Light Years E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 573

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

Lottie Lucas is the luckiest person she knows. She has looks, money, three houses and a teenage son she adores ...So why is her husband Harold walking out on her? Light Years is also about zoos and the zodiac; the seasons and the stars; and how humans see the natural world. It is a novel about the possibilities of happiness, a surprising and beautiful contemporary love story.

Leseprobe

MAGGIE GEE

LIGHT YEARS

SAQI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Lyman Sargent in America for an apposite piece of information; and London Zoo.

My friends Musa, Nina and Rachel Farhi, Barbara Goodwin and Grania Jones have given every sort of kindness and support.

This book is in memory of Peg Rankin, who climbedMount Kilimanjaro, and taught me to look at the stars:and for her son, Nick

The wise man only wonders once in his life, but that is always; the fool never. The education of the wise man begins with wonder, and ends with devout admiration . . . Coleridge, the most encyclopaedic of men, declares, ‘In wonder all philosophy begins, in wonder it ends, and admiration fills the interspace . . .’

It is to excite . . . wonder . . . that this work is written . . . While relating, so far as our space will permit us, all that is most wonderful in . . . science . . . we shall intersperse our narrative with relations of Amorous Siege and Battle, Perils of Sea and Land, of the Dreams and Fancies, the Ambition, the Wisdom and the Folly of Man . . .

Let us consider shortly one of the commonest wonders about us – SPACE. Gaze up into the sky from off the page you are reading, and try to pierce as far as your eye can reach, and then as far as your mind can conceive . . . The mind, it has well been said, fails to comprehend so vast an area . . .

The World of Wonders, c.1884

L’amore, che muove il sole e l’altre stelleLove, which moves the sun and the starsDante, Paradiso

PROLOGUE

In a year, light travels six million million miles.

‘When will you be back?’

‘I shan’t.’

‘When will you be back? You will.’

‘If I come back, it will be to see Davey, not you.’

‘You’ll be back tomorrow. In a week at the latest.’

‘A week? A fucking year more likely. Ten years . . .’

In a year, light travels six million million miles.

It flies from the sun to the earth in eight minutes. It crosses the whole solar system in eleven hours.

Light flies to the nearest star in our galaxy, Alpha Centauri, in four cold dazzling years. But there are several hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy.

After eighty thousand years of travel through interstellar gas and dust and stars, light has crossed the galaxy. But it is only one galaxy among unimaginably many. Light from at least one hundred thousand million galaxies is travelling towards us, through us, beyond us.

The whole observable universe would take thousands of millions of years for light to cross. But a single year is a very long time to us; see how far the light has gone already.

It is December 21. The Winter Solstice, the shortest day of a year in the mid-1980s. Around the five thousandth year since writing began, and the five hundred thousandth year since Upright Man began.

Only nobody thinks like that. They just think it’s getting near Christmas.

A fan of light spreads suddenly into the cold and dark. A door swings open on to the city street and there are voices, screaming with laughter, or screaming. A couple of dark silhouetted figures, embracing or fighting.

‘When will you be back?’

‘I shan’t.’

‘When will you be back? You will.’

‘. . . I could take a lifetime without seeing you!’

‘Where are you going?’

‘None of your business. Look, as far away as I can possibly get from you. Continents. Light years, Lottie. I’m through.’

Not embracing, fighting. He pushes her back against the light, slams the door and runs into the darkness.

Soon everything’s quiet again.

Darlington Road, Camden Town, North London, England, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Solar System, The Galaxy, The Universe, Chaos.

The people who live here or lived here are Harold Segall (forty-five years old) Lottie Lucas (thirty-five years old) and her son Davey (sixteen years old). It was Davey who wrote that address on a letter to his mother from a drab school holiday two long years ago.

‘Why Chaos?’

‘Well, it is Chaos, isn’t it?’

‘Hmm. It arrived all right, anyway, darling.’

Actually things weren’t really chaotic then. Harold and Lottie had just got married. The chaos was only wedding presents, and Harold’s terrible dusty books, in tottering piles, unsorted.

Now chaos has arrived, with Harold gone.

Lottie stands on the wide white stairs lit up like a stage set and beats, beats her palm against the wall, the knuckles flashing heavy gold. Her green oriental eyes are dry bright slits and her cheeks are blazing. Davey is up in the roof, glad the shouting has stopped, flung clumsy as a cuttlefish on his bed. He turns on his back and tries to look far away, through the skylight, as Lottie tries to look through the wide white wall of the stairway, seeing nothing.

In a cold back room of the house in a foolish antique bird-cage with carefully gilded ivy leaves on top, a tiny Golden Lion Tamarin monkey, whose ancestors lived on earth twenty-five million years before man, has started to die, on its own, quite quickly.

The faint urban glare of the sky above the dark streets is a lid which conceals the stars. But the light from the thousands and thousands of stars still streams on regardless over and through and beyond these infinitesimally tiny points on a tiny blue and brown and silver ball which is lost among thousands of millions of miles of stars and stardust.

The single most material fact about Lottie is that she is extremely rich. Lottie both knows and forgets to notice. Sometimes she remembers, and uses it.

The poor are acutely aware of being poor; not so the rich.

Lottie’s life is pleasant, in normal times, because she doesn’t have to work. She is quite without guilt for not working. Her father had worked till he died to make money. He seemed abstracted, bowed down with work. Lottie knows that work doesn’t make people nicer. (Men had to do it; women did not. It was one of the reasons feminists were crazy. Why would it be better if women were like men?)

Lottie uses her money to buy things. This time she has bought herself something alive. Something very small and very golden, a Brazilian monkey twelve inches long, a Golden Lion Tamarin, Leontopithecus rosalia rosalia.

