and we have to make her up from emptiness and airy spaces and wind on water.

‘She wasn’t a saint, your mum, you know,’ Debbie says, reducing Eliza to her own pedestrian vocabulary. Eliza (or, at any rate, the idea of Eliza), isn’t a cosy person, ‘our mum’. Invisible, she has grown sublime – the Virgin Mary and the Queen of Sheba, the queen of heaven and the queen of night in one person, the sovereign of our unseen, imaginary universe (home). ‘Well not from what your dad says,’ Debbie says smugly. But what does ‘our dad’ say? Nothing to us, that’s for sure.

Who is Debbie? She is the fat, wan substitute that four years ago ‘our dad’ chose to replace ‘our mum’ with. In his seven-year voyage on the waters of Lethe (the north island of New Zealand actually), Gordon forgot all about Eliza (not to mention us) and came back with a different wife altogether. The Debbie-wife with brown permed curls, little piggy eyelashes and stubby fingers that end in bitten-off nails. The doll wife, with her round face and eyes the colour of dirty dishwater and a voice that contains flat Essex marshes washed with a slight antipodean whine. The child wife, only a handful of years older than us. Snatched from her cradle by Gordon, according to Vinny, Vinny who is the Debbie-wife’s arch-enemy. ‘Think of me as your big sister,’ Debbie said when she first arrived. She’s changed her tune now, I think she would rather not be related to us at all.

How could Gordon have forgotten his own children? His own wife? In his lost years at the bottom of the world did he hear Abenazaar’s wicked invitation (‘New wives for old!’) and trade in our mother for the Debbie-wife? Perhaps even now the treasure that was Eliza (greater than a king’s ransom) is trapped in some dismal cave somewhere waiting for us to find her and release her.

It is hard to know what tales Gordon might have spun Debbie in the downunderworld but he didn’t seem to have prepared her very well for the reality of his life back home. ‘So these are your kiddies, Gordon?’ she said with an air of incredulity when Gordon introduced her to us. She was probably expecting two charming little moppets, delighted to be relieved of their motherless state. Gordon didn’t seem to realize that in the seven intervening years we’d become underground children, living in a dark place where the sun never shone.

Heaven only knows what she was expecting of Arden – Manderley, a nice suburban semi perhaps, maybe even a small castle where the air was sweet – but surely not this desolate mock-Tudor museum. And as for Vinny – ‘Hello, Auntie V,’ Debbie said, sticking out her hand and grabbing Vinny’s claw, ‘it’s so lovely to meet you at last,’ so that ‘Auntie V’s’ face nearly cracked. ‘Auntie V? Auntie V?’ we heard her muttering later, ‘I’m nobody’s bloody auntie,’ obviously forgetting that actually she was our bloody auntie.

‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life. (Ah, but what does he give it? B−? C+? He should be careful, one day time might mark him. ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)

Charles also has his hobbies to occupy him – nothing so normal as stamp-collecting or bird-watching, the kind of pursuits that fulfil other suburban youth – but an obsession with the mysteries of the unexplained world – with aliens and flying saucers, with vanished civilizations and parallel worlds and time travel. He’s preoccupied with life in other dimensions, yearning for the existence of a world other than this one. Perhaps because his life in this one is so unsatisfactory. ‘They’re out there somewhere,’ he says, gazing longingly at the night sky. (‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay there,’ snorts Vinny.)

Mysterious disappearances are his speciality – he documents them obsessively in lined notebooks, page after page, in his babyish round hand, cataloguing the vanished – from ships and lighthouse keepers, to whole colonies of New World Puritans. ‘Roanoke,’ he says, his eyes lighting up with excitement, ‘a whole colony of Puritans in America disappeared in 1587, including the first white child ever born in America.’

‘Yeah, well that would be because the Red Indians killed them all, wouldn’t it?’ Carmen (McDade, my friend) says, leafing through one of his notebooks – Carmen has no notion that private and property can coexist in the same sentence.

