The eyelids of the head were closed, giving it a passing resemblance to Keats’ death-mask, but then the lids suddenly flew open and the head began to speak, its nerveless lips moving slowly – and I recognized the Roman nose, the dark curls, the long lashes – it was the head of Malcolm Lovat. It was more like the toppled head of a statue than a real severed head – the break was clean and even, no blood vessels or frayed sinews floating like tentacles in the bucket.

The head emitted the most tremendous sigh and fixing me with its dead gaze beseeched, ‘Help me.’

‘Help you?’ I said. ‘How?’ but the rope slipped out of my hand and the bucket clattered back down the well. I peered down. I could still see the pale face glimmering through the water, eyes closed once more and the words ‘help me’ echoing like ripples on the water before fading away.

Carmen, the only one of us to have studied the subject in any depth, reports that a plucked turkey and its giblets are the nearest she can get to describing it, but then Carmen’s attitude to sex is surrounded with such an air of ennui that trainspotting seems positively dangerous in comparison. ‘Well, it’s one way of spending time,’ she says indifferently. (If you spend time what do you buy? ‘Less time,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly.)

‘For the neighbours,’ she says optimistically as she scrutinizes a tray of pale bloodless sausages. ‘I’m going to put them in buns with ketchup,’ she adds. ‘What do you think?’ She could turn them back into a pig for all I care but I mutter something encouraging because she has a wild kind of look in her eye as if someone’s overwound the key in her back and she’s going too fast. She starts wiping steaks tenderly with a cloth as if they were the butchered bloody cheeks of small children and says, ‘I think it’ll be nice. It’ll certainly be something.’ (Although you could say that about a lot of things.)

She turns her attention back to the sausages and stares at them fixedly then looks at me and asks, in a suspicious voice, ‘Do you think they’ve moved?’

‘What?’

‘Those sausages.’

‘Moved?’

‘Yes,’ she says more doubtfully now, ‘I thought they’d moved.’

‘Moved?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says quickly. No wonder Gordon’s worried about Debbie. He’s said as much to me on several occasions, ‘I’m a bit worried about Debs, she seems a bit … you know?’

I think he means mad.

I am saved from further discussion about the relocating sausages by a screech from the hallway that indicates Vinny wants attention.

Vinny’s on her way out to the chiropodist. Vinny rarely leaves the house so when she does it’s an occasion of some importance to her. She spends a lot of time looking forward to a glimpse of the outside world and then, when she returns, even more time complaining about the state of it.

‘I’m a shadow of my former self,’ she announces, peering through the misty patina of the rust-spotted hall mirror that Debbie has long ago given up trying to clean. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she’s a shadow of a shadow. Her bones have turned to polished yellow ivory, her skin to shagreen. Shagreen enamelled with imperial-purple veins. Warts grow on the backs of her hands like lichen. Her breath is as full of sighs as a bagpipe.

She takes a compact out of her ancient mausoleum of a handbag and rubs her cheeks vigorously with face-powder that looks like flour and, scrutinizing the result intently, says, ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ as if they’re to be found on her face rather than on her feet. She’s dressed for the outside world – a brown gabardine coat and a grey felt hat that’s a strange battered shape, like old dough that’s been punched. Vinny’s hat has an incongruous pheasant feather poking out of the top, expressing a jauntiness somehow at odds with the woman underneath. She takes her pearl-headed hatpin and sticks it into her hat, although from where I’m standing – loitering by the hallstand – it looks as if she’s just stuck it through her head.

‘Don’t smirk,’ Vinny says, catching sight of my face in the mirror. ‘If the wind changes you’ll stay like that.’ I loll my head on one side and make a face that Charles would be proud of. ‘You look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Vinny says, ‘only a lot taller,’ and deflates on to the hard little chair next to the telephone table. ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ she adds with feeling.

‘You said that already.’

‘Well, I’m saying it again.’ Vinny creaks forward and strokes one of her shoes consolingly. They’re new black lace-ups – witch’s shoes, that Mr Rice has presented to her with a flourish as a ‘token of his esteem’.

‘I’ll have to wear something more comfortable,’ Vinny says. ‘Go and get me my brown brogues, they’re under my bed. Go on – what are you waiting for?’