The day the tamarin arrives, her husband goes. She is left with her son and immense amounts of money. Henceforth, her life will be rather less pleasant.

When Harold stopped running he was near a bus stop, so on impulse he jumped on a passing 24. The glaring lights and his anger dazed him. The row ran through his brain like heavy traffic.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Fucking bitch,’ he muttered. Then he realized it was the conductor speaking.

He was fat, he was tall, his mouth was very mean. He stared at Harold, and his lip curled up.

‘Look, Sunshine, I’m a busy man.’

‘Er, sorry. I was dreaming. Sorry.’ Harold groped for his money. ‘Charing Cross, please,’ he decided. He suddenly knew where he would go. He would go and spend Christmas in Bournemouth. Everything else was complicated, so he’d start by doing something easy. At least the statutory Christmas Day phone call to his mother would be cheap. She lived in Poole, and so had he for seventeen years of his life . . .

On second thoughts there would be no phone call. He wasn’t ready to start answering questions. Moreover, his mother would gloat. Sylvia had never, really, liked Lottie. No one, of course, could gloat more than Harold about his lucky escape. But he wasn’t ready for his mother to gloat. If there was to be gloating, he Harold would start it.

On the high-speed train he did not gloat. He felt small and weak, rocketed from side to side through the empty, windy night. Not many travelling. The noise was terrific, and the lurching made him feel he might die. He kept reliving the final scene, her voice like a drill, her mouth wide and ugly. That shivering, brilliant, bedraggled thing in the stupid cage she had bought. The tamarin was at once beautiful and repellent, because pitiful. Harold was swept with rage and grief. From somewhere outside himself had come the strength to tell her he’d had enough. Almost ever since they got married he’d imagined that moment whenever they rowed. All the same, it all happened too quickly.

He is shaking, belatedly, with fear and surprise, to a rhythm much faster than the shaking of the train. He is cold, though the train is stuffy and hot.

What on earth has happened? What have we done?

And Harold goes rocketing back into his past, into Dorset where he’d lived as a boy.

He was only thirteen when his father, Harold Senior, left home and went to America. There were nights of fierce prayer that Daddy would come back. In the end he threatened God on his knees. God did nothing. He gave God up. Davey was older, which was a blessing.

Rubbish, he thought, lurching to the left, the back of his hand on the icy windows. Davey will probably be relieved. At least there won’t be any more rows.

His father and mother had rowed horribly. Pure suffering; Sylvia’s high actress’s voice, his father’s less frequent, a low puzzled roar, and the house seemed to tremble as she slammed the doors. One after another, and then back again. The final breakup was still somehow worse.

Harold examined his forehead in the rainy darkness behind the window. He caught himself doing that so often; bald, balder, baldest. Harold was unresigned. He had dreams where his hair grew back. Lottie always said she didn’t care about his hair.

‘You’re frightfully handsome and distinguished. All clever men are bald.’

‘I’m not exactly bald, yet, am I? Couldn’t you call it receding?’

Maybe she had cared, all along. He was sure that women must care. I mean I shouldn’t like a bald woman. I shouldn’t think it was distinguished. (Am I too old? Will anyone else ever want me?)

He thought about women’s hair. From a distance, his wife and his mother, walking together, might have been related.

Lottie’s hair. It was painful to think of her from a gathering distance. Keep gazing out of the window. But it didn’t work; lights from the carriage burned on the dark like Lottie’s hair.

Chin-length, cut so it swung and shook, the top layers sunbleached, the lower layers darker. Every shade of yellow.

Suddenly Harold was out of his seat and lurching along to the Buffet.

‘Give me a whisky, please. I mean, a large whisky.’

Superior smile, glazed flushed cheeks.

‘We only do doubles, sir.’

‘Then I’ll have a double double.’

With the whisky scalding his throat, he felt all right again.

Never go back, never go back. All hard decisions were right decisions. In the end, you had to live your ideals.

I was right to leave teaching, all those years ago. That was the hardest thing of all. If I hadn’t done that, I’d never have had . . . my new life. My London life.

The tide of certainty faded. It wasn’t his new life any more. He was leaving it behind, as the train began to slow.

The new life was becoming the old life.

The train pulled into a long, empty station. Bournemouth already? He wasn’t prepared. Shuffling his suitcase. Not much in it. He wondered if he had any ideals left.

But I’ve never put up with things for too long, Harold thought, pushing out into the loud, wet night. At least I left teaching. At least I left Lottie.

His anger returned, and he blamed her for the pain of the wind that howled down the platform. He suddenly needed a lavatory badly and was just turning into what he thought was the Gents’ when he was brought up short by a shout from the ticket collector (damn, it was the Ladies’ . . .)

“Scuse me, sir. Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Oh – sorry, sorry. You can’t read the sign.’

‘Can’t read, sir?’

The sir was ironical. Harold summoned some authority.

‘I want a taxi. Can you direct me?’

‘Taxi, sir? Yes, well, for that you’ll have to leave the platform. And show your ticket at the barrier.’

The man beside the ticket collector snorted. Harold wanted to punch them.

‘Are you always this helpful to strangers in Bournemouth?’ He meant to sound cutting, but he sounded pathetic.

‘This way, sir. Merry Christmas.’ There was alcohol on the breath they laughed at him.

‘Go fuck yourselves,’ he yelled over his shoulder, a safe twenty yards away. He wasn’t going to put up with things any more. There were going to be changes. Yes.

‘And Happy New Year,’ came back his tormentor.

The driver of the lone taxi hovering must have heard Harold swearing; he pulled noisily away, and Harold was alone.

Lottie walked up and down in the long front room of her large and splendid house. She had bought it, and no longer noticed it. There were two other houses she hardly noticed, one in Provence and one in Scotland, less than an hour from Perth.

