Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

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THE ART OF SUCCESSFUL ENTERTAINING

On Christmas Eve I wake up slowly from a bizarre Ovidian dream in which Eunice had been in the act of turning into a cow – a real one as opposed to a pantomime one, lowing mournfully at me for help. Her lower half (gymslip and white ankle socks) was still recognizably Eunice but her head was completely bovine. The metamorphosis had just reached her arms and she already had hooves where her hands had been, but (thankfully) no udders yet. I was just thinking that Eunice gave a whole new meaning to the word ‘cowgirl’ when I wake up.

It’s a cold, sunny morning. I can hear the baby gurning and carols being sung on a radio somewhere in the house. Charles bursts into my room without knocking and asks irritably if I’ve got any wrapping-paper, ‘I’ve only got one present left to wrap and I’ve run out.’ I mutter something negative and put my head back under the covers. It’s the middle of the afternoon when I wake up again and outside it’s already growing dark. Blink and you miss the daylight at this time of the year. So much for saving it.

I struggle out of bed, feeling exhausted, it’s as if I haven’t slept at all. My party dress is hanging on the wardrobe door but it’s too early to put it on, that would be like asking an accident to happen. Despite what Hilary said about not bringing a present I have bought her a boxed set of Bronnley lemon soaps which are sitting gift-wrapped ready on my bedside table. I think it is best to smooth my passage into this sophisticated milieu of the Walshes. Although, of course, the only reason I want to be at this party is to steal away Malcolm Lovat from under Hilary’s little nose.

I come downstairs still in my dressing-gown. Debbie and Gordon are both in the kitchen, Gordon at the sink wrestling with tomorrow’s turkey, a small frozen butterball, lethal enough to fling from a catapult and destroy an entire castle and its occupants. The relation of dead poultry to male genitalia is still something of a puzzle to me but it’s hardly something I can discuss with Gordon, heroically delivering the turkey of a bloody plastic bag of giblets. We would be better off with a roasted suckling baby at our festive table, at least then there might be enough white meat to go round.

Gordon sees me and smiles. He seems to be completely ignoring his mad wife who appears to have turned into a mince pie factory – there must be a hundred of them piled on the kitchen table. I hope she’s not planning some kind of Christmas party. ‘You’re not planning a party, are you?’

‘No. Should I be?’ she asks, attacking a helpless rectangle of pastry with a fluted cutter like a little hollow crown. I decide to leave her to it.

In the hall Vinny is wheeling the baby up and down in its pram. The baby regards Vinny with a glum expression as if it had been expecting something better from life. Who can blame it? Vinny seems to be disappearing before my eyes, so thin and insubstantial that she’s more like a cloud of dense ectoplasm than a human being. She’s drying up, desiccating like a dead beetle and she’s developing a strange aura, a cross-hatching of cobwebs around her outline as if she’s fraying at the edges (it could be her nerves). Perhaps the baby’s sucking the life out of her.

The baby has a name at last, I suppose if it had been left much longer Vinny, the Keeper of Cat Names, would have ended up christening it Tibbles or something. Although Tibbles might suit it better than the new-fashioned name it’s been given – Jodi.

‘I’ll do that,’ I offer reluctantly, taking over the pram handle from Vinny who staggers off gratefully to her room, followed by several Cats who have been prowling around jealously.

Perhaps we could take the baby and leave it on someone else’s doorstep, they might be fooled into thinking it was an anonymous Christmas present. They might even think it’s a manifestation of the second coming – Jesus come back to earth as a girl. (Now that would be something.) But the baby doesn’t look like it wants to save the world, it looks as if it would settle for what we all crave in Arden – a good night’s sleep.

It’s quite a peaceful activity walking up and down the hall with the pram, rocking up and down on the handle occasionally. There’s no hurry anyway – ‘Don’t go too early,’ is Mrs Baxter’s advice, ‘there’s nothing worse than being first at a party,’ well, except perhaps for never being at parties at all.

‘I thought you had a party to go to?’ Debbie says, breaking into my reverie. I look at my watch in amazement – it’s several hours later than I thought it was. How can that be? I must have completely lost track of time. Again.

‘Time playing tricks, eh?’ Gordon laughs (almost) as I pass him on the stairs.

