• memories, mirrors, some maiden game
• The Blushing Bride
• Dumb Woman's Lane **
• needle-sharp, whispered the voice from the cellar
• Super 32-in-1 Pregnancy

memories, mirrors, some maiden game

The trudging girl stopped when she heard the car and looked back: as he approached, she held out her thumb. He slowed, because the brown hair that cascaded over her shoulders and down her bare arms made her look attractive, and because this was too lonely a place for a young woman to be hitch-hiking.

'Going far?' he said.

'Just the next town. Aylesbury, is it?' she said, throwing down and stamping on half a cigarette. Her voice was educated, almost Sloane, and her mannerisms were brisk, showing none of the flagging of her steps. As he reached across to the passenger door she popped momentarily round to the front of the car, came back taking her mobile from her purse, and glanced at her watch. 'Thanks,' she said absently.

He watched as she typed something while sliding into the seat. When she was finished she did up her seat belt and showed him with a smile: 'White Mazda, 4.17, Long Crendon to Aylesbury, is that your numberplate?'

'Good idea,' he affirmed, with a broader smile. 'Never know who drives along here looking at old churches.'

'Just habit,' she said, sending it. 'Now we can relax. Hi.'

'It's a bit far to walk,' Peter remarked as they got up to full speed. She was remarkably beautiful, a fine nose with a little ridge to it, thoughtful lips, expressively long eyebrows. It was a pleasure to turn and make small talk to her, and they were on a quiet road for a little while yet.

'Short cut. Well I thought it was. Across those fields,' said Catriona with a wave of her hands in both directions. She yawned and tried vainly to stifle it but it seemed too much effort.

'We're keeping you up.'

'Sorry, I've been hitching all day and now I just want to get home.'

'Aylesbury's home?'

'God no. London.'

'You haven't been trying to hitch to London all day? Or are you--'

'I was staying with friends in Birmingham. But I don't want a three-hour trip straight down the M40.'

'So you use side roads. I prefer them myself.'

'And they're safer, I think. Fewer nutters. More people like you. You're local?'

'No, I'm going to London actually. Can I take you all the way? I use back roads as far as I can.'

'Yes. Okay.'

She was almost asleep, the life deflated from her as she sank back in the seat, so he forbore. They went quietly for a few minutes, eased against a hedgerow to allow a tractor to pass, and entered a copse. When they came out Peter let slip an exclamation, and had to slow down as he passed the church. He was craning to see it, unwilling to move any of his body over her seat as he would have done if he had been alone, but when she abruptly awoke she looked first at him then out the window where he was looking.

'Norman! Oh, can we stop? You want to see it, don't you?'

'Yes!' he laughed, amazed at the vivacious and pleading creature she had suddenly become. They pulled to a halt in front of the churchyard and went towards it.

'John Hutton, 1698,' she read from a lichened and skull-topped tombstone. 'And his Dame Judith, 17.. 1710 or 1718. And some Latin I can't read.'

Peter knelt by the grave to catch light on the edges of the inscription. 'I think the middle word is omnes.'

'Non omnes moriar? No, it's too long. I love these. Beautiful typeface, isn't it?'

'You're an artist of some kind,' he guessed. This had the odd effect of her looking round at him with an incredulous expression, which after slightly too long turned briefly to laughter, then polite laughter.

'No,' she said quietly, raising herself up from her haunches. 'I'd like to be. Who knows.'

They circled the church once admiring the lancets and comparing gargoyles. There was some Roman brick near the base of the tower, and another 1690s tombstone underfoot in the porch, names faded to Ja and Eliz. It was Catriona who was most eager to get in, and turned the iron ring. The church rang dully with the door and their footsteps. They stood and admired the nave columns, almost pure Norman, then began to circle the place in opposite directions. Several times Catriona skipped over to Peter to get him to look at something she had found first: a brass to Sir William de Truherne, 1421; a crusader effigy in his own chapel; a bird's nest in the piscina.