Well after midnight. Every light was on. She walked in and out of many mirrors, and her anger was minutely softened each time she glimpsed her furious passage, thick hair blazing as it tossed against the dignified angle of her neck and chin.

‘You’ll regret this, Harold,’ she muttered to the mirror. ‘You’ll be so ashamed.’

What was the good of trying to please him? You’d have thought she’d bought the tamarin for herself. She had so looked forward to showing him Goldilocks, she just couldn’t bear to wait till Christmas. The whole thing had happened in a frightful rush. There were times when you had to make quick decisions. Poor slow Harold could never see that. But despite the rush, she had thought of everything.

Even the cage. The antique shop was a flash of genius. Detail mattered to Lottie – she’d always had an eye for things. Those gilded leaves were so pretty, perfectly restored, of course. And of course little Goldie would appreciate it too. Not all hard straight clinical lines, like those enormous modern cages she’d turned down flat in the pet shop. The extra expense didn’t matter a bit, since Goldie herself had cost thousands.

Still the subject of Goldilocks was not entirely comfortable. Tiny, smaller than Lottie had thought, shivering and scratching in her brief grasp. And Harold said it had been sick, but he probably made that up to upset her. It wasn’t likely; on that first day she had given it tinned lychees and loganberries, just to be sure that the ‘fruit’ recommended by Dr Lambrequin was digestible. Nothing but the best for Goldilocks.

Harold even hated the name. ‘This is not some stupid fairytale.’

She caught sight of herself in the wide gold frame, brow furrowed in a way that didn’t flatter her, and a square tight set to her jaw. Instantly she drew herself up, shook her hair forward, gazed bright and imperious back at the glass: Lottie Lucas.

Subject dismissed.

But the subject of Harold was rather more complex. The subject of Harold could not be dismissed.

This evening Lottie had been drinking hard, and several glasses caught the light around the room, melted ice-cubes, abandoned lemon. She could never bear to spend time looking for things. If something was lost, she would simply get another.

She had married Harold as she did everything else; knowing what she wanted, going for it. She’d meant this marriage to be so different from her first disastrous marriage to Carl. Harold was brilliant like Carl, of course, but so much quieter, so much less wild.

Tonight his behaviour had been appalling, but on the whole he was – well, sweet . . . she had to admit they had mostly been happy. And they’d settled into a pattern, although they had only been married two years.

She felt a sudden pang of disquiet. It couldn’t be over. Of course it couldn’t.

He’d stopped being shy with Davey. He’d stopped wearing some of his more embarrassing clothes, and she’d thrown the others away. He’d almost stopped trying to take her to peculiar restaurants where he could pay. ‘Authentic’ little Indian places with ghoulish green strip lighting. Wine bars where you squashed up at tiny tables and ate red kidney beans and raw garlic while a pianist murdered Gershwin. In the end she had made her position plain.

‘Darling, frankly I’d rather take a cab to Odin’s where we can relax. The money is irrelevant.’

‘To you. Not to me.’

‘Look, it’s so boring to go on about money. For the millionth time, I have vast amounts of money. Lagoons of it. Oceans. We have vast amounts of money. We don’t have to talk about it all the time. I rather prefer to forget about it.’

‘But I . . .’

She had kissed him to stop him talking.

‘Sweetheart, I’m ravenous. Go call us a cab.’

In the end he came round to her point of view, more or less; and she sometimes let him take her to their local Greek, where the meat was perfectly acceptable.

‘I can see I’ve been rather stupid, Lottie. I can’t promise to stop trying to pay all the time – but I’ll try not to try.’

‘Wonderful, Harold! Admit it, darling – nice things just are rather nice, aren’t they?’

‘No no no. I mean, yes, they are. But my decision is on feminist grounds. I think my reaction’s been basically sexist . . .’

‘ – Harold, you do sound pompous – ’

‘. . . I just couldn’t take being paid for by a woman, which is too pathetic for words.’

‘No, darling, it’s marvellously gallant of you. It’s adorable. But I’m not just a woman. A wife’s different.’

‘Lottie, you’re not listening. It’s easy for a woman to take money from a man, right? Well, if there’s mutual respect it ought to be just as easy for a man to take money from a woman.’

‘Well I assure you, Harold, I do not want every Tom, Dick and Harry proving their respect for me by taking my money.’

‘You just don’t see the point of feminism, do you?’

‘I don’t need to, darling. I have everything the feminists ever wanted, and more. I don’t have to go round in hideous woolly hats hating men and secretly longing for them. I do whatever I like – always have done – so of course I don’t whinge about being frustrated and dominated and castrated and whatever it is they all create about.’

‘Not castrated, Lottie.’ Harold mildly replied.

‘Anyway, Harold, I’m sure the feminists don’t mean men to go round lecturing their wives on how to be one.’

‘Now there, Lottie,’ said Harold, giving one of his yelps of laughter, ‘You do have a point. Forgive me.’

He was best of all when he laughed. Best when they laughed together.

Harold sat on his case in front of the station. The desire to piss was urgent. The desire to cry was quite urgent, too. The wind blew straight from the stormy sea. Something scampered in the shadows. A dog? A rat? Not even a rat deserved cold like this.

Suddenly he thought of the tamarin. So little, so delicate, those round dim eyes and worried brows, the glory of its red-gold coat even now as it cowered at the back of the cage. The smell of excrement, sick and fear, sharp as a knife, so he moved back a pace. The black bars had looked like great sticks to beat it. Only Lottie would buy a cage as stupid as that.

‘You’ve gone insane,’ he had shouted at her, he who so rarely shouted.

‘Harold, what do you mean? You’re not going to be a spoilsport, are you?’

‘How can you talk like that? What do you mean, spoilsport? This is a living thing.’