Charles is looking for a pattern. The vast numbers of ships – the boats found crewless on the high seas and the Mississippi riverboats that have sailed off into nothingness – are not accountable to the perils of the sea but to alien kidnappings. The tendency (‘Well, two anyway,’ he admits reluctantly) of boys called Oliver to vanish on their way to the well for water, the number of farmers in the southern states of America observed disappearing in the act of crossing a field – the writer Ambrose Bierce who wrote an essay on one such disappearance entitled, ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ (‘and then disappeared himself, Izzie!’) – are all part of some vast otherworld conspiracy.

The category that excites him most, unsurprisingly given our own parents’ tendency to disappear, are the individuals – the society girl out for a downtown stroll, the man on the road from Leamington Spa to Coventry – people who were going about their ordinary lives when they vanished into thin air.

‘Benjamin Bathurst, Orion Williamson, Dorothy Arnold, James Worson’ – a curious litany of human erasures – ‘just like that!’ Charles says, snapping his fingers like a bad conjuror, one red, red eyebrow cocked in the cartoon position of surprise (whether relevant or not) that he favours for most conversations. People plucked from their lives as if by an invisible hand, ‘Dematerialization, Izzie – it could happen to anyone,’ he says eagerly, ‘at any moment.’ Hardly a comforting thought. ‘Your brother’s a nut-cake,’ Carmen says, sucking a mis-shapen mint so hard that it looks as if her cheeks have just imploded, ‘he should see a trick-cyclist.’

But the real question, surely, is – where do the people who vanish into thin air go? Do they all go to the same place? ‘Thin air’ must surely be a misnomer, for the air must be fairly choked with animals, children, people, ships, aeroplanes, Amys and Amelias.

‘What if our mother didn’t run off,’ Charles muses, sitting on the end of my bed now and staring out at the blue square of window-sky. ‘What if she had simply dematerialized?’ I point out to him that ‘simply’ might be the wrong word here, but I know what he means – then she wouldn’t have voluntarily abandoned her own children (us), leaving them to fend for themselves in a cold, cruel world. And so on.

‘Shut up, Charles.’ I put my head under the pillow. But I can still hear him.

‘Aliens,’ he says decisively, ‘these people were all kidnapped by aliens. And our mother too,’ he adds wistfully, ‘that’s what happened to her.’

‘Kidnapped by aliens?’

‘Well why not?’ Charles says stoutly. ‘Anything’s possible.’ But which is the most likely really – a mother kidnapped by aliens or a mother who ran off with a fancy man?

‘Aliens, definitely,’ Charles says.

I sit up and give him a good hard punch in the ribs to shut him up. It’s such a long time ago now (eleven years) but Charles can’t let Eliza go. ‘Go away, Charles.’

‘No, no, no,’ he says, his eyes alight with a kind of madness. ‘I’ve found something.’

‘Found what?’ It’s still only eight o’clock in the morning and Charles is in his pyjamas – maroon-and-white striped flannel that say ‘Age 12’ on the label on the collar, but which he has never outgrown. If the aliens kidnap him will they believe what he tells them or what his label says? He seems to have forgotten that it’s my birthday. ‘It’s my birthday, Charles.’

‘Yeah, yeah, look—’ From his striped breast-pocket he takes something wrapped in a large handkerchief. ‘I found this’, he says in a church-whisper, ‘at the back of a drawer.’

‘The back of a drawer?’ (Not my birthday present then.)

‘In the sideboard, I was looking for Sellotape.’ (For my present, I hope.) ‘Look!’ he urges excitedly.

‘An old powder-compact?’ I ask dubiously.

‘Hers!’ Charles says triumphantly. I don’t need to ask the identity of ‘Her’ – Charles has a particular tone of voice, reverential and mystical, that he uses when speaking about Eliza.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘It says so,’ he says, thrusting it in front of my face. It’s an expensive-looking compact, but old-fashioned – thin and flat, like a heavy gold disc. The lid is a bright blue enamel, inlaid with mother-of-pearl palm trees. The clasp is still springy and snaps open. There’s no powder-puff and the mirror is covered in a thin film of powder and the powder itself – a compacted pale pink – has been worn down in the middle to reveal a circle of silver metal.

‘There’s nothing at all to prove it’s hers,’ I tell him crossly and he snatches it back and turns it over so that an almost invisible shower of powder falls out on to my eiderdown. ‘Look.’