'Architecture student then?' he asked as they shut the door behind them and walked to the car. The sun was beginning to sink. It was large and ruddy, and all the fields glowed with an autumn clarity under the faintest purple mist. No cars had passed. The last visitor to the church had been yesterday. There was barely any wind.

'Student,' she replied enigmatically. She belted herself in and curled her body as if she wanted to sleep, when her phone rang. 'Hi... Yes, fine, we've just seen this lovely church... Norman, three brasses and an effigy... Don't know, I'll have to look. Hang on. Peter, do you know where we are?'

'It was St Thomas's but I don't know where. The village is over there.'

'A St Thomas's but we don't know where... Yeah, look, I'm tired, that's the last one... Peter's taking me into London. I'll get the Tube or something... Yeah... Love you. Bye.'

'Boyfriend expecting you?'

'Sister. She worries.'

Peter considered this for a while, then answered, 'I think I'd worry if you were my sister.' As they moved into a main road and a heavy stream of traffic he continued, for she was looking quizzically up at him from heavy-lidded eyes, 'Hitch-hiking all day with strange men. Oh. Sorry, I wasn't meaning to give you my hitch-hiker lecture. I'll shut up.'

'No it's okay. If I don't like them I say I only accept lifts from women. You looked safe enough so I do my text and get in.'

'The problem with the hitch-hiking lecture is that however I phrase it seems to come out as me saying, "I am not a rapist, but...". Then they get out.'

'Oh, poor thing. Well I'm going to trust you till we get to a Tube station, cos I want to rest now.'

In another fifteen minutes there was a choice between major and minor routes, and Peter shifted off into the minor road, where a long village snaked lazily across the landscape, hay-gold fields gleaming behind the houses. In the centre was a cluster of two or three shops, a school and a church and a hall, a bus stop and a pub. The Maiden and Sun was a boxy building of no great age, but on the further side of its garden and car park Peter could see a sedgy barrier; and as he was slowing down to look closer he saw two mallards take off from behind the sedge. He looked over at his drowsing passenger.

She, alerted to an arrival by the rolling of gravel under the wheels, took it in and announced, 'That looks nice. You thinking of a beer or something?'

'Or just a cup of tea. When's the last time you had anything?'

'I can go ages without drinking,' Catriona said. 'Or eating. But if you want to stop...'

'There's a stream over there.'

They slammed their doors shut, disturbing the silence. If there were other customers inside, there were none at the bulky trestle tables running from the entrance to the river gate. They had parked at the far end, away from the only other car, and from here could confirm that silvery water flowed slowly between thicket banks. It was straightened like a ditch here and for a while either side, with a footpath leading across to a distant wood, but no sign of a bridge. As it passed away from the pub and village the stream flattened out into a purling trickle over mossy stones.

'It's like the Cotswolds, this bit,' said Catriona into the silence. A burr in the sky drew her attention to one vapour trail joining an older one gone puffy and irregular. She was reluctant to leave the car park for the too-early dimness of a pub and questionable tea.

'Come on then,' said Peter after a little while, touching her just above the elbow, very faintly and briefly as he went forward. She felt the touch. She followed him in, crunching across the car park, and absorbed the looks of the local boys playing pool, who were the only ones who paid attention to their entrance. The overhead noise was up just a little too loudly in this part of the bar, but across the other side there was a quieter room, chintz couches in faded sea-green, and large agricultural implements across the walls.

She was looking at these realising that, all of a sudden, for the first time in her life, she knew the difference between a sickle and a scythe, when Peter got her attention again. She agreed to tea, and took up the dinner menu while waiting for him to get back. It was hand-typed, foxed with use, and appetising only in the meat dishes, of no interest to her. At the end it directed her to the specials of the day. Catriona made several forays into the more obvious nooks and bars without finding a blackboard, then spotted it behind the bar, between the two great mirrors. Here she saw from her dark eyes how tousled she was, and she took a brush from her bag.