But it wouldn’t be for very long, he reflected, shifting about on the case, trying not to put his weight on the mean sharp locks or the handle. His sorrow as he thought how the little thing might die was slightly lessened by another thought – how upset and ashamed stupid Lottie would be. Considering this lessening, he too was ashamed.

We’re a horrible species.

The night wind howled.

Sprawled in an armchair of blondest leather, sucking up gin through the piece of lemon, Lottie drew up a balance sheet.

They agreed to differ on voting; America; The Bomb; feminism; religion (Lottie wasn’t religious, but she was sure there was ‘something there’, some nameless God who favoured her); butter (Lottie spread it thickly, Harold feared for his arteries); bedtime (Lottie usually went early, Harold liked to read till two in the morning); and dope (on this point, Harold had given in – it was only nostalgia for the 1960s. It wouldn’t do with a child around.)

So what did they agree on? She’d told him once, over a drunken lunch. A year ago, not so very long. Or maybe a year was a lifetime long.

Loving Davey (though Harold at first found it hard to show it), sex, beautiful things, fun, walking, ‘really odd jokes’, and each other.

‘. . . oh, and history.’

‘History, Lottie? You must be joking. You don’t know the difference between Charles I and Charlemagne.’

‘Don’t be silly, Harold, of course I do.’

‘You don’t know your history, Lottie, honestly. Not that I married you to bone up on history.’

Her mouth was too full of crème brûlée to reply. But only for a moment. She swallowed energetically.

‘You’re the one who’s being stupid, Harold. History – isn’t History.’

‘Aaaaah!’ Mock enlightenment.

‘History is your life, what’s happened to you. It’s . . . meanings, and memories, not dates. And we do share that. I love telling you things.’

Harold’s beautiful brown eyes moistened; Harold apologized.

‘Sorry, darling. I’m an arrogant shit. You’re very wise. I adore you.’

The memory made her smile even now, but the glass in her hand was cold and empty. The taste was old gin and lemon pips, not sweet hot caramel and white Bordeaux. The memory was – rather lonely.

But Lottie was never lonely. Lottie refused to be lonely.

It was just that right now she needed someone to talk to. And Davey had been absolutely useless, going off and hiding in his bloody attic. She imagined his soft dark head on the pillow and was touched, as usual, with tenderness. Davey was still a love.

Or else he didn’t give a fuck.

She hated both her menfolk. She gave so much, and what did she get back?

She tried to put down her glass. As it slid off the arm of her chair and crashed down, she realized she was the tiniest bit drunk. She made a great effort not to be maudlin. She made a great effort to be fair.

Of course, Harold hadn’t meant any of the things he’d said tonight. He’d be back tomorrow morning at the latest. He was bound to ring before bedtime. Lottie looked longingly at the phone . . . but it was – God, it was two in the morning.

Still she sat on, and stared at the phone.

Things hadn’t begun with the tamarin, no. Perhaps they began when she declined to go to Poole with Harold to visit his mother, a week ago. She quite often declined. It was fine in theory.

But this time Harold had been worried. ‘I just think she didn’t sound well. You know, whatever you think, Mother loves to see you.’ (This wasn’t strictly true. Harold meant, I love to have moral support.)

She didn’t go, and he came back sullen and still worried about Sylvia’s health, though he wouldn’t be drawn after the initial statement – ‘I think she’s got angina – ’ with the silent postscript, not that you care.

‘Angina is the same as heartburn, isn’t it, Harold? Sort of indigestion but worse?’

‘No. It isn’t, in point of fact.’

That evening they went to Claudia’s Christmas party, and Harold drank far too much Chianti.

‘Harold,’ she’d hissed as he briefly turned away from a predatory-looking redhead, ‘you’ll get horribly drunk. You don’t even like Chianti.’

‘I see,’ he whispered back grimly. ‘Thank you for telling me what I like.’

And he hadn’t said a word to Lottie for the rest of the evening.

Even drunk, he was graceful. That lean muscled back in tight jeans and cashmere. Cashmere she had bought him. Half-twined around him was the very tall woman. Her limbs seemed to go round him at least twice, and her magenta head was on a level with his. They were ‘dancing’, but none of the right parts were moving.

Lottie wanted him. She hated him. She would punish him. But first she’d go home.

Just as she was pulling the car away from the kerb, a maniac hammered at the window. My God, that’s all I need. Then she realized it was Harold, too drunk to open the door.

‘Get in.’

‘Oh Lottie – Lottie. ’m sorry. Bes’ wife in a world.’

He slumped in the seat beside her as she drove, trying to knead her thigh, which she shifted irritably about.

‘You decided not to bring that giraffe home, then?’

‘Sh’raffe? Oh yes. Vampire,’ Harold burbled. ‘Noragiraffe. Vampire. Eat me up . . . Y’see, I think Sylvia’s dying,’ he continued without a break, and his hand fell away from her thigh.

‘Are you serious, Harold? Oh dear. Oh dear.’ Then ‘You don’t mean it, damn you. You’re just trying to get sympathy.’

She hoped he hadn’t heard that. He probably didn’t hear it. For Harold was snoring. Harold was asleep.

Next day he brought her breakfast in bed at some unearthly hour of the morning. His eyes were tomato-red, he was cravenly apologetic, and yet he was somehow withdrawn. She ‘forgave’ him without forgiving him, and went shopping very early to escape the atmosphere of guilt and crossness and headaches which hung in the house like old smoke.

Wandering around the glittering aisles of Fortnum and Mason, already crowded before 10 a.m., she felt out of sympathy for once with the mounds of pâtés and truffles, tinned frogs and tinned birds, marzipans and mayonnaises. It usually cheered her up, coming here. Marriage is spoiling my temper, she thought, and promptly bought a ribbon-waisted jar of snails, admiring their elegant coiled shells, the colour of gently burning sugar. It wasn’t enough. What did she want? What could she do with her discontent?

