'You should have thrown a bucket of water over her,' said Paul. 'She would have probably dissolved away into nothingness. Well done you, anyway.'

'But why were were you so resistant?' you so resistant?'

There was a complete silence around the table. It was Gus, the hitherto silent teacher.

'What?' I said.

'You didn't give it a chance,' he said. 'Your young therapist had a point. If one of my pupils starts to ask me about why we need to learn about history I just tell him to shut up. The very fact of him being so young and not knowing history means he wouldn't understand anything I told him. He can only answer the question by learning history.'

'Well f.u.c.k you too,' I said.

There was an awful silence but then Gus grinned and started to laugh which made it seem as if I had been witty rather than hysterically rude and a fairly good-natured argument about therapy ensued, with Erica and Gus guardedly in favour and Paul claiming that 'they' had proved that people who didn't go into therapy recovered more quickly from their neurotic symptoms than people who did. Crispin and his girlfriend were across the table whispering between themselves about something. I began to reach for people's bowls but Paul, who was sitting on my left, motioned to me to stay seated and spoke to me in an undertone.

'Are you all right?'

'I'm all right,' I said guardedly. 'Have you seen Claud?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I played squash with him this morning.'

'And?'

'He beat me three-one.'

'I don't mean that.'

'What do you want me to say? It's hard for him.' He thought for a moment and then visibly took the plunge. 'Jane, my darling, I shall say this just once. Or rather two or three things and I don't want you to say anything in reply. First, you're my sister and I love you and I will always trust anything you do. Claud is my best friend. Always has been, always will be. So it's a little complicated from my point of view but it's a minor problem. Second, I'm not going to say that Claud is a broken man, but the fact is that he's bemused, frankly, about what's happened to his life. He is genuinely baffled about why you suddenly broke up this dream marriage after twenty-one years.' Paul held up his hand to silence me. 'Please don't say anything. I'm not accusing you or criticising you in any way. I'm not saying it or thinking it. You never need to justify yourself to me. Third...' Now he paused and took my hand. I thought he might be about to cry, but when he spoke his voice was quite calm. 'The family our two families, Natalie, and those summers have meant so much to me that I can hardly put it into words. What was that poem, the one that Dennis Potter used for that film when the grown-ups all played children, Blue Remembered Hills? Blue Remembered Hills? How does it go? Hang on.' How does it go? Hang on.'

Paul got up from the table and clattered down the stairs so that the floor actually trembled beneath us. I sat at a bit of a loose end, isolated from the discussion going on around me. Gus was getting up to go. I felt a bit abject. We weren't going to be leaving together. We weren't even going to be exchanging phone numbers. He leant across the table and offered his hand: 'It was very nice to meet you, Jane,' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'I'm sorry I said "f.u.c.k off" to you. I don't normally say things like that at dinner parties.'

'That makes it even worse,' he said, but rather cheerfully. He was probably quite nice. Paul returned up the stairs, nodded at Gus who was going down, and spent too long rummaging through a book.

'Here we are,' he said. '"That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again." That's what I feel.'

'But you can can come there again. You go there almost every summer. We've just been there.' come there again. You go there almost every summer. We've just been there.'

'Yes, but I mean childhood and things like that. That's what going back reminds you of. And finding Natalie, of course.'

He held my hand and I said nothing. It was Paul who broke the silence. 'Oh, and there was something else I wanted to say.' Suddenly he looked shifty. The nonchalance seemed studied. 'That weekend, it made a huge impression on me. It seemed like one of those moments that changes your life. I thought I might make a film about the family.'

'Paul, are you serious?'

'Yes, I am. I started thinking about it when Alan made his speech. It's the right thing to do now. I feel that I've got to confront this.'

'You might have to but do we we have to confront it as well?' have to confront it as well?'

'No, it'll be all right. It'll be a good film as well. I want to get behind the camera again, get back to making doc.u.mentaries. It feels right.'

'Tired of making money, are you?' I asked teasingly. Paul never found this subject amusing.

'Look, Surplus Value Surplus Value runs itself now. Ask Crispin over there. It's a foolproof formula. It just needs a prod every now and then. I need a challenge.' He refilled his gla.s.s. He had drunk too much this evening. He began to speak in a low voice that was almost a whisper. 'Finding Natalie is what did it. She meant so much to me. She still does. For me she represents a lost innocence, everything that slips through your fingers as you grow up, all the things you felt you ought to be and didn't live up to.' runs itself now. Ask Crispin over there. It's a foolproof formula. It just needs a prod every now and then. I need a challenge.' He refilled his gla.s.s. He had drunk too much this evening. He began to speak in a low voice that was almost a whisper. 'Finding Natalie is what did it. She meant so much to me. She still does. For me she represents a lost innocence, everything that slips through your fingers as you grow up, all the things you felt you ought to be and didn't live up to.'