Before she could use it, her presence brought her to the attention of a stout woman emerging from the kitchen, and on an impulse Catriona agreed she did want a drink. She ordered a half of Morland's, and interrupted herself to check with Peter at the other bar. She glanced at herself in the mirrors, and him beside her, with her brush still in her hand.

They returned to their table at the same time, she with two halves and he with a tea tray; and so in sole possession of their comfortable and airy room, decorated with Coronation supplements and Pears soap adverts, they spread themselves out and began to talk. As Catriona did she returned to the food menu, tempted by garlic bread. She wondered whether they would do just that for her at this sort of time.

He was a section head in a council planning department; he'd been in a firm of builders before that; and he lectured on Wren in adult education classes. He was, she guessed, about thirty-five, and she was uncertain whether to tease him by overestimating. It would depend on how much shock she saw on his face when she revealed her own age.

'Seventeen?' he repeated, shocked. She tried to nod trimly as she watched his eyes for calculation, but it was too much effort to keep a straight face, and she dissolved into unseemly, schoolgirlish laughter.

'Big girl next year,' she said. 'University.'

'But I thought you... I'd been guessing a teacher, or student teacher, or... twenty-four I would have said.'

'My big sister's twenty-three, perhaps you'd get on with her.'

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way. I thought I'd got on well with you.'

Catriona allowed him a smile and savoured more of her beer. Refreshed, she was thinking of him more: of the subtle warmth of when he spoke of people making things to last; of whether he had cats or kits or kids at home. No wife mentioned, yet. She hadn't got so far on an adult footing with enough married men to know what they said, out here in the country, with a companion for now and a long drive ahead. Received wisdom had it they didn't mention their wives, or didn't get on with them if they did. But Peter seemed very nice, honest and gentle, nothing shifty about him.

'Married? Kids?' she said anyway.

He shook his head and seemed to shrink a little; there was a little pain in the gesture. He had wanted but had not got, freshly enough for the asking to matter.

'Boyfriend?'

Her lips twitched. She was aware the delay in answering would be odd. She finished her tea and lit another cigarette before conceding, 'Well, the guy I was sleeping with in Birmingham isn't the guy I go out with in London.'

'No business asking, sorry. But that's about as clear as these things ever are.'

'Yeah, and I hit a nerve too. Sorry.'

'Two years and I'm still bitter. Um, Catriona, are we going to get on the move soon or do you want to see about dinner here? I'm easy either way.'

They drifted out to the car park and watched a heron skip from tree to brook, and watched the evening deepen and the wan gold of the cornfields darken. Four nights later they slept together, just the once, and their pillow talk was of the rustling of a brook and the darkening of corn, the silence of a nave that had heard nine hundred years of footsteps, day by day, and the unlikeliness of encounter.

The Blushing Bride

For one whose throwaway remarks are worth keeping.

'Filling up. You're on soon.'

'Five times I read the Bible, cover to cover. Five times. I don't read the Bible through from one year to the next. I can't believe that God didn't specifically prohibit it somewhere.'

'I'm sure the bishops have been through this. Come on, get out there, it's show time.'

'Five times. I have always considered myself Old Church. Not High Church, not for flummery and tradition for the sake of it. Conservative, yes, there are some who would call me conservative --'

'John --'

'-- But I move with the times. "Who gives?" instead of "Who giveth?", that's a very sensible change; and dropping the "obey", no qualms there.'

'John, that old fool Henderson's looking at his watch.'

'He can come and find me. Ntch. Is that the last of the -- Oh, another bottle. Well done that man.'

'He's collared Annie. She's going... I can't see.'

'Not to the organ? I can't do this. Tell them I'm ill, Derek.'

'You will be if you skulk in here any longer.'