Suddenly she remembered the man at Claudia’s party with the very good suit and unreadable eyes. Either enigmatic or frightened. Today she deserved something really unusual. He was half-Belgian. She’d never met a Belgian before. And he had his own plane, which sounded fun. She had a hunch he would bring good luck.

Harold often teased her about her hunches. He said she had too many of them. It was just that Harold was rather low on intuition, as most men were. She deserved some luck.

She riffled through her snakeskin bag, and his number was there, on a pleasing card, a marbled grey.

Dr R Lambrequin, FZSSpecialist in the Zoology of Exotic FaunaPremises Centrally Located

It sounded frightfully respectable. Unusual but respectable. And he’d offered her a rare opportunity. Something very special he could show her; the would-be purchaser had changed his mind. Something he could offer at an advantageous price. Something for the very discerning buyer. Something for the woman with everything. She went to see him that morning.

‘Unique, Madame,’ he smiled. ‘Not generally on the market. I obtained it as a very special favour from my good colleague in Belgium. You will never see another in private hands, I give you my word of honour.’

Lottie loved the Golden Lion Tamarin on sight. ‘I’ll take it,’ she gasped, enchanted. She refused his other offers. Her house was a little too small for a bear, though they could have kept it in Scotland.

‘No. I’ll just have the . . . tamarin, did you say? And . . . yes, why not? I’ll call her Goldilocks.’

‘It’s male, Madame,’ Dr Lambrequin said, with the thin-lipped ghost of a smile.

‘Nobody’s going to know that,’ said Lottie. She definitely preferred it female. Delivery on the twenty-first. And so he was undone.

As she drove home she passed a six-foot, model-like redhead piled with bright red-gold furs who reminded her briefly of the woman at the party. Love for Harold seized her heart painfully.

I want him, I love him. I should have gone to Poole. I’ll make it up to you, Harold.

And so she’d decided to give him Goldilocks. Doubly, trebly undone.

Time to put out the lights. She bent to one and found the mirror again and again she saw what she didn’t want to. Tired and sad. Put out the lights. She never looked tired or sad in the morning. Everyone said she was beautiful, everyone said she was ‘incredible’ for thirty-five. She felt about fifty, fumbling for the light switch with the gin knocking at her skull and making her unsteady.

Once the room was dark, in the instant before she passed on to the lighted landing, she realized that she was suffering, that he had made her suffer.

Folding her strong arms around her as she padded upstairs, she renewed an old vow: Never suffer for a man. Never, never suffer.

Halfway upstairs, she stopped, swayed, and went reluctantly downstairs again. The cage was in the utility room, since Harold hadn’t helped her take it anywhere more suitable (the sun-lounge might be nice). She noticed her breath catch a little as she opened the door, as if she were nervous, so she strode in boldly, making kissing noises.

‘Goldilocks? Goldie?’

There was a scampering sound like mice as she switched the light on, but she saw nothing behind the black bars. A wave of panic – had it escaped? Then she saw something bright huddled in the cage’s farthest corner. Its little face was fixed on her, eyes wide, nose and mouth aquiver. She told herself it was curiosity, but she knew in her heart it was utter terror. Closer to the cage the smell hit her. She went and flung open a window.

God, I can’t cope with this now. I’ll sort everything out in the morning. Harold will come back and sort it out.

She turned on her heels and as she closed the door she leaned against it, safe outside, unconsciously trying to close it tighter.

Sleep didn’t come as readily as usual. The gin was dry and fretful in her brain, no help. A tiny worry like a tiny worm.

What if he doesn’t come back for Christmas?

Above Camden and Bournemouth the stars burned on as they always burn, without night or day. The earth rolls away from that endless brightness. Protected by the turn of the earth from too much brightness, all the little creatures slept, Lottie and Harold in their different cities, Davey twelve feet above his mother, thin arms spread on the peaceful dark.

The little monkey on its rack of rigid metal did not sleep, could not sleep. The tamarin came from a tropical forest. The world for him has become very cold. Time should have been for hunting insects, seeds, fruit. But he cannot hunt.

He is living a dream. His dream is the forest, great trees, great richness, and he bruises himself as he flings himself towards it, scratching and tearing at the painted-over rust.

He is dying so much faster than any of the others. Tomorrow, more of the dream forest will die. The animals scamper towards the collectors.

The twenty-second, the twenty-third.

‘Mum, it hasn’t eaten any of that carrot.’

Davey had decreed there should be no more tins. Davey flattered himself that he knew about nutrition.

‘Well, Dr Lambrequin said it would eat vegetables.’

‘Perhaps we haven’t hit the right vegetable yet.’

‘I’m not going to worry about it every second. Most pets get fed far too much.’

Lottie sounded firm, but her heart was heavy. She could see Davey didn’t want to upset her, and that upset her more.

‘Has it – been sick again?’

‘Not since I cleared up the last lot.’

‘You like her, Davey, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes I do . . . I mean, she’s beautiful. But I wonder . . . do you think . . . just to be on the safe side . . . do you think we should call a vet?’

It rushed out, once he got started.

‘We are not going to fuss. I’ve got enough to worry about with Harold disappearing. If only he’d come back, he knows about things like this.’

Her voice suddenly slipped off its note of forced irritation. She heard her fear come through, and could not prevent it.

‘Anyway, Davey, I’m scared. It might be . . . against the law. They might say I shouldn’t have taken it. It will be all right if only . . .’

If only, if only. Christmas Eve, and Harold had not come back.

One shopping day till Christmas.

