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By Root 995 0

on to the curving rear balcony, but the blue lagoon of the Guardi still gleamed and flashed above the mantelpiece. A low cupboard in the break-fronted bookcase stood open. Funny how mere living in a house like this could have the look of a burglary. He peered down from the balcony, but there was no one in the garden. He went more calmly up the further three flights of stairs, and when his nerves about Leo took hold of him again they were almost a relief from the grown-up anxieties of guarding the house. He saw Catherine moving in her room, and called out to her. A breeze had slammed his door and his own room was stifling, the books and papers on the table by the window curled up and hot. He said, "I thought we'd had a break-in for a moment"—but the fear of it had already gone.

He picked out two possible shirts on their hangers, and was looking in the mirror when Catherine came in and stood behind him. He sensed at once her desire to touch him and her inability to do so. She didn't meet his eye in the mirror, she simply looked at him, at his shoulder, as though he would know what to do. She had the bewildered slight smile of someone only just coping with pain. Nick smiled back more broadly, to make a few seconds of delay, as if it might still be one of their jokes. "Blue or white?" he said, covering himself with the shirts again, like two wings. Then he dropped his arms and the shirts trailed on the floor. He saw night falling already and Leo on his racing bike racing home to Willesden. "Not too good?" he said.

She walked over and sat on the bed, where she leant forward and glanced up at him, with her ominous hint of a smile. He had seen her in this little flowered dress day after day, it was what she strode about the streets in, something off the Portobello Road that looked just right for the district or her fantasy of it, but now, armless, backless, legless, seemed hardly a garment at all. Nick sat beside her and gave her a hug and a rub, as if to warm her up, though she felt hot as a sick child. She let it happen, then shifted away from him a little. Nick said, "What can I do, then?" and saw that he was hoping to be comforted himself. In the deep, bright space of the mirror he noticed two young people in an undisclosed crisis.

She said, "Can you get the stuff out of my room. Yeah, take it all downstairs."

"OK."

Nick went along the landing and into her room, where as usual the curtains were closed and the air soured with smoke. The dense red gauze wrapped round the lampshade gave off a dangerous smell, and filtered the light across a chaos of bedclothes, underwear, LPs. Drawers and cupboards had been gone through—the imaginary burglary might have reached its frustrated climax here. Nick peered around and though he was alone he mugged a good-natured readiness to take control. His mind was working quickly and responsibly, but he clung to his last few moments of ignorance. He made a low quiet concentrating sound, looking over the table, the bed, the junk heap on the lovely old walnut chest. The cupboard in the corner had a wash-basin in it, and Catherine had laid out half a dozen things on the tiled surround, like instruments before an operation: a heavy carving knife, a curved two-handled chopper, a couple of honed-down filleting knives, and the two squat little puncheons that Nick had seen Gerald use to grapple and turn a joint with, almost as though it might still get away. He gathered them up in an awkward clutch, and took them carefully downstairs, with new, heavy-hearted respect for them.

She was adamant that he shouldn't call anyone—she hinted that worse things would follow if he did. Nick paced about in his uncertainty over this. His ignorance of what to do was a sign of his much larger ignorance about the world in which he'd recently arrived. He pictured the sick shock of her parents when they found out, and saw the stain on the record of his new life with the Feddens. He was untrustworthy after all, as he had suspected he was, and they had not. He had a dread of being in the wrong, but was also frightened of