In thirty years the Rev. Mr Carter had seen his wife's pubic hair, and no other except for the occasional irruptions on television meriting a 'dear me' and a glance back at his novel. With his girlfriends from student days he had not always got that far. He was quite unprepared for how dominating the bride's luxuriance was. He had only met Penny Stewart a few times before they had come to him to plan the wedding, and could not remember whether her curls were natural. If the hair of her head had been done up, so had that profuse triangle drawing the eye in across her smooth flesh. Her arms and legs were tan and her torso wan. Slight breasts, budded in coral pink, erect, teasing, softly round.

'I'm sorry?' Mr Carter said to one of Mr Henderson, who was looking strangely at him, or strange.

At young Alan Hudd he would not look. One sight of the smirking, priapic, goatee'd beast had told him all he wished to know, and more, of what married life held in store for Penny, who had seemed such a nice girl.

He risked another glance at her before attending to his prayer book. Although he could not bring himself to look her in her face, he wondered whether there was a flush upon her chest, a muted trembling in her soft limbs, a slick of trepidation made liquid and betraying her hidden mortification as it seeped in glistening rills over the dovelike flanks.

'I'm just trying to, finding the wedding service, Mr Hendersong,' he responded to the jab in his side. The bride was awkwardly placed so that he continually saw just that most salient part of her over the top of the book as he held it out before him riffling through it, to and fro.

After the third effort he was pleased to find himself distracted by mild theological curiosity over why there were no headings to help him find his place. Could it be a relic of some printer's convention from the time of Cranmer? In this dutiful frame of mind he resolved to study the prayer book more closely next week: it had barely registered with him till now that it was a bilingual text, not that he knew much Hebrew or Greek, but now, bless me, there was so much of it that he could barely find the English.

The organ music had stopped.

Craftily he dropped the book and bent to pick it up again. It sounded heavily in the resonant silence, broken only by an unexplained squelching just in front of him.

Penny was shifting uneasily. She froze as the Rev. Mr Carter gripped her calves and climbed unsteadily to his feet, pausing to rest for breath at the height least opportune for clearing his head.

Whether the groom's pointed intervention was more out of jealousy or out of kindness to old men of the cloth, it had the vicar upright and bobbing backwards in no time.

'I voted against g-gay p-priests,' Mr Carter threatened.

Time swam, and the ancient sacred ceremony swam with it, and the whole church joined in -- pillars and corbels and hatchments, in the shimmering rose of the west window. It was all going swimmingly.

'You may now put your finger in the bride's ring,' he explained, then fainted in the excitement.

needle-sharp, whispered the voice from the cellar

It was some twenty years ago that it passed to me, and within two or three years I was the sole inheritor. I'm not sure when the old man died, though that could be looked up somewhere; and I'm not sure how old I was. Perhaps six or seven. If I was five, would the event have impressed itself on me so? I knew who Napoleon was, but I was a bright child and would surely have known that when I was five. My mother can't help me: she had never heard me mention the recording until recently, though she knew I spent a lot of time with the old man, after school, until he shut up his shop. From the earliest I can remember I have been fascinated by antiques and bric-a-brac, and could curl up amongst them, brass and oak and japanning and dust, with my nose in some brittle nineteenth-century history or storybook. The old man quickly learnt I could be trusted to treat his volumes with care, even at five: I knew how to bookmark properly, and not to bend the spines back, and where to replace them in his shelves when I had finished.

We were saddened when the fire wrecked his shop. It was the first fire I had known of nearby, half a street away, and the first I had seen the wet, blackened damage from, with its peculiar stench. Part of the back room was untouched, some of the big things along the left wall were saved, but the little counter full of hidden drawers, that was reduced to nothing. It was perhaps a couple of years earlier that he had got me to listen to the recording, because I was admiring a gramophone that had come in and that he was fitting its horn onto. He had fetched the disc from a hiding-place under his counter -- he never let me explore there, for he said he had too many delicate things, and I could handle them when I was older.