Desperate, Lottie went out and shopped. If I get more food in, he’ll have to come back. It will have to be eaten. He’ll have to come home.

Crystallized oranges, round as suns. Rough boar pâté, dark in its dish. Mistletoe for magic healing. A twenty-pound tip to deliver that day. Wrapping paper, though she’d done all her wrapping, the nervousness growing as her arms filled with emptiness.

She got home at two in the afternoon. No one but Claudia had telephoned. Davey wouldn’t look at her. She couldn’t ask about the tamarin (she would never again call it Goldilocks.) But she started to imagine she smelled it everywhere, the acrid smell of fear.

‘It’s been sick again,’ he announced to the window, staring miserably out at the greyness. She rang Dr Lambrequin’s number; there was no answer. Frantic, she drove to his address.

Lottie hammered on the recently painted front door, its shining letterbox a rigid mouth. Mocking her. The door didn’t open. Then she kicked it, enraged, and her heel left a deep scratch on the new blue paint. I’m going insane, she reflected, shaking, feeling tears start to prickle.

Without warning the door opened. It was a tiny woman, mid-European-looking, very old. Lottie stepped back so as not to alarm her.

‘I’m looking for Dr Lambrequin.’

‘You know where is Dr Lambrequin?’

The little white face twisted upwards, horribly eager, and Lottie saw that her neck was shrivelled and pulled like the skin Amanda skimmed from warm milk.

‘No. I want Dr Lambrequin. I want to talk to him.’

‘Oh.’ The little old woman shrank back into herself, life gone. ‘No, cannot help you. Is gone. And he leave such horrible . . .’ she tailed off, pale eyes wrinkling together, as if she regretted beginning. She half-turned away. In horror, Lottie saw the door was already closing.

‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘You have to help me. I bought an animal. From him.’

The little body swung round, fierce energy was back in her mouth and fists, which clenched at shoulder-level, tiny and angry as a child’s.

‘All – his – animals – dead. Horrible, so horrible. No food for them, nothing. Your friend is wicked man. How do I help them? Too old. He tell me nothing. He ask for flat for one month, holiday let. Such gentleman. Suit – everything.’ (Lottie nodded in agreement.) ‘Such gentleman, I ask nothing in advance. Then noises – dreadful noises all the time – he tell me I have nightmare. Then I discover, he bring here zoo. Then he go, and pay me nothing. Except – dead monkey, dead bear, dead snake! Then police come here, and men from Customs.’

She stared at Lottie with something like hatred, but the white-ringed irises didn’t focus on Lottie. They looked through her at a history of suffering.

Lottie was swept with hopelessness, something she never let herself feel. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but the blind pale face didn’t yield at all, and the door was closing. Closed.

Oh God, thought Lottie on the icy step. Help me, please. Help.

She didn’t tell Davey where she had been.

‘Did Harold . . .?’

‘I’d tell you, Mum.’ Then he came and put his arms around her, and she thought how lovely his black hair was, blue and sheeny in the thin sun from the window. My lovely son.

‘Good news. The monkey drank some milk and ate some lettuce and banana.’

‘Did it? Thank God.’ She hugged him until he gasped for breath. ‘By the way, it’s a tamarin, darling.’

That afternoon they decorated. She forced herself not to look at the clock. She decorated frantically, obsessively, with the energy that . . . she stopped herself.

The energy Harold said he loved. ‘Lottie, you’re a force of nature.’

Nature howled outside the glass, spiteful winds, acidic sunlight which slowly dimmed and reddened. The trees had shrunk to their own dark bones, the very last yellow leaves blown down.

But the Christmas tree was wonderfully healthy, a bright dark green, taller than Davey. (Harold had insisted on getting one with roots, and carried it home himself through the streets, ringing on the door without warning, a bristling green amazing apparition with his thick dark eyebrows just clearing the top. Harold, Harold. Just a week ago.)

She tied more balls, knotting forcefully, green, red, blue. Red, red, red. Blue, blue, blue.

‘Watch it, Mum. You’ll knock off all the needles.’

In the end she had piled on so much glitter you could hardly see the tree underneath. Outside the house, the sky turned violet then black, and street lights were hung on the darkness.

But nobody came, and nobody phoned, or nobody that counted, and the night settled down.

At eleven that night, she was up on the step-ladder hanging her ninety-ninth paper chain. The room was a mad multi-coloured cats-cradle of colour and her neck and shoulders ached. The phone rang and she nearly broke her ankle jumping down and ploughing through the mess to reach it. Wrong number. Lottie wasn’t polite. Davey went and made her cocoa.

‘Mum, let’s go to bed. Or tomorrow will be ruined.’

‘Looks as if it’s ruined in any case.’

Oddly she slept like her old self, easily, and woke up happy: it’s Christmas. And then remembered: this Christmas.

But Harold would ring. It would be all right.

The day is unreal, like a frozen tooth, not as painful as expected, and removed at the end by the dizzy spin of champagne they drink at Claudia’s. They drive off the dark with lights and laughter; the Boar of Winter has an orange in its mouth. The sun cannot quite be swallowed up. The days are already minutely longer.

‘You see, Lottie, I know Harold’s type. All talk and it doesn’t mean a thing. You’ll get home and find him sobbing on your answering machine, calling from a Sally Army hostel. Be nice to him. Let him come back.’

‘Bastard,’ Lottie giggled, sipping and burping. ‘I wouldn’t have him back if you paid me.’

She had eaten vast quantities of rich dark meats, pork and venison and fat dark duck, she had gorged the crystallized oranges she brought, and her body was soothed with the warmth and the sugar. Her mind was full of air bubbles, floating, pain-free. The table was forested with candles gleaming in lovely confusion from every bright surface. Davey was kneeling on the carpet, thick hair fallen forward over his face, reading another book in the firelight. Life, Lottie thought, is very beautiful.