So. I have the shoes (white stilettos that I can hardly walk in) and the frock, of course, but what about the rest of me? I need my mother, I need my mother to turn me into a real woman, but in her absence I do the best I can, damping down the frizzled snakes of my hair with Vitapointe so that I end up smelling well basted, like Christmas dinner. Not to mind, I think, putting on the fur tippet which curls comfortably round my neck.

I am going to walk into the party and Malcolm Lovat will catch a glimpse of me, walk towards me in a dream, we’ll melt (yes, melt) into each other’s arms, he’ll peel the pink dress off me and inflamed by so much naked flesh we’ll swoon into – why don’t I have a mother advising me against such a rash course of action? (I’m sixteen, for heaven’s sake, I’m a child.) Why isn’t my father asking me where I’m going as I fly so eagerly down the stairs?

‘Where are you going?’ Gordon asks.

‘Just out,’ I say airily and a little frown pinches his brow. ‘I’d give you a lift,’ he says, ‘but – ’and he indicates the kitchen at his back, now so full of mince pies that they’re rolling out of the door. ‘It’s OK, I’ll get the bus,’ I reassure him hastily.

He reaches out and straightens my coat collar. But I have no time now for such tendresse, I am away to forgo my virtue and the clock’s upbraiding me with the waste of time. ‘How are you going to get back?’ Gordon shouts after me. ‘There’ll only be a skeleton bus service tonight.’

‘It’s OK. I’m getting a lift off Malcolm Lovat,’ (there’s nothing like being optimistic). Although the idea of a skeleton bus service has a certain novel – if somewhat ghoulish – attraction.

The Walshes’ house turns out to be a gracious Georgian affair with pillars and a portico. My chest is tight with party anticipation. I pause for a second at the gate to savour the air of excitement, all the lights are on in the rooms and a tree in the garden has been strung, not with the garish coloured lights of the seaside prom, but with tasteful white globes like bright little moons. The wrought-iron gates at the foot of the driveway are wide open and on one of them is hung a large holly wreath, embellished with a red ribbon bow, a badge of cheer and festivity to welcome us partygoers. I walk up the path, dress rustling, take a deep breath, and ring the doorbell.

The door is flung open as soon as my finger touches the bell, as if someone has been standing behind it waiting for me. Taking the role of footman is a frog-faced boy I have never seen before who smiles breezily at me and says, ‘Hello there – whoever you are.’

I certainly haven’t arrived too early, the house is buzzing with chatter and excitement and svelte girls – all of them spilling over with self-confidence and spilling out of expensive dresses which are definitely not hand-made. ‘Go in the living-room!’ the boy at the door bellows cheerfully at me above the noise, pointing at a doorway on the left from which The Shadows are twanging loudly.

Inside the living-room Hilary’s parents – ‘John and Tessa’ – stand smiling, as if they’re part of a wedding reception party, only they have their outdoor clothes on. Dorothy, Hilary’s older sister, is hovering around next to them, a vision in lemon tulle.

‘We’re going to leave it to you now,’ Mrs Walsh laughs gaily, ‘you young things all together, while we have to go to the boring old Taylor-Wests’ do, I really rather envy you.’ Who this statement is addressed to isn’t entirely clear but as the nearest person I feel a duty to laugh and nod sociably as if I know just what she means. Mr Walsh gives me a funny look and, turning to Dorothy, says, ‘Now, Dotty, you’ve got the Taylor-Wests’ phone number if you need us. Just remember, don’t turn the music up too loud and make sure you give all these poor fellows a Christmas kiss.’

‘Dotty’ laughs graciously and says, ‘Don’t you worry about us, Daddy, you get yourselves off – and have a wonderful time!’

So this is how normal families behave, I always knew it! (Why, they might even be happy.) Oh, how I love John and Tessa and Dotty and Hilary. Where is Hilary? Not that I’m really interested in Hilary, but she is the thread that will lead me to the object of my heart’s desire (Prince Malcolm). ‘Where’s Hilary?’ I ask in my politest voice and Dorothy turns to look at me and smiles indulgently as if I’m a quaint but backward relative. ‘I think she’s in the kitchen with the fruit punch,’ she answers and then laughs uproariously at this ‘joke’. ‘That didn’t sound right, did it?’ and Mr and Mrs Walsh laugh as well, bright, tinny laughter that could set my teeth on edge if I wasn’t in such a festive mood.

Mrs Walsh pulls her mink coat (the foxes at my neck flinch in distress) closer around her body and kisses Dorothy’s cheek goodbye. I’m half-expecting her to do the same to me but her eyes gloss over me as she turns to Mr Walsh and trills, ‘Come on then, Johnny, we’d better leave them to it.’