The calamity hastened his own death, though he was very old anyway. By that time I knew about death. So I never saw what else was in those drawers, precious or fragile or unique. He had seen a lot, and I estimate now he must have been in his eighties. He had never met the owner of the voice on the record, but his elder brother had. All his brothers and sisters died in Buchenwald, except the two who had starved in Łódź. Somehow he had been more resilient. After five years in a Ukrainian prison he had been allowed to move to Hungary and set up as a bookseller.

He didn't know about the recording: it wasn't that that he was interested in as he sought news of the old family house. They had not been rich, but there had been a few trinkets that a struggling middle-class family could almost call their treasures or heirlooms. His last surviving sister had told him she had seen their father hiding things in the coal-cellar. The story prompted his curiosity, even in the bitterness of a concentration camp, and he was going to ask her more about it when he thought about it again two days later. But death comes too quickly.

Gerstein was his name, I should say. We never knew his forename. I could look it up, somewhere, I suppose. Mr Gerstein wasn't even sure where the Napoleonic connexion was. He had heard his grandfather, then in a parlous state and with only a few years left to him, mention Napoleon once, saying that his own father had been at Austerlitz. That was what he repeated to me there in that dim golden shop some time after five o'clock, when I was a little child eagerly taking it in. I seem to remember its being dark out, so it must have been around winter, but I can't remember cold. Perhaps it was late autumn; perhaps he had a radiator on. He was really talking to himself, pondering once more where the three French medals and two ribbons had come from. "Had been at Austerlitz," he repeated. "Was he a soldier, or a doctor, or a little boy?"

The only explanation was in the folded yellow papers that came with it, and all they talked about was the history of the recording and the person who made it. It was in French, so at that age I couldn't read a word of it; and he was rusty and unsure. All he knew was that these had been in the bundle under the hidden trapdoor in their old house in Łódź. He had burgled his own house. The family were out, the Poles who lived there now, and he bore them no animosity for they were not the ones who had moved in after the War, nor even the ones following them. A semblance of normality had come to the country after its devastation, and houses were passed on legally. The cellar was boarded up, so he broke into it with a crowbar. He had no torch, only a box of matches, and it took him a while to find the trapdoor, which strangely he had not known about when he had lived there. Because it was so dark and he was in a panic to get away, he dragged the whole box up into the light.

There was a bit of silver plate in there, nothing to make him rich in the West where he was heading next, but more than he owned in his present existence, and once outside he was going to snatch those glittering pieces and throw the rest of the box into the nearby river. A moment's thought made him realise it was easier to keep storing them in the box than to hide their irregular shapes under his coat. So he took a few unwanted odds and ends with him, medals and a gramophone record and yellow papers, on his trip back to Hungary where a smuggler's skiff and a night voyage punctuated by tracers and bullets awaited him.

"I'd forgotten I had this," he told me. "You reminded me by playing with that machine. I've never listened to this, just kept it here with all the rest. There's a funny old story to it, if you can believe this writing."

"Tell me the funny story," I had said.

Bertrand Soligny had been ten when his father, a doctor, had taken their family out to Africa. Young Bertrand had imagined fierce, terrible, black natives with bones in their noses and teeth around their necks, and constant warfare. He was very surprised to find none of that, but a small island, where the people were white and spoke what his father told him was English. All except a small coterie who congregated around an old man. Bertrand wondered why this man, shorter than all around him, was the centre of so much attention. He would watch him brooding, strolling about the parts of the island that the English soldiers would allow him to reach, and once Bertrand spoke to him, fearfully, uncertainly.

When he told his father this, he used mimicry, as he always did. It was automatic in him to imitate the voices of his elders. It seemed to amuse them, and he had a talent for it, so at ten it was natural to play with this talent. "Always remember that!" his father told him. The boy was strangely impressed by the elder Soligny's earnestness on this point. The other French-speakers listened politely to his imitations and uttered "Remarkable!", and patted his head and offered him sugared plums.