On its golden underside, striated in fine circles, there is an engraving. I hold it up to the square of blue and make out the stilted message:

‘Well anyway,’ Charles says, ‘I think it’s hers,’ and he pockets it moodily and leaves without wishing me happy birthday.

I myself am usually to be found lying on my bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).

‘I expect Charles is in his room,’ I tell Gordon and he makes a surprised face as if this is the last place he expected him to be.

Of course, he could just have been Gordon come home after seven years’ absence with a new young wife and Eliza might never be coming back. But this version of reality was not to our taste. ‘He’s sad, your dad, isn’t he?’ Carmen says, unnaturally poetic. At least he’s not mad or bad. But we’d prefer it if he was glad. ‘Bit of a lad?’ Carmen offers. But no, not really.

Girls idolize him. He’s the kind of boy you could take home to your mother (if you had one), the kind of boy you could take up to Lover’s Leap and steam up the car – a boy for all seasons in fact. No-one ever mentions Malcolm Lovat without saying what a great future he’s going to have, he’s reading medicine at Guy’s and is home for the Easter holidays at the moment. ‘Following in my father’s footsteps,’ he says with a wry little smile. His father’s a gynaecologist. ‘Perverted’ is Vinny’s verdict on this particular speciality – she has had ‘women’s trouble’ treated by Mr Lovat – ‘what man wants to specialize in sticking his hands inside women? Perverts, that’s what kind.’ I wonder where Charles and I would get if we followed in our father’s footsteps? Lost, presumably.

Malcolm wants to be a brain surgeon, which seems just as perverted to me; what person in their right minds would want to stick their hands inside other people’s heads?

Poor Malcolm, his mother is an ogress. Both his parents are so intolerant and snobbish that it seems a wonder they have a son like Malcolm. Perhaps not such a wonder, for Malcolm is adopted. The Lovats were quite old when they adopted him. ‘I don’t think they knew what to do with me when they got me,’ Malcolm says, ‘I didn’t drink gin and I didn’t play bridge.’ He has learnt to do both.

Unfortunately, he is a prince out of my star. ‘I don’t know though, Iz,’ he says, rather glumly, to me over a shared packet of crisps. ‘Do I really want to be a doctor at all?’ The dreadful thing is, he thinks of me as a friend. He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead. ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs. I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ – more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire. Too many years of wandering around the streets of trees after him like a large faithful pet have robbed me of female qualities in his eyes.

Of course, I could have spent the weekend with Eunice. ‘How would you like,’ she asked enthusiastically, ‘to come caravanning with us in Cleethorpes? That would be a nice way to spend your birthday.’

Enthusiastic Eunice is the last person I would have ever chosen as a friend, but of course you don’t choose your friends, they choose you. Eunice arrived in secondary school on the first day and attached herself to me like a mollusc and has stuck firmly on ever since, regardless of the fact that I’ve nothing in common with her and spend a considerable amount of time trying to prise her off. I think I was just the first person she happened to see when she walked through the school gates. (‘Like she was under a spell or something?’ Audrey muses.) But Eunice isn’t the kind of girl to fall under enchantments, she’s far too sensible for that.

She’s very plain – white ankle socks, hair parted to one side and fastened in a hair-slide, heavy black-rimmed glasses. She’s looked exactly the same for the last five years except that she’s no longer flat-chested and has black hairs on her calves as if someone’s pulled the legs off a web of spiders and stuck them on Eunice’s legs. She’s a humourless girl who leads a very organized life – the sort who lays out all her clothes for the next day before she goes to bed and does her homework as soon as she gets in from school. My way of being organized, on the other hand, is to go to bed wearing my school uniform.

Eunice knows about everything and never lets you forget it, so that you can’t pass a post-box or a cat on the street without Eunice expounding on the invention of the postage stamp or the evolution of the sabretoothed tiger into the cat. Click, click, click, goes Eunice’s brain. It’s formed differently – where my brain, for example, is a gallimaufry of art and poetry and over-whelming emotions and you could dip into my mental hodgepodge and come up randomly with Idylls of the King, the sinking of the Titanic or the death of Old Yeller – Eunice’s brain is modelled on a reference library – holding an unnecessary amount of facts, a clinical retrieval system and an advice desk that won’t shut up. Click, click, click.