'That's a lot to represent,' I said warily.

The last thing I wanted was an argument about who Natalie meant most to, but Paul just looked solemnly down into his gla.s.s. People started to move around the table and Crispin's girlfriend, Claire, sat down on my right. She grinned at me. She had a bob of dark hair, half-way between Louise Brooks and a Beatle, and a round face like a teddy bear, made rounder by her granny gla.s.ses.

'When's it due?' I asked.

'G.o.d, is it that obvious?'

'No, not really. I didn't dare say anything at first. One of the worst experiences of my life involved congratulating a woman on being pregnant and it turned out that she was just fat. But if the woman who looks a bit pregnant is also wearing loose-fitting dungarees and she doesn't drink or smoke anything for the entire evening, or touch the cheese, then I can take the risk of congratulating her.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, I didn't know I'd spent an evening sitting across the table from Sherlock Holmes. What else do you know about me?'

'Nothing. Except that you look very well.'

'I'm afraid you get a point deducted for that. I've been throwing up every day. I thought it was meant to stop after the first trimester.'

'There's no guarantee,' I grinned. 'A friend of mine was suffering from morning sickness while she was in labour.'

'Thanks,' said Claire. 'That makes me feel really really sick.' She edged a little closer. 'Look, I'm really sorry about this awful thing with your sister-in-law and everything else that's been happening with you. It must be terrible.' sick.' She edged a little closer. 'Look, I'm really sorry about this awful thing with your sister-in-law and everything else that's been happening with you. It must be terrible.'

'It's all right, but thank you.'

'And you were being very funny about that woman you saw but I thought she sounded horrid.'

'I don't know about that, but she isn't what I need just at the moment. I think you would need to be in perfect psychological health to cope with Dr Prescott.'

'You seem quite robust to me, Jane. You just need someone to talk to about it all. Look, you don't really know me, and please just ignore this if it's an irritation, but we do know this therapist who is the most lovely man. He might be just the sort of person you need.'

I must have looked doubtful because Claire became alarmed.

'Alex isn't a guru, or anything out on the fringe, Jane. He won't be doing things with crystals. He's a proper doctor, he's got letters after his name and all that. The main thing is that he's just great, a really nice guy. Let me give you his number. Which I haven't got of course. Crisp, love, have you got Alex Dermot-Brown's number?'

Crispin was deep in conversation with Paul about some technical matter and only heard the question when it was repeated.

'What for?'

'Don't you think he might be a good person for Jane to talk to?'

Crispin thought for a moment, then smiled. 'Yes, I suppose so. Be nice to him, though. He's an old friend.' His Filofax was open on the table and he flicked through it and found the number.

'Here,' he gave me a slip of paper. 'Should your mission fail, Jane, we will of course deny any knowledge of you.'

Six.

The following morning I wrote a letter to Rebecca Prescott enclosing a cheque for the session and saying that I had decided not to proceed. Then, feeling foolish, I rang the number that Crispin had given me. The phone was answered and somebody said something unintelligible.

'h.e.l.lo, can I speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown, please?'

More unintelligible speech.

'h.e.l.lo, is your mummy or your daddy there?'

This achieved something at any rate as the gibberish became the comprehensible 'Dada, Dada'. The receiver was apparently s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the first speaker who gave a high-pitched scream.

'Be quiet, Jack. h.e.l.lo, is there anybody there?'

'h.e.l.lo, I want to speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown.'

'That's me.'

'You're a therapist.'

'Yes, I know.' There was a clatter in the background and Dermot-Brown shouted something. 'I'm sorry, you've caught us in the middle of breakfast.'

'Sorry, I'll try to be brief. I was given your number by Crispin Pitt and Claire um...'

'Claire Swenson, yes.'

'Could I come and talk to you?'

'All right.' He paused. 'What about twelve?'

'You mean today?'

'Yes. Somebody's gone on holiday. If that's not all right, it'll have to be next week some time. Or the week after that.'

'No, twelve will be fine.'

He gave me his address, in Camden Town, near the market. G.o.d, more disruption in the office. Not that it mattered all that much. 'Work' for me was the CFM office on the top floor of an old mola.s.ses warehouse overlooking the ca.n.a.l and the basin in Islington. The C Lewis Carew died of Aids in 1989. Now there was just me and the F, Duncan Fowler, and after the years of recession we were only just approaching a time where there was enough work for two of us. As long as I went to all the meetings concerning 'my' hostel and kept the paperwork up to date and popped into the office regularly then nothing much would go wrong.