Hilary is indeed in the kitchen with the fruit punch, doling it out with a glass ladle in a very ladylike way, like an aristocratic WVS woman. ‘There you are, Isobel,’ she says, giving me a charitable kind of smile. The glass punch cups have tiny glass handles that are impossible to hold. I hand over the gift-wrapped soaps, ‘I brought you a present,’ which she takes cautiously, as if the box might contain something venomous. She puts it down without unwrapping it, turns her back and starts fiddling with a plate of Ritz crackers that have been given sophisticated party toppings that Debbie would envy – bits of Gouda and cocktail onions, stuffed green olives and tiny shiny black fish eggs like fleas.

I sip my fruit punch awkwardly, trying to stop the little cup slipping out of my big hand. It tastes, rather disgustingly, of orange squash and Ribena. Just then the captain of the football team, a loutishly handsome boy called Paul Jackson, comes into the kitchen, winks at me and pours an entire bottle of vodka into the fruit punch. When Hilary turns round he stuffs the bottle into his jacket pocket and smiles at her. She smiles back and says, ‘Canapé, Paul?’

Hilary and Paul seem very interested in each other and not very interested in me and so I help myself to some of the newly fortified punch (which now tastes of orange squash and Ribena, with a hint of nail varnish remover – a slight improvement) and slope off to try and find somebody who might be interested in me, like Malcolm Lovat, for example.

Everyone at this party seems to know everyone else and yet I know nobody – I’ve certainly never seen any of these people in school, where have they all come from?

The Walshes‘ house has many mansions and I wander through the different rooms, each one alive with chattering party-goers, each one presenting a different tableau of conviviality. Trying to infiltrate these hard knots of people is like trying to get into a rugby scrum. Emboldened by anonymity, I try varying social tactics. ‘Hello, I’m Isobel,’ I say shyly on the outskirts of one group – and am completely ignored. Perhaps I’ve accidentally put on my cloak of invisibility.

‘Hello, my name’s Isobel, what’s yours?’ I try, more loudly, on the edge of another group and everyone turns round to look at me as if I’m an unwelcome imbecile. There’s no sign of Malcolm Lovat anywhere.

I overhear someone say, ‘God, have you seen that dress, what does she look like?’ and the other person replies, ‘A strawberry tart,’ and hoots with laughter. Do they mean me? Surely not. I slink back to the kitchen. Hilary has disappeared (if only) and been replaced by her brother Graham who’s grinning at me in an odd way. ‘Hello, Is-o-bel,’ he says in an affected kind of way.

Graham’s with a group of his college friends, all dressed in sweaters and corduroy jackets and stripy scarves just in case anyone mistakes them for anything else. To my horror I suddenly realize that one of them is Richard Primrose.

‘Surprise,’ he says, snarf-snarfing.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Graham, my good friend here,’ he says, draping his extra-long arm around Graham’s shoulder in a drunken way, ‘invited me, of course. And I told him to invite you,’ he laughs, jabbing in my direction with his finger. He can hardly stand, he’s so drunk. ‘This,’ he says, gesturing to the rest of the group, ‘is my kid sister’s friend,’ his voice drops to an artificial whisper, ‘the one I was telling you about.’ They all look at me as if I’m an exhibit in the zoo and I feel myself blushing to a shade that probably accessorises quite well with my dress.

They crowd around me, one of them says, ‘Hello, Is-obel, my name’s Clive,’ and another one says, ‘Hi, I’m Geoff.’ This is amazing, to be the focus of so much male attention and for a deluded second I imagine the dress must be weaving its magic and I’ve been transfigured into a magnetically attractive person. They are so close that I can smell the alcohol fumes coming off them, more beerily pungent than just vodka-laced punch. One of them puts his arm round my waist and laughing and smirking, says, ‘Well, Is-o-bel, we’ve all heard what a goer you are. How about giving me a try?’

‘Goer?’ I repeat, mystified, wriggling out of his unpleasant embrace. ‘Goer? What do you mean?’ In my mildly befuddled brain I wonder if a ‘goer’ isn’t some kind of snake – or is it an island? ‘Goer?’ I puzzle to the nearest boy? (Clive, I think, but they’re indistinguishable really with their little beards – you can just tell they’re all jazz fans.)