I poke around half-heartedly amongst the detritus and debris that composes Vinny’s soft furnishings. I swing open one of the heavy doors of the wardrobe, taking extra caution in case the whole contraption topples over and crushes me. Vinny’s wardrobe, once the Widow’s, is a curious affair. ‘A Compendium’ it announces itself in a stylized script from some time before the First World War. A ‘Lady’s Compendium’ in fact, because there was once a matching ‘Gentleman’s Compendium’ that belonged to my long-forgotten grandfather – ‘my late father’ as Vinny says, her intonation suggesting unpunctuality rather than deadness.

Vinny’s wardrobe displays its sex boldly – shelves labelled Lingerie, Scarves, Gloves, Sundries and racks designated Furs, Evening Wear, Day Dresses.

Despite the amount of Vinny’s clothing hanging on the bedstead (or, indeed, the amount hanging on the floor), the wardrobe itself contains a forest of clothes, clothes that I’ve never even seen Vinny wear. Until now I’ve only had the most cursory of glimpses into the reeking camphor insides of Vinny’s wardrobe and I’m gripped by a strange fascination and can’t help but finger the ancient crêpe day dresses, hanging limp and lifeless, and stroke the musty wool costumes and coatees that are evidence of a more stylish Vinny than the one that now snails around the house in dusty print overall and fur-lined, zippered slippers. Was Vinny young once? It’s hard to imagine it.

A long fur coat of uncertain animal insists on being fondled and a tippet brushes itself eagerly against my fingertips. The tippet’s made from a long-dead pair of foxes, unacquainted in life but now for ever joined as intimately as Siamese twins. Their little triangular faces peer out from the dark depths of the wardrobe, their black bead eyes staring hopefully at me while their sharp little snouts sniff the fusty air. (How do they spend their time? Dreaming of unspoilt forests?) I rescue them and place them around my shoulders where they nestle gratefully, protecting me from the draughts that whirl around the room like major weather fronts.

Crammed into the bottom of the wardrobe is a stack of boxes – shoe-boxes like cat coffins, grey with dust, their ends labelled with black-and-white line drawings of shoes that have names (Claribel, Dulcie, Sonia) and hat-boxes, some leather, some cardboard. In the shoe-boxes are many different kinds of footwear – a pair of cream sandals, stout enough for an English summer, a pair of patent black T-straps, itching to dance a Charleston. But no sign of the errant brown brogues.

A plaintive screeching from the foot of the stairs indicates that Vinny is growing impatient. Just then, I spy a stray shoe lurking at the very bottom of the wardrobe, a partnerless one – but definitely not Vinny’s or the Widow’s style. A high-heeled brown suede shoe with a strange piece of matted fur stuck to it, like a piece of dead cat. The inside of the shoe’s spotted with mould and a rhinestone glistens from within the little nest of dead fur. The nap on it is dark and rough and the thin heel of the shoe is splayed at an angle like a tooth waiting to fall out.

The smell of sadness which has drifted at my back into Vinny’s room, is suddenly overwhelming, enveloping me like a damp cloak and I feel quite queasy with misery.

Vinny’s squawks are growing louder, is she going to have to go barefoot to the hospital? What am I doing up there? Have I climbed into the wardrobe and disappeared?

Hurriedly, I take the shoe and close the wardrobe door and, as I turn away, notice Vinny’s brown brogues sitting amongst the clutter of her dressing-table, their tongues silent. Vinny, on the other hand, has reached a critical level and if she shrieks any louder will explode.

We know, in our bones and our blood, that the shoe has travelled through time and space to tell us something. But what? If we found its partner would it help us find the true bride (‘it fits, it fits!’) and bring her back from wherever she is now?

‘She could be dead for all we know, Charles.’ Charles looks as if he’d like to attack me with the shoe. ‘Don’t you ever think about her?’ he says angrily.

But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about her. I carry Eliza around inside me, like a bowl of emptiness. There is nothing to fill it, only unanswered questions. What was her favourite colour? Did she have a sweet tooth? Was she a good dancer? Was she afraid of death? Do I have diseases I will inherit from her? Will I sew a straight seam or play a good hand at bridge because of her?

I have no pattern for womanhood – other than that provided by Vinny and Debbie and no-one could call them good models. There are things I don’t know about – good skin care, how to write a thank-you letter – because she was never there to teach me. More important things – how to be a wife, how to be a mother. How to be a woman. If only I didn’t have to keep on inventing Eliza (rook-hair, milk-skin, blood-lips). ‘No, hardly ever,’ I lie to Charles in an off-hand way, ‘it was such a long time ago. We have to move on with our lives, you know.’ (But where to?)