Claudia watched Lottie smiling, head poised on her long strong neck like a fruit, perfectly in place, sure of her welcome. Her husband’s left her and she’s still unruffled, Claudia thought as her lips smiled back. She’s always had whatever she wanted. What if Harold doesn’t come back? It can’t be easy, living with Lottie. It isn’t easy, being her friend.

‘Claudia, you’ve been wonderful this evening,’ Lottie shouted on the doorstep. (Lottie was always slightly too loud; at least it was less noticeable at Christmas.) ‘Davey and I should have been so gloomy if we hadn’t had somewhere to go.’

‘She is wonderful, isn’t she?’ said Justin, Claudia’s limp attachment, one arm draped over her thin shoulder as they stood together in the lit doorway. But his eyes only flicked very briefly to Claudia and then they were fixed on flushed, moist Lottie, narrow bright eyes, wet wide lips, deliciously wide, full lips. Her curls blew wildly in the wind as she stood for a second sturdily facing the light with her thin son propped against her. She blew a last kiss, and Justin blew two. Harold must be mad, he thought.

Claudia did not agree.

‘Can you entirely blame Harold?’ she murmured, as they slipped back inside.

‘Well, I do think a marriage is worth preserving,’ he demurred, trying to be diplomatic, achieving a consummate lack of tact since his failure to propose was a sore point with Claudia. Not that she would have accepted. Not that she believed in marriage.

‘Don’t be so fucking pompous, Justin. Will you help me load the dishwasher?’

It was five past midnight. Christmas was over.

Really, thought Justin. She’s getting too sure of me.

Lottie and Davey were walking home. She was full of drunken energy. Davey would have much preferred a taxi. He was way past his normal bedtime, and a little bit tipsy, though less so than his mother.

‘Mum, did you switch the answerphone on?’

‘Of course I did.’ She was putting all her concentration into not falling off the icy pavement. She slipped a little, and giggled. Harold was entirely irrelevant.

But Davey was brooding on Harold. He’d better have rung, or I’ll hate him for ever. He rushed upstairs and pressed the button on the machine by the light that shone in from the landing.

Pressed the button. The dim light shone.

Pressed the button. The wrong button.

Pressed the Erase button in the half-light and went straight to bed, too locked in his misery to go and check the tamarin, went straight to bed and sniffled like a baby. Everything went wrong, everything. Next day he’d have to tell her the truth.

Next day she was much too cross to be told. Booze and sugar no longer muffled the truth which dinned in her ears like traffic. Her husband had left her. She was mad with rage.

‘Yesterday you seemed all right.’

‘Bullshit. Yesterday I was vilely canned. And repulsively sentimental.’

She drank black coffee, sucking it in aggressively, hair scraped back in a rubber band, strong jaw thrust out at him like a fist. Her skin was patchily inflamed by drink, anger in red untidy patches.

‘I mean. It’s outrageous. He might be dead, for all we know. And Good Riddance. God, I didn’t mean that. Oh fuck it all, I’m going to phone Sylvia.’

‘Um – do you think you’re in the right mood?’

‘I think I’m the best judge of my moods. Honestly, Davey, sometimes you’d think that I was the child and you were the parent. If you want to look after somebody I suggest you go and see how – you know – is’ (jerking her head dismissively in the direction of the thing downstairs).

‘I did.’ Flat.

‘How is it?’

‘Not good.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t look at me in that awful reproachful way. I swear I’ll get the Queen’s own vet to that thing but no one’ll come on Boxing Day. Look, I’ve got a human being to worry about. Don’t expect me to fret about an ape.’

‘Monkey.’

‘TAMARIN!’ she screamed at him, smashed down her coffee-cup, and strode to the phone.

Davey didn’t want to hear this. Davey didn’t want to live here at all. A lot of his friends seemed to feel the same way, even more often than Davey. There’s thousands of us, he considered, appalled by the behaviour of adults, all over the Western World. I wouldn’t want to say about Russia.

He got out of the room in the nick of time as she dialled the final digit.

‘Hello-o-o-o-ah?’ was what Lottie heard, an actress’s voice of perennial hope for the perfect phone call with the perfect part, though Lottie was sure Sylvia recognized her voice.

‘It’s Lottie, Sylvia.’

‘Oh Lottie.’ Pause. ‘Did you ring to wish me a Happy Christmas? You’re a day late, you know.’

‘Sylvia, I have other things on my mind. You may know your son has walked out on me.’

‘Don’t be short, dear. I was only asking because Harold didn’t ring to say Happy Christmas. And he always does. Every year. Mind you, he did ring on Christmas Eve.’

‘Sylvia, did you know Harold had left me?’

Pause.

‘Oh yes, dear. I am his mother, you know.’

Lottie placed the receiver on the ground and shook both fists at the stupid air. When she picked it up again, Sylvia was complaining about Christmas.

‘. . . of course you can’t imagine what it’s like being on your own if you’ve never had to do it. I do not blame . . . I merely observe.’

‘Sylvia, will you listen to me? Do you know where Harold’s gone?’

‘Aaah . . .’ Sylvia trailed into silence.

‘You do know. Will you tell me at once?’

‘Lottie dear, it’s no good shouting at me. I’m quite an old lady now, you know. I don’t think Harold likes shouting either. He was always a quietly spoken boy.’

Lottie knew there was no going back. Nor was there any way to go forward. Suddenly it was all too much.

‘Now Lottie, don’t be agitated. He’s bound to get in touch with you sooner or later. I’m almost sure he said he was going to . . .’

The intonation made it deeply doubtful.

Lottie hung up. She had never done that to Sylvia before. She found she had sweated profusely.