‘Yeah,’ he says, fingering the edge of one of my cap sleeves, ‘we’ve heard how accommodating you are, Is-o-bel. Izzie-Wizzie, let’s get busy.’

‘Old Dick here,’ another one of them says, nodding his head in Richard’s direction, Richard sniggers, ‘has been telling us that you do anything, Is-o-bel.’ He snorts with laughter. ‘Things that nice girls don’t do.’ ‘Nice girls,’ another one chuckles and mimes being sick.

‘Not like Ding-Dong here,’ another one, possibly Geoff, says (they’re as numerous as mince pies). ‘We’ve all heard what Dick gets up to with you, Ding-Dong.’

‘Yeah, pussy’s in the well,’ another one of them leers. The foxes at my neck growl protectively.

I glare in disbelief at Richard. ‘What on earth have you been saying about me?’ He has the grace to look slightly shame-faced but at that moment Dorothy strides into the kitchen with a tray of dirty glasses and the pack of boys all wheel round to watch Dorothy’s magnificent breasts and bottom. ‘What an arse,’ one of them sighs quietly and Dorothy says, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Isobel!’ with a disgusted expression on her face, before sweeping out again.

Slightly chastened for only a moment by Dorothy’s commanding presence, the baying pack now close in on me in a way that’s really quite frightening. They’re all built like half-backs and I don’t think that the fox tippet’s going to be an adequate champion if it comes to a contest between us. Richard’s keeping his distance on the outside of the circle, reviewing my discomfort with a supercilious smile. I vow to kill him at the first opportunity.

One of them starts singing, Ding-dong bell, pussy’s in the well, and Graham makes an amateur pass at my sweetheart neckline. Flight’s the only solution here and I turn to one of them and give him a hefty kick on the shin before shouldering him out of the way and heading out of the back door and into the garden.

I’m expecting the Walshes’ back garden to be as tamely suburban as the ones on the streets of trees, but it resembles a stately home in its landscaped vastness, it’s like unexpectedly entering another dimension. (Appearances can be deceptive.)

I sprint across the grass as fast as I can but my movements are hampered by the heels on my shoes and the large volume of pink I’m wearing, and I haven’t got very far when Graham does a rugby tackle on me, sending me crashing on to the frosted grass of the lawn. His hand slips down into the bodice of my dress, determined apparently on this particular goal, but I manage to jab him hard in the ribs with my left elbow and he rolls off me, yelping with pain. I have lost one of my shoes by now, and I hastily kick off the other one as I scramble to my feet.

Up and running again, I make for the far end of the garden, thinking there might be a gate out onto the street somewhere. Glancing behind, I see two of them racing across the grass after me. Why is this happening to me? I’m supposed to be waltzing rapturously in Malcolm Lovat’s handsome arms not running for my virtue.

I’m running now over a smooth, flat piece of lawn and only realize that it’s not an ordinary lawn when I trip over a croquet hoop and thud heavily to the ground. (Maybe this is what The Home Entertainer means by Human Croquet.) One of the boys is on me now, hanging on to me round the waist as I struggle to get up. I wrench myself free and hear something rip. Maybe it’s his head coming off.

I set off again at a gallop, the two boys hallooing and tantivying behind me. I notice a big silver birch growing by a perimeter wall and veer over to it thinking that I might be able to scramble up it and on to the wall but when I get to it I discover that its branches are too high to reach. ‘Gotcha, Ding-Dong!’ one of the boys shouts.

I’m done for. All I can do is stand and try and get my breath back, I feel sick from exertion and can’t raise a scream no matter how hard I try. It’s like being trapped in a nightmare. I lean against the trunk of the silver birch gasping for air like a dying fish and send up a small silent plea for help. Why do I have no protector in this world, someone watching over me?

I can’t even move, my legs feel as though they’re full of lead shot and my feet are rooted to the ground. One of the boys, Geoff, I think, runs straight up to me and stops, the mad Dionysian light in his eyes turning to confusion. He seems to look right through me. The other one, Clive, runs up to join him, and then bends over double to get his breath. ‘Where’d she go?’ he asks, panting. ‘This way, somewhere,’ Clive says, looking around everywhere except at me. ‘Fucking little prick-teaser,’ he adds and puts his hand out on to my left shoulder and leans his weight against it as if I’m just part of the tree.