She’s a Guide leader, you can’t see her uniform for badges, teaches at Sunday School, sings in the school choir, plays in goal in the school hockey team, is the school chess champion and likes knitting. She intends to be a scientist and have two children, a boy and a girl (she’ll probably knit them), and a reliable husband with a well-paid job.

Her mother, Mrs Primrose, always says, ‘Oh you’ve brought your friends home, Eunice!’ – each time surprised anew that Eunice is capable of making friends. The Primroses live in Laurel Bank, which is too close for comfort.

‘Primrose’ we are all agreed, is a very pretty name and it’s only a shame it’s paired with ‘Eunice’ – she could surely have been called ‘Lily or Rose or Jasmine or even … Primrose.’

This remark is addressed to Charles over my birthday lunch of macaroni cheese in an attempt to get him interested in Eunice as a girl instead of her previous incarnation as a crashing bore, on the principle that two misfits together might make a fit. ‘Daisy,’ Mr Rice adds, uninvited, ‘Iris, Ivy, Cherry – I knew a girl called Cherry once,’ he snorts. ‘She was a bit of all right … Poppy, Marigold, Pansy … [Mr Rice is the most boring person alive] … Hyacinth, Heather—’

‘Gorse, wort, bladderwrack,’ Vinny interrupts him impatiently.

‘Violet,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that’s a pretty name.’

Is this normal, I wonder? But then, what is normal? Not Carmen’s family, surely – the McDades are liable to such casual violence that even the friendliest exchange with them is liable to result in injury – a box on the ear, a punch in the stomach. ‘Yeah,’ Carmen says, cracking gum like a whip, ‘it’s not nice, is it?’

Carmen’s as thin as tapeworm and has waxy yellow skin that’s nearly transparent so that all her blue veins show like a human biology diagram. Her feet are the worst thing about her – skinny and flat with splayed toes and far too big for the rest of her body, the veins on them like tangled railway junctions. If this is what her feet are like at sixteen, what will they be like when she’s an old woman? But she’s an old woman now really.

Carmen left school at the first opportunity and is already engaged to a square-set boy with the unlikely name of Bash, who could easily pass himself off as one of her brothers. She’s got her future all mapped out – the wedding, the children, the house, the long path to old age. ‘It’s not very romantic, is it?’ I venture, but she just looks at me as if I’m speaking a different language, one she doesn’t know. Carmen’s got a job on the cheese counter in British Home Stores, forcing me to spend quite a lot of time hanging around British Home Stores looking as if I need half a pound of coloured Cheddar.

It doesn’t look such a bad job actually, I don’t think I’d mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted – which is nothing in particular, it’s true, but I like being alone in my head, I’m used to it. But, of course, the very opposite would probably turn out to be the case and far from being free to roam around in its empty spaces, my mind would most likely be full of nothing but cheese. Carmen confirms this suspicion – ‘Red Leicester’ in particular, she offers, when I ask her to be more specific.

And poor Audrey, so quiet and self-effacing, so frightened of the blackhearted presence of Mr Baxter, that sometimes you have to look twice to make sure Audrey’s still there. Perhaps that’s how people disappear – not suddenly, as in Charles’ unexplained world where people are mysteriously plucked from their lives, but by slowly, day by day, erasing themselves.

Elfin-bodied and angel-haired, Audrey is insubstantial, hardly part of the material world at all. ‘Eat something, Audrey, please,’ Mrs Baxter constantly urges, sometimes even following Audrey round the room with bowl and spoon as if waiting for her to inadvertently open her mouth so that she can take her unawares and pop food inside her. One day I half-expect to see Mrs Baxter regurgitating a little pellet of food and stuffing it down Audrey’s beak. Audrey hasn’t been well for weeks with some bug she can’t shake off and mooches around Sithean bundled up in big cardigans and baggy jumpers looking miserable. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Mr Baxter keeps snapping as if she’s making herself ill just to annoy him.