I cycled over to the office anyway. I looked through the mail and chatted to our a.s.sistant, Gina (she's our secretary, really, but we call her our a.s.sistant to compensate for paying her so badly). Duncan came in at eleven looking as relaxed as ever. Duncan is a portly fellow, quite short, with a nearly bald head fringed with reddish curly hair and an almost excessively expansive beard. I told him about some new complications with the hostel, he told me about a housing co-op job which would earn us even less money. Still, it was nothing much to worry about. I have no mortgage, and the children are away being paid for mainly by Claud. Duncan has no mortgage and is divorced with no children and no alimony. We own our leasehold. As Duncan put it in the dark days of the early nineties, before we could go bankrupt, we would first have to get some work.

I told Duncan I was going to see my second therapist in two days and he laughed and gave me a hug and then I got on my bike. I was predisposed to like Alexander Dermot-Brown because I was able to get almost all the way from my office to his house by cycling along the ca.n.a.l. I just had to cross Upper Street and then I could make my way through the wastes of gasometers and railway land past the post office depot and leave the towpath when I got to Camden Lock. Just a couple of hundred yards or so later I was chaining the bike to the railings.

Alexander Dermot-Brown was wearing trainers, jeans and a thin, worn sweater with holes in the elbows through which a checked shirt was visible. He had a craggy jaw, almost like Clark Kent in the old comic strip, and he had wavy brown hair flecked with the first hints of grey and very dark eyes.

'Dr Dermot-Brown, I presume.'

He smiled and held his hand out. 'Jane Martello?'

We shook hands and he gestured me in and downstairs into the kitchen in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

'Would you like some coffee?'

'Lovely, but oughtn't I to be going into a room and lying on a couch.'

'Well, we can probably find a couch somewhere in the house if you're desperate. I thought we should have a chat first and see what we think about things.'

With its ceramic floor and stained-wood panelling and cupboards, the kitchen would have seemed elegant if it had been empty. But there were toys on the floor, the walls were covered with posters, postcards and children's drawings stuck haphazardly with pins and tape and Blu Tack. The walls were scarcely less crowded than the notice board, a largeish area of cork tiling above one of the work surfaces, on which takeaway menus for local restaurants, invitations, notices from schools, snapshots were attached in what looked like a whole series of layers. Dermot-Brown saw me staring around.

'Sorry, I should have tidied up.'

'That's all right. But I thought a.n.a.lysts were meant to work in a neutral environment.'

'This is is a neutral environment compared with my office.' a neutral environment compared with my office.'

He took coffee beans from the freezer and ground them, tipped them into a large cafetiere and poured in boiling water. He rummaged in a cupboard.

'I ought to give you some biscuits but all I can find are these Jaffa cakes. If I allow one for each child, that leaves one over. Would you like it?'

'That's all right. I'll just have coffee. Black, please.'

He poured coffee into two mugs and we sat down on opposite sides of the scrubbed-pine kitchen table. A smile was playing across his face as if the whole encounter seemed slightly comical to him, as if he was only pretending to be grown up.

'Now, Jane is it okay if I call you Jane? And you must call me Alex why do you think that you need therapy?'

I took a sip of coffee and felt the usual overwhelming desire. 'May I smoke?'

Alex smiled again. 'Well, Jane, one idea I have about therapy is that it's a sort of game and for it to work we both have to agree on some ground rules. One of them is that you don't smoke. I have small children in the house. It also guarantees you at least one benefit from your sessions, even if you achieve nothing else. The other benefit of the rule is that it's very easy for me to abide by because I don't smoke. There is a good chance that I'll be relaxed and in control while you're neurotically suffering from nicotine deprivation, and that's good as well, at least for me.'

'All right, I'll do without.'

'Good, now tell me about yourself.'

I took a deep breath and sketched out my situation, there, over the coffee, which he topped up, in that kitchen, my elbows on the rather sticky table. I told him about my separation and the discovery of Natalie's body. I talked a bit about the Martello family, this wonderful inclusive group that we were all meant to feel privileged to be connected to. I described my single life in London and its dissatisfactions, though I left out my s.e.xual escapade. It took rather a long time and when I had finished Alex waited before responding. His first statement was an offer of more coffee. I felt a bit deflated.

'No, thanks. If I have too much it makes me all trembly.'

He ran his finger round the rim of his coffee mug in a slightly fidgety way. 'Jane, you haven't answered my question.'

'Yes, I have. I said I didn't want any more.'

Alex laughed. 'No, I mean, why do you feel you need therapy?'

'Isn't it obvious?'

'Not to me. Look, you're having to deal with life on your own after what is it? twenty-one years of marriage. Have you ever lived on your own?'

I shook my head.