But when I glance down at his hand, I see that where my left shoulder should be, where my right shoulder should be – where my entire body should be, in fact – is the silvery, papery bark of the birch. My arms are stiff branches sticking out from my sides, my previously bifurcated legs have turned to one solid tree trunk. I would scream now, but my mouth won’t open. Call me Daphne.

Everything begins to grow dim and blurred at the edges and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the cold ground, underneath the tree, with no sign of any of the boys, and Hilary marching across the lawn towards me. ‘What on earth are you doing out here, Isobel? You haven’t seen Malcolm, have you? I can’t find him anywhere.’

I trail back into the house on Hilary’s heels. There seems little point in telling her that I’ve just recently turned into a tree. I am not what I am. I am a tree therefore I am mad, a mad person subject to massive delusions and hallucinations. ‘Having a nice time?’ Hilary asks dutifully, her eyes already scanning the kitchen for someone else to talk to other than me. ‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ I reply, taking a cocktail sausage from a Prima cabbage that’s stuck all over with sausages on sticks so that it looks like it’s just come from outer space.

I go up to the first-floor bathroom to try and clean myself up a bit. There are twigs and dead leaves in my hair, my stockings are laddered to shreds and my stiff net petticoat is in tatters. This must be what ripped during my ordeal out in the back garden. The pink dress is no longer the colour of sugar and spice, it is now the pink of pigs and embarrassment and tinned salmon.

I remove the ragged petticoat from the dress with one final rip. A couple of dead leaves are caught in the holes of the net. I look around for a bin but there isn’t one so in the end I stuff the petticoat behind the hot-water tank in the airing cupboard. The tank isn’t lagged and is giving off an incredible amount of heat, bubbling away like a particularly perverted medieval torture instrument. It’s huge, Hilary would fit inside exactly.

When I come out of the bathroom I almost trip over Hilary, who’s now locked in a swooning embrace with Paul Jackson, the captain of the football team. She seems to move around the house at a rapid speed, perhaps she has a doppelgänger, a kind of body-double standing in for her during the more tedious moments. Not that her clinch with Paul Jackson looks exactly tedious – his hand’s thrust up her skirt and his knee is pushing her legs apart. I wonder what Mr and Mrs Walsh would say if they could see her now. Had they any idea how much (if any) alcohol was going to be consumed on their premises? Or how much debauchery was going to be unleashed the minute their backs were turned? I doubt it very much somehow. Still, it’s encouraging to see Hilary being unfaithful to Malcolm, she seems indeed to have forgotten all about him. She looks as though she’s about to throw up and when she comes up for air reveals a vivid love-bite across her windpipe, I almost expect to see blood on Paul Jackson’s teeth. ‘Isobel,’ she slurs, trying to focus on me and going cross-eyed with the effort. If only Malcolm could see us side by side now – it would be only too obvious who was the right girl for him. (Me.)

‘Isobel,’ she repeats with some effort, ‘have you seen Graham?’

‘Graham?’

‘Graham, my brother,’ her head lolls forward on to Paul Jackson’s shoulder, ‘insisted you were invited.’

‘Did he? What as – the entertainment?’ I ask her indignantly, there’s only one reason he wanted me and that was because of the lies Richard has told to get his own back on me. I start explaining this to her but she’s dropped off to sleep and is snoring pig-like and Paul Jackson is already twanging her suspenders again. He catches my eye and says, ‘Sod off.’ So I do.

I head down to the living-room again. Out in the hall, a big grandfather clock strikes the half-hour – half-past eleven – where has all the time gone? (Where does it go? Is there some great time sump at the bottom of the world?) My sojourn as a silver birch must have disposed of hours of it.

A lot of changes have taken place in the living-room since I was last in it. Gone are the innocent Shadows, the bright overhead lights, the junior cocktail party chit-chat. Now it resembles nothing so much as an inner circle of hell – the dark writhing shapes, the tortured moaning noises of people in extremis – and it takes several seconds for the dark shapes to resolve themselves into necking couples – standing, sitting, lying – all fumbling at each other with orgiastic enthusiasm.

In the hallway someone’s being sick, and Dorothy, also ravaged by drink by now but still immensely practical, gets the vacuum cleaner out and starts hoovering up the vomit. I debate with myself whether I should tell her what a bad idea this is but decide to keep my meagre housekeeping tips to myself when she hoovers in my direction and snarls, ‘You’re really a bit of a tart, aren’t you, Isobel? And keep your hands off my brother, you’re not his type.’