Hilary and Dorothy have an older brother, Graham, also a student at Glebelands University. Graham doesn’t share his sisters’ Aryan qualities – smaller, thinner, darker than his sisters, as if Mr and Mrs Walsh were just practising when they had him.

Good-looking boys, who are studying dentistry and law and look as if they’re members of the Hitler Youth, hover around Hilary and Dorothy like wasps round a jam-jar, keen to study their biological perfection. My chances of ever being like them are zero. Next to them, I’m a chimney-sweep, a walnut-skinned beggar girl.

‘What very black hair you have, don’t you, Isobel?’ Hilary remarks one day (it’s unusual for Hilary to even talk to me), stroking a finger over her porcelain (‘English Rose’) cheek. ‘And such dark eyes! Were your parents foreign?’

Hilary stables her white pony at the farm beyond Hawthorn Close and sometimes I see her riding round the Lady Oak field. In the early morning mist she could easily be mistaken for a centaur, half-horse, half-girl.

I can see her now riding in slow dressage circles around the Lady Oak. The branches of the tree are covered in tightly budded leaves, like little green jewels. To the Druids the tree was the link between heaven and earth. What would happen if I climbed the Lady Oak, would I reach heaven, or just some everyday giant shouting Fee-fi-fo-fum as he chased me down again?

‘For God’s sake,’ Vinny says, as Debbie clears away the remains of the watery macaroni cheese from under her nose. Vinny snatches her plate back again. ‘You’re not even eating that,’ Debbie protests.

‘So?’ Vinny sneers. (Vinny would make a good adolescent.) ‘Even the dog wouldn’t eat this stuff.’ Debbie is a dreadful cook, it’s hard to believe that she completed a year training to be a domestic science teacher in New Zealand. What would make a good birthday repast? Roasted swan and breast of lapwing, bud of asparagus, leaf of artichoke. And desserts, desserts moulded like castles and decorated like courtesans – studded with maraschino nipples and draped in piped swags of whipped cream. Not that I would ever eat a lapwing. Nor a swan, come to that.

Against all the odds, Debbie clings to the strict blueprint for family life that she came to us with four years ago, one which she herself received carved on tablets of stone from people called ‘Mum and Dad’. ‘Dad’ was a school janitor and ‘Mum’ was a housewife and the whole family emigrated when Debbie was ten. This blueprint dictates that she must impose order on a disordered world, which she does by means of feverish housework. ‘Someone take the key out of her back,’ Vinny sighs wearily. Soon I expect we’ll find Debbie in the hearth separating lentils from the ashes.

Arden has her in its thrall. ‘This house’, she complains to Gordon, ‘has a life of its own.’ ‘Possibly,’ Gordon sighs. The house does seem to conspire against her – if she buys new curtains then a plague of moths will follow, if she puts down lino, the washing-machine will flood. Her kitchen tiles crack and fall off, the new central-heating pipes rattle and moan and bang in the night like banshees. If she polishes everything in a room then the minute she leaves, the particles of dust will come out of their hiding-places and regroup on every surface, sniggering behind their little hands. (We must imagine those things we cannot see.) The dust in Arden isn’t really dust, of course, but the talcum of the dead, a frail composite waiting to be reconstituted.

She tries to grow vegetables in the garden and produces instead mandrake-rooted carrots and green potatoes. Greenfly and blackfly crowd the air like locusts, her runner beans are stunted, her cabbages are yellow, her pea-pods empty, her lawn as blighted as a blasted heath. Over the hedge, next door, Mrs Baxter’s garden buzzes with honey-bees and is smothered in flowers – beanstalks that touch the clouds and each white curd on her cauliflowers as big as a tree.

Poor Debbie, lingering under the Fairfax curse that dictates nothing will ever go right or – to be more specific – everything will always go wrong just when it looks as if it might go right.

‘Well, someone has to do it,’ Debbie snaps at Vinny as Vinny queries the need to get up from the dining-room table to enable Debbie to polish it, ‘and it’s obviously not going to be you.’