One day, for reasons he never understood, they packed hastily, the whole family, and went to a small waiting rowboat, which in the dark and swelling waters of an oncoming storm barely got them to safety on a ship anchored around a headland. He never had a chance to say another word to the proud old man the others danced attendance on.

The storm became terrible. His brother died on board after about eight days, and in the evening of that fateful morning they saw land for the first time. Wrecked on the beach, there were some fourteen or fifteen survivors, of crew and families. They had no way of knowing it at the time, but they were on the coast of Angola. A war was brewing between two tribes, one rebelling from the sway of Portuguese missionaries and the other seeking to take advantage of the confusion. Two nuns found them, but they had nowhere to go, for the nuns had fled from a massacre. Then Bertrand Soligny's mother developed fever and died.

It was three months before they were rescued, before another Portuguese ship came to replenish the ruined settlement. His father was dead by then too, caught between wild animals and a turbulent stream: they heard his screams but never found him. But by then he had learnt he could please the nuns with his imitations too, and they especially asked for the man on the island. They put him in an orphanage when they got to Europe. At fourteen he caught cholera and was among those who survived it after weeks of fever, not the three-quarters who succumbed.

In 1830 he was once more in Paris, manning barricades in the July Revolution. He was grazed on the head by a bullet and left for dead. By the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune he was himself aged, and starvation almost claimed him. Still from time to time he would trot out his Napoleon voice, and the few words that the great man had addressed him. So it was that in 1891 or thereabouts someone romantic and visionary who had one of Mr Berliner's new recording-machines heard of Bertrand Soligny and wondered if the machine could capture any of the spirit of the Emperor. The eldest Gerstein brother, now long gone to mud and ash, was one of those named as a young child being present at that session.

I have since heard that these old discs can be so fragile that playing them once now can ruin them. Mr Gerstein played it to me three times in succession. It was crackly; it was in French. But after the second playing he looked at me with a curious turn of his eyes and asked me if I could repeat the foreign words. Always quick with language, I did repeat what little I could. So after the third hearing, now primed for what to listen for, I repeated more of it and with more confidence. He wrote down the words on a little bit of paper for me. Not all of them, not all the content of the disc, just those few seconds when the ageing speaker's voice noticeably changed to a different accent.

For some reason I kept the paper. I threw it away when I was sixteen and cleaning up after a house move, but I glanced at it again and remembered the incident, and the actual words came back to me as a voice in my head. They seemed so familiar I didn't give them a second thought. It was only about five years later that, happening to discuss old homes with Mum, Mr Gerstein's shop came up. I mentioned the recording, and she was interested. It was she who pointed out that I was now the only living person ever to have heard Napoleon's voice.

Super 32-in-1 Pregnancy

And there's always some clown, some dippy mate of your brother's girlfriend, who's got some bright idea. Well Roddy, that was his name, a real dork, says he works in some pharmaceutical company, Rhone-Poulenc or Glaxo or... I can't even remember now. Large gaps in my... ugh... hang on.

Back again. I just washed that too. Where was I? Oh yeah, Roddy the boy genius, he washes the glass dishes, I know that now, and he can't tell aspirin from weedkiller. Last night he was giving it out like he's Watson and Crick and Marie Curie combined. Says they're working on these "uppers". Ecstasy-cum-orgasm pills he called them, with a leer. Dork. Dorky dorky dorky prat.

Okay, I knew shouldn't have been fucking Steve at the party. Nobody caught us, okay, but they could easily have walked in, and I was in no condition to hide myself quickly. We'd been drinking so long I'd lost track of what time it was. Or when I last had the Pill. Oh dear. Yes. Always a little worry in the back of the mind, but you know, you get used to doing it automatically, reach into the handbag...

Well I say this for Roddy's pills. They improved the sex. I was impressed with what Steve could do with a bit of chemical prodding.

And apparently the rabbit blew up like a balloon and died with a smile on its lips.