Graham is on the stairs behind Dorothy, pumping up and down on top of a big-frocked girl, who presumably is his type, and I push my way past their intertwined bodies and run up the stairs to try and have one last attempt at finding Malcolm Lovat.

The first door I try appears to open into Mr and Mrs Walsh’s bedroom, huge twin beds like barges dominate a room heavy with brocade. The next room reeks of Dorothy. It’s frilly and girly and organized on lines of military precision – a shelf of science books, fiction in alphabetical order and toiletries laid out on the dressing-table with mathematical regularity. If a single Q-Tip moved in this room she would know about it.

I go up to the next floor and try another door. This bedroom is frilly and girly too but sporty as well – tennis rackets, sportswear and riding-hats everywhere – this must be Hilary’s room. On the bedside table there’s a photograph, head-and-shoulders, of a horse and on the bed a huge assortment of dolls – dolls with baby faces, dolls in full Highland regalia, dolls in flamenco dress, moppety rag dolls and antique dolls with yellowing ringlets and astonished expressions.

And there, incongruous amongst the dolls, lies the much bigger body of a supine Malcolm Lovat. He greets me cheerfully, and drunkenly, waving a half-empty bottle of gin in his hand. ‘Hello, Izzie.’

‘I didn’t think you were here.’ I take a swig of neat gin from the green bottle, slugging in a cavalier fashion, and I’m quite pleased with myself for not choking to death. ‘Smell that,’ Malcolm says, suddenly rolling over and plunging his face into the pillow, ‘essence of horse!’ How we laugh!

He pats the space next to him on Hilary’s (almost certainly) virginal divan and I squash myself into the space. ‘That’s a big dress,’ he says pleasantly and puts his arm round my shoulder and we lie there quite companionably, drinking gin and assigning imaginary personalities to Hilary’s dolls, most of which are extensions of her own character.

We’re approaching the bottom of the gin bottle now. The inside lining of my body feels as if someone’s set a match to it, a not entirely unpleasant sensation, and the distracted globe of my brain has turned into porridge. Most of Hilary’s poor dolls have been kicked to the floor by now. Or have jumped to safety.

I think I drift in and out of consciousness a few times. Time seems to have become slower, more viscous somehow, as if the molecules of time are indeed capable of changing state and are no longer an invisible gas but a flowing liquid (perhaps that’s the Heraclitean flow). ‘Kiss me,’ I mumble suddenly, emboldened by gin and the strange fluidity of time. Malcolm opens his eyes, I think he’s been asleep, and hauls himself up into a cobra position on his elbows and gazes at me. ‘Please,’ I add, in case he thinks I’m being impolite. He frowns deeply at one of the few remaining dolls – a baby-doll about the size of ‘our’ baby – and says, ‘Isobel,’ very seriously.

This must be it then – he’s realized the cosmic links that bind us, he’s about to kiss me and open the seals on our love – we will be transported to some transcendent place where the music is by the spheres and the lighting by Turner – I hope I don’t turn into a tree before this can happen, or go flying through time again. I close my eyes hopefully. And pass out cold.

When I open my eyes again the room is dark and someone has covered me up with Hilary’s eiderdown. Someone has also been busy gluing my brain to the inside of my skull and when I try and sit up it does its best to wrench itself free in a way that’s quite, quite horrible. For extra effect, the fibres of my brain have been soldered together. The bedroom door opens and I close my eyes against the shock of the light.

When I force them open a slit I can see a furious Hilary, mascara and lipstick smudged, hair a haystack, skin deathly pale (presumably because Paul Jackson has drained all the blood out of her body by now) staring at me in repulsion. ‘What are you doing on my bed, Isobel?’ I make an attempt at sitting up and break out in a cold, clammy sweat. Feebly, I try to wave a warning at Hilary with my hand because I know she isn’t going to want to see what’s about to happen.

But too late – I clutch my forehead in a vain attempt to staunch the throbbing and lean over the side of the bed and empty what remains in my stomach (bits of gin-soaked cocktail sausage mainly) all over Hilary’s startled dolls.

Hilary starts screaming at me, a torrent of ladylike invective that pours from her mouth in a tumbling stream of toads and ashes.

‘Drop dead,’ I moan at her.