Perhaps she’s coming back in bits – a drift of perfume, a powder-compact, a shoe. Perhaps soon there’ll be fingernails and hair, and then whole limbs will start to appear and we can piece our jigsaw-mother together again.

Mr Baxter’s hair has been newly cut in an army crop that bristles angrily from his scalp. Mrs Baxter’s hair, on the other hand, is softly waved and the colour of small timid mammals. There’s nothing harsh about Mrs Baxter. She favours neutral colours – oyster, taupe, biscuit and oatmeal – so that sometimes she just seems to fade right away into her pretty, chintzy living-room with its well-behaved curtain tie-backs and orderly teak display-unit. This is better than Vinny who wears funereal shades as if she’s in permanent mourning for something. Her life, according to Debbie, who’s more of a pastel person herself.

At the unexpected sight of Mr Baxter, Charles says, ‘Right, I’m off then, I’m going to the cinema,’ and before Debbie can say, ‘Oh no you aren’t!’ he’s gone. Poor Charles, he can never find anyone to go anywhere with him. ‘He should get a dog,’ Carmen suggests – the McDades have a pack of assorted dogs for every purpose – ‘a dog would go anywhere with him.’ But Charles wants someone who’ll sit in the back row of the cinema with him, someone to rendezvous with in cafés and drink frothy coffee and eat toasted teacakes, and although a dog would probably be perfectly willing to undertake these duties I think it’s a girl, not a canine, that Charles wants. (‘Hmm,’ Carmen says, frowning, ‘that’s a bit more difficult.’) Why don’t girls want to go out with Charles – because he looks so odd? Because he has strange beliefs and obsessions? Yes. In a word.

Mrs Baxter, unsure of the etiquette of something as novel as a barbecue, has brought a large Tupperware bowl with her which she proffers to Debbie. ‘I just made a wee bitty coleslaw,’ she says with a hopeful smile, ‘thought you might be able to use it.’

‘Or even eat it,’ Mr Baxter says with a sarcastic smile so that Mrs Baxter grows flustered.

More neighbours begin to troop into the garden and Debbie grows increasingly edgy about her unglowing coals. The neighbours are suitably impressed by Debbie’s barbecue grill – ‘very new-fangled’ – but less impressed by their uncooked food.

Mr and Mrs Primrose arrive with Eunice and Richard, Eunice’s unattractive brother. Mr Primrose and Debbie fall into an earnest conversation about The Lythe Players’ next production – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which they’re going to perform (‘just for the heck of it,’ Mr Primrose laughs) on Midsummer’s Eve in the Lady Oak field. Why on Midsummer’s Eve? Why not on Midsummer’s Night? ‘As if it matters,’ Debbie says dismissively.

Debbie has a speaking-part at last, playing Helena, and is constantly complaining about the number of words she has to learn, not to mention the awkwardness of those words, ‘He [meaning Shakespeare] could have made the whole thing a lot shorter in my opinion, and he uses twenty words when one would do, it’s ridiculous. Words, words, words.’

I don’t bother entering into an argument with her, or explaining that Shakespeare is beyond all possible measure. (‘Unusual’, Miss Hallam the English teacher says, ‘in a girl of your age to find such enthusiasm for the Bard.’) The ‘Bard’! This is like calling Eliza ‘our mum’, bringing them down to the level of ordinary mortals. ‘If anyone came from another planet,’ I tell Charles, ‘then it was Shakespeare.’ Imagine meeting Shakespeare! But then what would you say to him? What would you do with him? You could hardly take him around the shops. (Or maybe you could.) ‘Have sex,’ Carmen says, sticking her tongue into a sherbet fountain in a vaguely obscene way. ‘Sex?’ I query doubtfully.

‘Well, you may as well,’ she shrugs, ‘if you’re going to go to all the bother of time-travel.’

‘The who?’

‘The Lovats. On Laurel Bank. He’s your gynaecologist.’

Debbie gives a little shudder of horror. ‘Why on earth would I want to invite him? He’d be standing there, eating a steak, and knowing what I look like inside.’ An unsettling thought. But he’d be exceptional if he was eating a steak, no-one else is.

Faced, as he is, with so much ‘women’s trouble’ (especially such ‘women’ as Debbie and Vinny), one might feel almost sorry for Mr Lovat – but he is not a particularly nice person – ‘a cold fish’ in Debbie’s estimation, a ‘queer fish’ in Vinny’s – so an unusual consensus there from the warring-parties, about the fish part anyway.