‘Certainly bloody isn’t,’ Vinny says, refusing to move so that Debbie has to polish around her while she chews on a cigarette, revealing her crocus-coloured teeth. Always an heroic fumeuse (Vinny’s been kippered by nicotine), she’s recently taken to smoking roll-ups, leaving shreds of Golden Virginia in her wake wherever she goes. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims every time she comes across one of Vinny’s dog-ends with the life sucked out of it. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims as Vinny showers the macaroni cheese remains with a garnish of tobacco. ‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny murmurs enigmatically.

‘Now, now,’ Gordon says, for ever trying to keep the peace. And failing. Poor Gordon. He has taken the loss of the family fortunes in his stride. ‘I never wanted to be a grocer anyway,’ he says, but did he want to be a lowly pen-pusher in Glebelands Corporation town-planning department? ‘You can’t go wrong in local government jobs,’ Debbie encouraged approvingly, ‘pension schemes and regular holidays and a chance of promotion. Like Dad.’ (‘What do janitors get promoted to?’ Charles puzzled.) What did Gordon do when he was in New Zealand? He looks wistful and smiles sadly, ‘Sheep farm.’

The only thing in the whole world that Debbie wants is the thing she cannot have. A baby. It appears that she is infertile (‘Barren!’ Vinny crows). ‘Something wrong with my tubes,’ Debbie explains (in less biblical terms) to all and sundry, ‘women’s trouble.’ Tubes! I think of Debbie as a great Underground map – instead of nerves and veins and arteries perhaps she has the Metropolitan and the District and Circle.

‘It’s the curse of the Fairfaxes,’ Charles tells her cheerfully.

To compensate for not being pregnant, Debbie seems to be growing fatter and fatter. She’s like a big plumped-up cushion on legs. Her wedding ring is cutting into her finger and she’s developed a cascade of little chins. Her inability to spawn is in stark contrast to the empire of cats in Arden (Vinny is their queen) which is expanding exponentially.

Elemanzer, one of Vinny’s feline cohorts, entwines itself with playful malevolence around Mr Rice’s ankles under the table. He gives her a swift kick and leers at me, ‘Sweet sixteen, eh?’, wiping macaroni cheese off his greasy lips. Mr Rice, the lodger who will not leave, has lately grown almost intimate with Vinny – sharing a glass of Madeira and a game of bezique every Friday evening. ‘You don’t think they have a physical relationship, do you?’ Debbie whispers in horror to Gordon and Gordon snorts with laughter, ‘When time goes backward.’

Mr Rice gives a little scream as the cat claws his leg in retaliation but must stifle it with his napkin or there will be trouble from Vinny.

A more comforting smell than birthday cake greets me in Sithean. ‘Marmalade,’ Mrs Baxter says, scumming honey-coloured froth off the sugary mess bubbling in her big copper pan. The marmalade’s the colour of tawny amber and melted lions. ‘The very last of the Sevilles,’ she says sadly as if the Sevilles were some great aristocratic family whose fortunes had failed. ‘Have a wee stir of the jeely-pan,’ Mrs Baxter urges, handing me a long-handled wooden spoon, ‘and make a wish. Go on wish, wish,’ she says like a demented fairy godmother.

‘For whatever I want?’

‘Absolutely.’ (I wish, naturally, for sex with Malcolm Lovat.)

‘You could be having a party,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘or playing a game.’ Mrs Baxter would have us playing games all the time if she could. She has a book – The Home Entertainer (of which she’s very fond) – a relic of the happy childhood she once had and a book that can provide a game for every occasion. ‘Indoor pastimes,’ she says, nodding happily as she stirs the marmalade, an ‘April the First Party’ maybe? ‘An April the First Party,’ she reads from the book, ‘is often highly amusing, for all the world loves a fool. You must be careful, however, that the guests are congenial and chosen carefully.’ This seems like sound advice to me.

Audrey is sitting hunched up at the kitchen table writing labels methodically in her neat handwriting – ‘Marmalade – April ‘60’ – her golden-red hair escaping in a fine halo around her hairline. She looks up and gives me her lovely melon slice of a smile, always a surprise, like sunshine coming out from behind a sombre cloud.