Mr and Mrs Walsh come home not long after (‘What’s happened to the Hoover, Dotty?’) and turf out the remnants of the party in disgust, including me, especially me. ‘Get out,’ Mr Walsh hisses nastily. ‘God only knows what else you were doing in my daughter’s bedroom. I can tell your sort, you’re nothing but a whore.’ How unkind. There’s no sign of Malcolm Lovat, which isn’t entirely a bad thing, because at least that means he isn’t in Hilary’s arms.

My foxes are waiting for me on the hall table and I pick them up and stagger out into the night – a night glazed with frost and freezing cold, so that I almost expect Mr Walsh to shout, ‘And never darken my door again, young lady!’

‘And I don’t want to see your face in my house again, you little tart!’ he shouts, in character. I get as far as the wrought-iron gates before being overtaken by the most overwhelming lethargy. I am indeed a fallen woman, or at any rate, a fallen girl – fallen by a huge laurel bush by the wrought-iron gates, fallen and crawled under and curled up and snoring as quietly as a hedgehog, determined to hibernate. Snow begins to dust my face like cold icing-sugar.

* * *

I’m rudely awoken by Malcolm Lovat trying to stuff me into the passenger seat of his car and muttering, less charitably this time, about ‘what a bloody big dress’ I’m wearing. ‘That’s how people die, you know,’ he says crossly, starting up the engine and backing away from the Walshes’ driveway. My brain is no longer glued to the inside of my skull, now it has shrunk to a hard, gin-pickled walnut and is rattling around, bouncing off bone, unanchored by membrane.

‘Hypothermia,’ Malcolm says, as if he’s having a stab at naming our abandoned baby. We provide the perfect cautionary tale against alcohol as we weave a delicate drunken path along the icy road. ‘Bloody hell,’ Malcolm exclaims grimly as we occasionally skate across the road and pirouette and spin as if the car’s turned into a tipsy Sonja Henie.

I have several attempts at lighting up a cigarette and on the fourth, successful, attempt drop a lighted match on my dress and a large pink patch of it instantly melts and I narrowly avoid turning into a human torch. How shall I die? Fire or ice?

Somehow or other we end up at the top of Lover’s Leap once again but Loving and Leaping are the last things on our minds, wading through blood up to my knees would be easier and we both fall asleep the second the engine is turned off. When I wake up it’s cold. A drizzle of saliva seems to have turned to ice on my chin and my eyes are crusted with sleep. I root around hopelessly in the glove compartment and am surprised to find half a packet of stale custard creams which I fall on like an animal. After a while I nudge Malcolm awake and offer him one. It’s such a shame that I’m in no fit state (my head’s about to fall off) to sit and appreciate his beautiful profile, the curve of his lip, the black kiss curl that loops around his ear. I open the car door and throw up on the ground.

We set off again on another seemingly endless journey. The streets of Glebelands are deserted, everyone is in bed waiting for the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Our odyssey takes us once more past the street where the Walshes live, but here, unlike the rest of town, is the most extraordinary activity. I suppose if we hadn’t been asleep on Lover’s Leap we might have seen, from our vantage point, the fire engines racing across town, seen the flickering flames burning up the Walshes’ house down in the little model town at our feet, heard perhaps the ringing bells of the desperate ambulances trying to save the occupants.

The street is choked with fire engines and ambulances and policemen. We stumble out of the car and hang around the wrought-iron gates like sightseers. The red ribbons on the holly wreath hang limp in the still air. There is ash and soot in the air, the smell of charred frocks and canapés. I remember suddenly the net petticoat stuffed so carelessly behind the boiling water tank, imagine it catching and spreading to the neat stacks of sheets and towels, and eventually engulfing the entire house. Everyone has safely escaped the inferno it seems, except –

‘Richard and Hilary,’ Malcolm says, his voice blank with disbelief.

As we approach the streets of trees it begins to snow properly. At first the little fluttery flakes stick to the windscreen, crystallize and melt and are washed away by the windscreen wipers, but soon the flurry of snowflakes grows bigger and they begin to cling to passing objects, aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees.

Instead of turning into Chestnut Avenue, Malcolm drives up Holly Tree Lane. We’re both so numb with shock at the sudden demise of Hilary and Richard that I don’t think we really know where we’re going. (Drop dead – did I really say that to both of them?)

The snow is now swirling around in the darkness in a menacing kind of way. We are driving past Boscrambe Woods, the trees an inky black mass at the side of the road. Abruptly, Malcolm swings the car into one of the entrances to the woods and parks in front of a row of fire-beating brooms that poke up towards the stars. They’re in the wrong place. There could be no fire in these woods tonight. The ground is hard as iron, the waters in the streams turned to stone. When Malcolm turns the engine off it’s quieter than anything I’ve ever heard.