Debbie has made dessert for the occasion – a sophisticated moulded concoction, Riz Imperial aux Peches. ‘Cold rice pudding?’ Mrs Primrose ventures doubtfully. ‘With tinned peaches?’

Mr Rice reappears just in time for Richard Primrose to snigger, a horrible kind of snarf-snarf noise, and say, ‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Semolina!’

I tell him this is an old joke, but Richard isn’t interested in anything a girl says. Mr Rice is beginning to look like a pudding, now I think about it, a stodgy suet rolypoly one, with his pasty skin and currant eyes. Richard himself would make a very poor pudding. He’s a bespectacled and bespotted youth the same age as Charles and a first-year student of Civil Engineering at the Glebelands Technical College. Richard and Charles have several things in common – they are both equally potholed with acne and subject to a similar red-raw shaving rash. They both also smell faintly of old cheese rinds, although this is possibly true of all boys (except Malcolm Lovat, of course), and they both have a geekish, unsocialized quality which alienates them from both girls and their male peers. Despite their similarities they detest each other.

There are some things they don’t share, however. Charles, for instance, is human (despite what he likes to think to the contrary) but Richard is possibly not. Possibly an extra-terrestrial experiment gone wrong in fact – an alien’s idea of what a human is like, put together from spare parts, the creation of a Martian Frankenstein.

He’s the complete physical opposite of Charles, thin and lanky as a vine, his body dangling from his big coathanger-shoulders like an ill-fitting suit. Lantern-jawed, in profile his face is a concave new moon.

Richard keeps trying to make sly physical contact with me, shooting out a surreptitious hand or foot and trying to rub them against whatever bit of my body he can reach. ‘Sod off, Richard,’ I say nastily to him and stalk off.

‘And this is?’ Mrs Baxter says warily to me, holding up a collop of singed flesh.

‘Poodle?’ I offer hopefully.

‘I think I might go home, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says hastily. ‘I should get back to Audrey.’ Audrey is still harbouring ‘Some kind of bug, summer flu,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘probably.’ Whenever she refers to Audrey’s ‘bug’ I imagine poor Audrey playing host to some giant lady-bird or shining iridescent beetle. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Eunice asks, annoyed at a mystery that her click-click-click brain can’t solve.

I wander disconsolately round the garden, the smell of sadness trailing at my heels – April’s perfume hasn’t been burnt up in the heat of June and lingers as a slight vibration in the air. Aren’t ghosts supposed to squeak and gibber? What is it? Who is it? I can feel its invisible eyes on me, perhaps it’s a manifestation of my adolescent energy, a mysterious poltergeist. If only Malcolm Lovat was here instead, following me around. I wish to go by Carterhaugh, to kilt up my skirts, forfeit the fee of my maidenhead and walk on the wild shores of sexual passion.

‘I saw you this morning,’ Eunice says, appearing at my side, a bloody smear of tomato ketchup on her face. ‘Pretty terrible barbecue,’ she says cheerfully, ‘I could have made a much better job of it.’

‘Where?’

‘Where what?’

‘Where did you see me this morning?’

‘In Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix, you ignored me when I waved at you.’

But I wasn’t in Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix or anywhere else, I was in my bed, dreaming about Malcolm Lovat’s head. ‘Maybe it was your double then,’ Eunice shrugs, ‘your doppelgänger.’ My self from the parallel world? Imagine if you were to come around a corner of the world and meet yourself – what questions you could ask! ‘Do you have this odd feeling, Eunice?’

‘Odd?’

‘Yeah, as if something’s not quite right …’ But then the barbecue bursts into flames and the heavens open in an attempt to quench the fire and the social gathering comes to a wet and sooty halt.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, fingering its snowy falls. ‘A shawl, for my sister’s first grandchild,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘You remember, Rhona in South Africa.’ Mrs Baxter always looks sad when babies are mentioned, perhaps because she’s lost several babies herself. ‘Never mind,’ I try to comfort her, ‘you’ll be a grandmother one day, I expect,’ and Audrey, who’s standing at the cooker making unseasonable convalescent hot chocolate, accidentally knocks over the milk pan, sending it crashing to the floor.

What’s it like to be a caw-cawing crepuscular rook ripping through the sables of night? A black bird flying high over the chimney-pots and blue-slate roofs of the streets of trees? The last rook, a straggler, dips its wing in salute as it flies overhead. What do we look like from the air? A bird’s-eye view? Pretty insignificant, I expect.

