Eleanor said no, she was not a doggie sort of person. Julian said he was glad: Georgina Darcy had been. Georgina was spoken of, when at all, in the past tense. Bernard, in some respect still unfinished business, was at least accorded an existence in the present.
Liese and Leonard came to dine with Julian and Eleanor. Liese had abandoned her principles and now wore a fur coat, and Leonard made up in funny stories anything he lacked in a capacity for abstract thought.
Eleanor went out to the pantry to bring in the trifle the maid had left before going off duty. Liese followed her.
‘Eleanor,’ said Liese, ‘don’t you care any more what’s going on in Mafeking Street?’
‘No,’ said Eleanor.
‘Bernard’s had to move out of No. 93. The mortgage company have repossessed it. And he’s moved in with your father Ken and his girlfriend Gillian.’
‘Gillian? Ken was living with Gillian’s mother.’
‘She’s moved out.’
‘No wonder I have amnesia,’ said Eleanor, and dropped the glass bowl of trifle. It broke. She and Liese scooped what was eatable into a plastic bowl, rearranged it, and served it. Eleanor was the only one who cut her mouth on a sliver of glass. The sight and taste of her own blood falling on to whipped cream recalled the memory of snow, and the snowman which represented Bernard.
The next morning she called him, at Ken’s. The bill, she was glad to note, had been paid.
‘Bernard,’ she said, ‘is No. 93 up for sale?’
‘It has been for three months,’ he said. ‘Now the mortgage company own it. It wouldn’t sell because it was haunted.’
‘Only a tiny bit haunted,’ said Ellen. ‘Only by my mother.’
‘It got worse after you left,’ he said. ‘The estate agents said when people came to look over it they’d see things on the stairs, and smell dry rot, though the surveyors couldn’t find any. How are you? Why do you keep sending these divorce petitions through the post? You know I’m a Catholic.’
Eleanor said she’d better come over and see him, and her father, and her father’s new girlfriend.
‘She’s not new,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been going on for years. She’s much too good for him.’
Ken’s fingers had become arthritic and he could no longer play the banjo. Gillian had a back problem and a cataract in one eye, surprising in one so young, but Bernard said the depletion of the ozone layer and the consequent increase in ultraviolet light was causing an epidemic of cataracts. It was not a cheerful household.
Bernard said along with everything else the curse of invisibility had been put on him. He existed but did not exist. People looked through him in the street, in shops. He might as well be a little old lady for all the notice anyone took of him.
‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, ‘you are very visible to me and Julian when you stand outside our window. I wish you wouldn’t. It does no one any good.’
‘It does me some good,’ said Bernard, and smiled. He had shaved.
He was looking a little less pale and thin. Gillian was a good cook, he said, considering her one eye. She was better than Eleanor had ever been.
‘I never set out to be a good cook,’ said Eleanor.
Ken said, ‘The trouble with you, Apricot, is that you take after your mother. Unstable.’
Eleanor said to Ken, ‘The trouble with me is that I like men twice my age, the same way you like girls half your age.’
Gillian said, ‘It’s tea time!’, and sat them all down to scones, cream and jam, and chocolate cake served on rather dirty plates and tea from a grimy teapot. It seemed her one eye enabled her to cook, though not to pick up Ken’s scattered tissues from the floor, or tidy away Bernard’s many combs. But perhaps she didn’t see it as her business so to do. The combs were all matted: Bernard seemed to be losing his hair. Gillian was a stolid girl, with a pasty face and thick lips. She had pale blue, rather prominent eyes, one very cloudy.
‘You’re going bald,’ said Eleanor to Bernard.
‘It’s that curse,’ said Gillian. ‘That black magic group they set up at the college. They’ve really got it in for poor Bernard. They mean him to lose everything. You were only part of it. It’s not official now but it still goes on.’
Ken said all women were the same, they were all gullible; if Rhoda hadn’t spent all his savings on