Mrs Baxter pours the hot marmalade in one long shower of gold into gleaming glass jars. Mrs Baxter is a hedgecomber, her pantry’s crammed full with jams and jellies and cheeses of every different kind – crabapple jelly and damson cheese, strawberry conserve and elderberry, rosehip syrup and sloe gin.

When the world has grown into eternal winter and the honeycombs are locked in ice and the sugar canes are withered, at least there will be Mrs Baxter’s jam to cheer us up.

I turn round to close Mrs Baxter’s gate and when I turn back round again – the most extraordinary thing imaginable – everything familiar has vanished – instead of standing on the pavement I’m standing in a field. The streets, the houses, the orderly lines of trees are all gone. Only the Lady Oak and the church – clustered around with a huddle of old cottages – remain. It’s the same place and yet it isn’t, how can that be?

I know from Charles’ paranormal research that it’s quite a common thing to suddenly disappear while crossing a field. Perhaps it’s about to happen to me? I feel suddenly dizzy as if the planet’s started to spin faster and I have an overwhelming desire to lie down on the earth and cling to the grass to stop myself being flung off the planet. Or the other possibility, of course – that I’m going to be sucked down through the grass and into the soil and never be seen again for seven years.

I’m relieved to see a figure advancing towards me – a man in a long astrakhan-trimmed overcoat and derby hat. He looks odd but harmless, he certainly doesn’t look like an alien about to abduct me, instead he tips his hat as he draws near and enquires politely after my well-being. In his hand he’s carrying sheaves of paper – maps and plans – and he waves them at me enthusiastically. ‘It’s going to be a wonderful year,’ he says. ‘An annus mirabilis as these so-called educated folk say. Right here,’ he booms, stamping his foot firmly on the muddy grass where Arden’s big hawthorn hedge was growing a moment ago, ‘right here I’m going to build an excellent house,’ and he laughs uproariously as if this was a great joke.

I find my voice which has been lost for some minutes, ‘And what year is this exactly, please?’

He looks startled. ‘Year? Why 1918, of course. What year do you think it is? And soon,’ he continues, ‘there are going to be houses. Everywhere you look, there will be houses, young lady,’ and he walks on, still laughing, marching on his way in the direction of Lythe Church, climbs over a wall and disappears.

Then I find my feet are back on the pavement and the trees and houses are all back in place.

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am. Jings and help me Boab, as Mrs Baxter would say.

What’s happened to the moon? Has its orbit moved closer to the earth overnight? I can feel the moon’s gravity pulling the tide of my blood. This must be a miracle of some kind, surely – a change in the very laws of physics? I’m relieved that someone else is sharing the lunacy with me – I can feel Audrey clinging on to my arm so hard that she’s pinching my skin through the fabric of my coat.

A moment longer and we will be running for the woods, bows and arrows in our hands, hounds at our heels, converts to Diana, but then sensible Eunice pipes up, ‘We’re only experiencing the moon illusion – it’s an illustration of the way the brain is capable of misinterpreting the phenomenal world.’

‘What?’

‘The moon illusion,’ she repeats patiently. ‘It’s because you’ve got all these points of reference –’ she waves her arms around like a mad scientist, ‘aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees – they give us the wrong ideas of size and proportion. Look,’ she says and turns round and suddenly bends over like a rag doll, ‘look at it between your legs.’

‘See!’ Eunice says triumphantly when we finally obey her ridiculous command. ‘It doesn’t look big any more, does it?’ No, we agree sadly, it doesn’t.

‘You lost those points of reference, you see,’ she carries on pedantically, and Audrey surprises me by saying, ‘Oh shut up, Eunice,’ and I point helpfully back down the street and say, ‘You live back there in case you’ve forgotten, Eunice,’ and we walk quickly on, leaving her to go home on her own. The moon carries on bowling up into the sky, growing smaller.

I lie in bed and look at my window full of moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. It’s high in the sky, shrunk back to its normal size, free and unfettered from the earth. A perfectly normal moon – not a blood moon, nor a blue moon – it isn’t an old moon with a new one in its arms, just a normal April moon. God bless the moon. And God bless me. Faraway, in the distance somewhere, a dog howls.