‘Shape-shifting,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’

‘Shape-shifting?’

‘Into an animal or a bird or something?’

‘What would you like to be, Charles?’

Charles, still wretched at having lost the shoe, shrugs his shoulders indifferently and says, ‘A dog, maybe,’ and then adds hastily, ‘a proper dog,’ as he catches sight of Gigi squatting indecorously in the middle of the lawn.

‘Maybe people can shape-shift into replicas of themselves,’ Charles says after a pause, ‘and that’s how you get doppelgängers?’

‘Oh, do shut up, Charles, you’re giving me a headache,’ I say irritably. Sometimes Charles’ ideas are just too complicated to bear thinking about.

‘Do you think the aliens are already here?’ he carries on relentlessly.

‘Here?’ (On the streets of trees? For heaven’s sake!)

‘Living on the earth. Among us.’

Wouldn’t we have noticed? Perhaps not. ‘What do they look like – little green people?’

‘No – just like us.’

Just because you feel alienated, I explain to Charles, it doesn’t mean you’re actually an alien, but he turns his face away, disappointed in me.

It’s quite dark by now, the moon pale and distant, a white coin flipped up into a sky the colour of washable ink. The stars are all out, sending their indecipherable messages. Starlight, starbright. Debbie comes out into the garden and asks us what on earth we are doing out here in the dark and Charles says, ‘Starbathing.’ Really, the sooner he can hitch a ride back to his own planet the better.

‘Where’s Charles?’ Gordon asks, as he passes me on the stairs. ‘He seems to have disappeared.’ He’s incongruously cheerful for having just made such a statement.

‘There’s somebody at the back door,’ Vinny says to me when I sit down. She leans forward and gives the fire a vicious poke. She’s probably imagining sticking the poker into Mr Rice’s head. Mr Rice has gone a-wooing and Vinny, who has got it in her head that there’s some kind of ‘understanding’ between her and Mr Rice, is very, very annoyed. This understanding – or, more properly, misunderstanding – has arisen from a casual compliment from Mr Rice to the effect that Vinny would ‘make someone a wonderful wife’. He might have meant the bride of Frankenstein’s monster but he certainly didn’t mean himself.

‘There’s someone at the back door,’ the bride of Frankenstein’s monster repeats irritably.

‘I didn’t hear anyone.’

‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there.’

Reluctantly, I go and investigate. There is a strange scratching noise coming from the back door and when I open it, a hopeful whine directs my eyes downward to a large dog which is lying Sphinx-like on the threshold. As soon as I make eye contact with it, it leaps up and launches into its canine routine – head cocked to one side in a winning way, one paw raised in greeting.

It’s a big ugly dog with fur the colour of a dirty beach. A dog of uncertain genetic origin, a touch of terrier, an ancient whisper of wolfhound, but more than anything it looks like an outsize version of the Tramp in The Lady and the Tramp. It has no collar, no name tag. It’s the essence of all dog. It is Dog.

It keeps waving its huge heavy paw around in a determined effort to introduce itself so I bend down and take the proffered paw and look into its chocolate-brown eyes. There’s something in its expression … the clumsy paws … the big ears … the bad haircut …

‘Charles?’ I whisper experimentally and the dog cocks one of its floppy ears and thumps its tail enthusiastically.

I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. He’s absurdly grateful.

‘Look,’ I say to Gordon when he comes into the kitchen.

‘Have you seen Debs anywhere?’ he asks, scratching his head like Stan Laurel.

‘No, but look – a dog, a poor, lost, homeless, hungry, lonely dog. Can we keep it?’ and Gordon, who looks as if he might have been playing the game of Lost Identity from The Home Entertainer says vaguely, ‘Mm, if you like.’

Of course, I know the Dog isn’t really Charles under an enchantment and anyway he comes back from wherever he’s been in time to drink Horlicks with Gordon. Neither Vinny nor Debbie are speaking to Gordon having simultaneously discovered the usurper dog finishing off the remains of supper in the kitchen. It will eat anything, it transpires, even Debbie’s cooking.

‘Vitamins!’ Vinny says. ‘Who needs them?’ ‘Everyone?’ I murmur. ‘Molecules!’ Charles says. ‘Who understands them?’ ‘Scientists?’ I venture. (Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t important.)

Vinny is so scrawny, and probably cold-blooded, that no flea ever bothers biting her. Debbie, however – plump, warm-blooded and fine-skinned – is a banquet for them, a moveable feast.