‘Come on,’ Malcolm says, opening the car door, even though the snow is now blowing a blizzard. Reluctantly I tramp into the wood behind him. In the wood there is no blizzard, everything is still. The snow must have been falling for hours longer in the wood than outside the wood (how could that be?), for snow is piled up everywhere – Christmas-card snow, winter-wonderland snow, crisp and virginal. The bare branches of the deciduous trees, rimmed with snow, spring and arc overhead like the vaulted roof of a great cathedral. It is like being in church, hushed and reverent, but more spiritual.

The wood is full of evergreens too, firs have gathered from all over the world – the Norway spruces (abies picea) and lodgepole pines (pinus contorta), alpine firs (abies lasiocarpa) and European silver firs (abies alba), the balsam fir (abies balsamea) and the beautiful noble firs (abies procera) crowd together under their snowcoats like an eternal Christmas waiting to happen.

We plod along, silent in the silence. It’s like being the last two people in the world. Perhaps we are, perhaps we’ve entered a time warp that’s propelled us forward to the last, cold days. Only in the wood can you truly lose track of time. A rabbit bounces across the snow in front of us.

Ahead of me, Malcolm stops suddenly and, turning to me, puts his fingers to his lips. A red deer, a female, is standing ahead of us on the path, sniffing the air for us, knowing we are here but not quite seeing us. Then, in one startled leap, she’s gone, crashing through the frozen branches so that the sound of snapping twigs echoes noisily in the cold silence around us.

‘That’s lucky, I expect,’ Malcolm whispers, and puts his arms round me. His breath is warm on my frozen cheek. This is it then. I close my eyes expectantly … ‘Time to go home,’ he says suddenly, and ploughs back through the snow, dragging me by the hand. I expect if we weren’t still full of Beefeater’s anti-freeze we’d both be dead of the cold by now.

We find the car covered in a thick eiderdown of snow and have to brush it off with our poor ungloved hands. The tyres spin on the snow as the car reverses on to the pristine road. The snow has stopped falling now and we slip and slide down the twisting road. ‘I think you’re the only person I can be myself with,’ Malcolm says, more articulate than he’s been for hours. Why does everyone have so much trouble being themselves?

He glances across at me to check whether I understand what he’s trying to say and from nowhere a deer suddenly appears ahead of us, caught in the headlights. Nightmarishly mute, I lift my hand and point at it. Malcolm carries on blithely about his true self and his problems finding it but then he follows the direction of my pointing finger and horrified stare and says, ‘Oh shit—’ It looks exactly like the deer we’ve just seen in the wood (although they all look alike really) but this is no time to be making comparisons. Not such a lucky deer, after all. Time starts to slow down. Malcolm slews the car to one side to try and avoid the deer. I can see it clearly – its eyes rolling, wild with terror, its muscles moving and rippling beneath its velvet skin as it gathers itself into one great desperate leap.

The deer jumps free. And so does the car – taking off, jumping clear of the road, flying slowly through the air, gliding down the steep bank at the side of the road as if it had wings, all in perfect silence, as if the soundtrack to the world has been turned off, but then it hits the ground for the first time and sound returns suddenly – the noise of metal rending and glass breaking, the sound of the world ending, as we bounce off the snowy ground, splintering a young tree, crashing through gorse in a mad flurry of snow, the car an unstoppable wild animal intent on self-destruction before finally being tamed by a big sycamore standing sentinel in the frozen field.

Everything’s quiet once more. No-one will ever find us here. I feel very tired but also very peaceful. The words to ‘Silent Night’ run through my mind. We could sing to keep our spirits up but it seems that neither of us is capable of opening our mouths; when I try to make the words come out they stick to my tongue. I can’t move my head at all in fact. Perhaps time has changed state again, now it is a solid, a great block of ice that has us trapped, frozen inside like flies in amber.

By concentrating very hard on the muscles in my neck I manage to turn my head a few inches. I can just see Malcolm. His face is crazed with blood that glistens in the dark. He’s trying to speak as well. After a long time I finally understand what he’s trying to say. The words come out slowly, mis-shapen, grating in the silent night. ‘Help me,’ he says, ‘help me.’ But I know it’s no good because he’s already dead.

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