Debbie blames the Cats (there’s a musical waiting to be made), always a source of contention between the warring mistresses of Arden

(A Word about the Cats: There were no cats in Arden until the arrival of Vinny. Vinny used to have her own house, a dingy little terrace on Willow Road, but when our parents disappeared so thoughtlessly she had to give it up and come and live with us. She’s never forgiven us. She brought the First Cat with her, the begetter of the Arden dynasty – Grimalkin, a bloodthirsty, belligerent grey female from whom we have bred many a fat fireside companion.)

Debbie is not the only person who dislikes the Cats. Mr Rice is not above administering the odd kick catwards when he thinks no-one is looking, unaware apparently that Vinny has radar in her ears and eyes on revolving stalks.

Sensing her unpopularity à la lodger, Elemanzer, Grimalkin’s youngest and fiercest daughter, goes out of her way to annoy him, sleeping on his pillows when he’s out and lying in wait on the stairs to trip him and even going to the length of getting pregnant and delivering her litter in Mr Rice’s sock drawer.

For days after, we are entertained by the idea of Mr Rice delving into his drawer in the bleary light of dawn, expecting to come out with a blue and grey Argyle and screaming in horror as he discovered his socks have come to life – wriggling, damp and furry, in their little nest. And one very, very large, silver-grey tabby sock sinking its angry maternal teeth into his hand.

By the time summer comes one of those mewling socks, a handsome young kitten called Vinegar Tom, has gone missing and Vinny has become obsessed with the idea that Mr Rice had somehow had a hand in this disappearance.

Debbie and I are agreed on one thing (and one thing only); we loathe Mr Rice. We loathe the way he eats with his mouth half-open and the way he grinds his teeth when he’s finished eating. We loathe the way he whistles tunelessly through those teeth when they aren’t eating or grinding. We particularly loathe the way, at night, those same teeth grin out at us from a glass on the bathroom shelf.

I’m repelled at having to share a bathroom with him, not just because of the teeth but for the overwhelming smells he leaves behind – of shaving-foam and Brylcreem and the unmistakable (but not to be dwelt on) smell of male excrement. Once or twice I’ve encountered him coming out of the bathroom in the morning, with his dressing-gown hanging open and something slack, like a pale fungus, flopping out from its lair. ‘Oops,’ Mr Rice says with a leering grin. ‘Death of a Salesman,’ I fantasize grimly to Charles.

‘Men,’ Vinny mutters with feeling. (Vinny was herself once married, but only briefly.) It seems men fall into one of several categories – there are the weak fathers, the ugly brothers, the evil villains, the heroic woodcutters and, of course, the handsome princes – none of which seems entirely satisfactory somehow.

Wooden carts barrel across the cobblestones, fish-wives in sixteenth-century fustian are yelling their wares. A couple of dandies in velvet preen themselves on the street corner and when I approach them I catch a smell of something rank and unwashed. Will they look at me and scream? Can they see me? Can they hear me?

When I was in a time warp last time (not often we get to say things like that, thank goodness) the man I met in the field seemed to be able to communicate very well indeed, but this pair stare right through me and no matter how much I shout and jump up and down it seems I am invisible. Of course, if the laws of physics have been overturned there’s no reason for things to remain constant from one experience to the next. Chaos could break out at any moment. Probably has.

I push open the door of The Sun, or Ye Sunne, I may as well see what it used to be like. This is, after all, the underage haunt of Carmen and myself (how confused my tenses feel), we have spent many a shadowy hour lurking in the Snug when we should have been in science class. If only I had paid more attention in Physics instead of dropping it for German. The front door in 1960 is a bright shiny red one, but in this unknown year of Our Lord it is a two-part wooden stable affair. Perhaps I should introduce myself with ‘I come from the future’?

Maybe this is my own form of the moon illusion, maybe I’ve got the wrong set of references and am misinterpreting the phenomenal world?

There are only a couple of people inside, looking like extras from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, only a lot scruffier than is usual in Hollywood. They’re all staring gloomily into their pewter tankards as if they don’t know the Renaissance has ever happened.

In the shadows, in the corner of a high oak booth, there’s a man with his eyes closed, he’s quite young, in his twenties somewhere, and there’s an odd familiar feel to him as if I’ve met him in the present – or what was the present in my immediate past but is now the future, if I ever go back there. Dearie, dearie me.

The man opens his eyes and looks at me. Not through me, like everyone else, but at me and he gives me a smile, sort of lop-sided and cynical, a smile of recognition, and he raises his tankard to me and I have an overwhelming desire to go over and talk to him because I think he knows me, not the everyday, exterior me, but the interior Isobel. The real me. The true self. But just as I take my first step towards him everything vanishes, just like before.

It isn’t opening time yet and Ye Olde Sunne Inne seems to be deserted. It’s definitely the present again – beer mats and beer towels and pineapple-shaped ice-buckets. I leave the Snug and wander through the Lounge and the Public Bar and finally find the back door of the kitchens open. I come down a passage full of dustbins and open a door and find myself on the market square again and see Eunice coming out of Green Man’s Ginnel looking puzzled and I hail her from the other side of the square.

‘Where did you go?’ she asks crossly when she’s negotiated the traffic. ‘Gephyrophobia,’ she says unexpectedly.

‘Pardon?’

‘Gephyrophobia – fear of bridges.’

‘Right,’ I say vaguely.

‘Dromophobia – fear of crossing the street? Potamophobia – fear of rivers? Perhaps,’ Eunice says airily, ‘some deep-seated terror in your past is coming back to revisit you.’

What is she going on about? ‘What are you going on about, Eunice?’

‘You can have a phobia about anything, fire for example – pyrophobia – or insects – acaraphobia – or the sea – thalassophobia.’

Eunicephobia, that’s what I have. I walk quickly across the road and jump on a bus without looking at the number of it and leave Eunice weaving in between cars, trying to follow me. I personally, for no discernible reason, have discovered a rip in the fabric of time, free-falling through its wormholes and snickets as easily as opening a door.

Are there other people who are dropping in and out of the past and not bothering to mention it in everyday conversation (as you wouldn’t)? But let’s face it, if it comes right down to it, which is more likely – a disruption in the space-time continuum or some form of madness?

‘Why are you dressed like that?’ I’ve tried very hard to forget my trip down memory lane to Ye Olde Sunne and this is an unpleasant reminder.

She looks down at her dress as if she’s never seen it before and then stares at me with her little eyes. ‘Oh, dress rehearsal,’ she says suddenly as if she’s been translating what I said, ‘Midsummer what’sit.’

I could tell her that she doesn’t smell high enough to be authentic but I don’t bother. ‘Izzie?’

‘Mm?’

‘Do you think there’s something missing from this room?’

‘Missing?’

‘Or something not quite right. It’s like—’

‘It’s like it’s the same room as before and yet it’s not the same?’

She stares at me in astonishment, ‘That’s it exactly! Does that happen to you as well?’

‘No.’

‘Your head perhaps?’ I query.

‘What?’

‘Nothing?’

Will I ever escape the madness that is Arden?

Mrs Baxter knows how to produce an amazing number of variations on a Victoria sponge, each embellished with a different decoration – chocolate cakes labelled with chocolate vermicelli, lemon cakes tagged with jellied lemon slices and coffee cakes signposted with walnut halves that resemble the brains of tiny rodents. Vinny has never even baked a cake, let alone been initiated into the protocol of decorating them.

Mrs Baxter also eats a lot of her cake of course and sometimes after she’s eaten several slices back to back she’ll put her hand over her mouth and laugh, ‘Dearie me, I’ll be turning into a cake soon!’ What kind of cake would Mrs Baxter turn into? A vanilla sponge, soft and crumbly and full of buttercream.

‘No wonder you’re so bloody fat,’ Mr Baxter says to her. Mr Baxter himself has never been seen to eat cake (‘He’s not a cake hand,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly).

Mrs Baxter always gives me an extra slice of cake, wrapped in a paper napkin, to take home for Charles. Anyone watching me scurrying home from Sithean would think that there was some kind of endless birthday party taking place inside.

Today, in honour of the sun, Mrs Baxter has strayed from her usual beige spectrum and is wearing a sundress with brightly coloured red and white candy stripes, like an awning, or a deck-chair. It has thin red shoelace-straps and a lot of Mrs Baxter’s flesh is on show – her fat arms and dimpled elbows and the voluptuously maternal cleft of her cleavage in which pink cake crumbs have lodged. Mrs Baxter’s skin has turned to the colour of cinder toffee from working in the garden and she’s covered in big freckles like conkers. She looks hot to the touch and I have to stifle a desire to jump down into the chasm of Mrs Baxter’s bosom and get lost there for ever.

Mrs Baxter sighs happily, ‘It’s just right for playing Human Croquet,’ but doesn’t elaborate on whether she means the lawn or the weather or the mood. ‘Of course,’ she adds, ‘we don’t have enough people just now.’

Mr Baxter appears suddenly on the lawn, casting his menacing shadow over the tea-tray like an evil sundial and Mrs Baxter’s cup trembles in its saucer. Mr Baxter gazes into the distance, far beyond the Albertine, towards the rise of green that is Boscrambe Woods.

‘Cuppie, dear?’ Mrs Baxter enquires, holding up a cup and saucer as if to make it clear what she means. Mr Baxter looks at her and seeing her sun-hat – a red plaited-straw coolie hat – frowns and says, ‘Just come home from the paddy-fields, have you?’ and Mrs Baxter knocks over the milk jug in her hurry to pour Mr Baxter’s cuppie (they are an incredibly clumsy family). ‘Silly me,’ she says with a big smile that owes nothing to being happy. ‘Nothing better to do?’ he asks, raising an eyebrow at the bird-table. It is not the birds he is questioning though.

Mr Baxter doesn’t like to see people idle. He’s an autodidact (‘That’s how I avoided the pit,’ he explains darkly) and resents people who’ve been ‘given things on a plate’. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like cake.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks me gruffly.

‘Just killing time until the play,’ I mumble through a mouthful of cake. (‘Oh dearie me, don’t do that,’ Mrs Baxter murmurs.)

Mr Baxter sits down, rather abruptly, on the grass next to where I’m sprawled in a deck-chair, exposing his thin, hairy legs above his grey socks. He’s out of place in Arcadia, he prefers sitting on straight-backed chairs and watching parallel lines of desks stretching towards infinity. ‘There’s greenfly on the rose,’ he says to Mrs Baxter in a tone that’s suggestive of moral improbity rather than pest infestation. ‘You’re going to have to spray it.’ Mrs Baxter hates spraying things. She never flattens spiders or bashes wasps or cracks! fleas, even house-flies are allowed to buzz freely around Sithean when Mr Baxter’s back is turned. Mrs Baxter has an agreement with creeping and flying things, she doesn’t kill them if they don’t kill her.

Mr Baxter’s smell rises up on a current of warm air towards me – shaving-cream and Old Holborn – and I try not to inhale.

‘I spy with my little eye,’ Mrs Baxter says hopefully, ‘something beginning with “T”,’ and Mr Baxter shouts, ‘For God’s sake, Moira, can I get a bit of peace, please?’ so that we don’t find out what the “T” is. Perhaps it’s Theseus, even now striding across the field under the harsh suburban sunshine to exclaim that his nuptial hour is drawing on apace. ‘Oh, they’ve started!’ Mrs Baxter says excitedly, ‘I must go and fetch Audrey.’

Debbie comes home ashen-faced and at first I think this is on account of her dreadful performance – she may as well have handed the part over to the prompt – but she whispers to me over a mug of Bournvita, ‘The wood.’

‘The wood, the wood,’ she repeats, like Poe trying to write a poem, ‘in the play,’ she hisses, ‘Midsummer what’sits?’

‘Yes?’ I say patiently.

‘My thingie.’

‘Character?’

‘Yes, my character gets lost in the wood, doesn’t she?’ (The Lady Oak has heroically stood in for a thousand trees for the Players.)

‘Yes?’

Debbie looks round the kitchen, a weird expression on her face, she seems to be having a lot of difficulty putting her thoughts into words.

‘What’s wrong?’

She drops her voice so low that I can hardly hear her, ‘I was in a wood, for real, I was lost in a bloody great forest. For hours,’ she adds and begins to cry. I think she’s been too much in the sun. Shall I tell her about the ginnels and snickets and vennels of time? No, I don’t think so. ‘Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist?’ I suggest gently and she runs out of the room in horror.

So there we have it. We are both as mad as tea-party hatters.

I miss my mother. The ache that is Eliza comes out of nowhere, squeezing my heart and leaving me bereft. This is how she affects me – I’ll be crossing the road, queuing for a bus, standing in a shop and suddenly, for no discernible reason, I want my mother so badly that I can’t speak for tears. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come?

The clock on the Lythe Church chimes the witching hour. Caw. A shuffling of feathers and leaves from the Lady Oak.

Under my feet moles mine and worms tunnel unseen. A bat flits through the ocean of darkness. Somewhere, far away, a dog howls and something moves, the black shape of a figure walking across the field. I could swear it has no head. But when I look again, it’s disappeared.