That day was appallingly long, as long as Christmas Day had been short. He’s trying to drive me crazy. Harold became a malignant presence, an absent presence, his malignant mother’s son.

The tamarin rallied that evening, drank some water, did the ghost of a jump. Next day it lay dimly in the dark of the cage. Diarrhoea had begun as well as sickness. Lottie forced herself to go and see it, but when she opened the door she was stopped in her tracks by the harsh, quick sound of its breathing. Davey was always closing the window. How would it manage without fresh air? She flung it open again.

For the first time she heard a little question, small and distinct, as if planted in her head from a long way away, somewhere even colder where she was not loved.

Lottie, what have you done?

But she wasn’t going to listen to that. It was Harold’s fault for abandoning her. He had never loved her. Right then. She hadn’t ever loved him.

The next phone call to Sylvia was very different. Lottie was in control. She prepared her script before she started, and put the phone down smartly at the end.

‘Sylvia? This is Lottie. I’m sorry I hung up on you yesterday. I was a little . . . tired. I’m ringing to give you some information. I’m getting all Harold’s things packed up and Pickford’s will bring them down to Poole. I’m sure that’s best for everybody. Give your son my good wishes when you see him. Goodbye.’

As she placed the yellow phone precisely in its cradle, she felt power flooding back. Good, she was in control. Lottie was in control.

This was not how Harold found her when he finally got through on December 31. She progressed from hissing to fury when she realized it was him.

‘. . . dead . . . you don’t give a damn . . . all your fault . . . I hate you! I HATE YOU! I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!’

(It has been very hard for Harold to ring. His voice trembles, but she is too far beyond herself to notice, too far from reason and too far away across miles of cold dark senseless earth and leafless trees and howling winds, and she feels her anger as vaster than everything, millions of miles below the scalding stars, a billion times vaster than the planet they are on, two little living points jerking unconnected signals.)

‘I did ring, Lottie. On Christmas Day. I left a message asking you to ring back – ’

‘LIAR! LIAR! Can you imagine what it’s like? Davey looks at me as if I’m a murderess. I hardly dare go downstairs, just thinking of the awful thing – going rotten – down there.’

The injustice helped him get his voice back.

‘For God’s sake, Lottie, who went and bought it in the first place?’

‘HAROLD! Come back at once and see to it!’

Suddenly he was shouting too. His voice wasn’t really very good at shouting. It showed the strain, breathy and torn.

‘Why should I come back when I hear you’re sending all my stuff down to Sylvia’s? Mother was in tears, by the way – did you have to upset her too?’

‘Your mother is a spiteful cow and her tears are worth about as much as . . .’ Lottie wanted to say, don’t be so unfair. She hurt me, not the other way round. ‘. . . They’re worth about as much as our marriage,’ she finished. ‘FUCK – ALL!’

‘Look, Lottie, I’m in an extremely depressing hotel in the south of England, and I don’t want to hear this.’

‘You don’t want to hear this! You! YOU!!’ She was barking and spluttering with fury. ‘You did all this. You walked out on me . . .’

He held the receiver away from his ear, feeling cold and odd. She sounded like a fishwife. The hotel wasn’t actually as depressing as he had said. Looking round the lobby it was faded but comfortable, rather as his own life had been before Lottie annexed it, two and a half years ago.

‘. . . bought it for you!’

He clearly caught her conclusion.

‘You’re being completely irresponsible, Harold!’

She thought: Please come back. Please come back and help me.

‘Oh shut up, Lottie. This is getting us nowhere.’

But Lottie had moved into a strange red country of screaming sound that he couldn’t enter.

Harold wasn’t really any good at all in the presence of extreme emotion. It made him want to slip out of the picture, leaving his shoes and his clothes propped up, dive through the window and at the end of his naked jackknife through miles of air, find himself floating out to sea . . .

‘. . . so when are you coming back? Harold, are you there?’

He came back reluctantly. Docile suit, uxorious shoes.

‘Harold, I’m TALKING TO YOU!’

Something gave. He kicked it off, with a sense of excitement, shoes, clothes, meek stupidity.

‘Lottie. I mean, look here. I don’t have to come back if I don’t want to.’

Not the right note; a sulky small boy.

He tried again. ‘Stop haranguing me. It’s me who’s supposed to be angry with you.’

Not much better. It was all unreal. Weary, he wondered if he cared any more. He wanted to get a drink from the bar and watch Casablanca on the TV.

‘HAROLD! YOU’RE DRIVING ME INSANE!’

‘Lottie – is there any point in this?’

‘What shall I do with the bloody monkey?’

A sudden image; small, broken. Anger twisted in Harold’s gut. In all the years that stretched ahead Lottie never forgot the cold speech that followed.

‘Get the vet to take it away. Or burn it. Or give it to a lab for research. It’s absolutely nothing to do with me. I’m just sick – with sorrow – about it. Disgust, if you like. I’d better ring off. Please give my love to Davey.’

Click.

Burr.

It could not be true. The electric burr of loneliness.

Eleven-thirty, December 31. The real parting had begun.

January

CHAPTER ONE

There are a lot of bodies in the Solar System. Everybody knows, working in towards the sun, Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth and its Moon, Venus, Mercury.

But there are many others who are virtual strangers. Strangers with fantastic names.

Orbiting Pluto, Charon; orbiting Uranus, Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda; orbiting Saturn, Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, Mimas, Hyperion; orbiting Jupiter, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Amalthea, Himalia, Elara, Metis, Adrastea, Pasiphaë, Carme, Sinope, Lysithea, Ananke, Leda.

Such an enormous number of strangers you may never think about or meet again.

They have a lot of space to move about in. The solar system is around six billion miles across.

Earth itself is vastly more crowded. Around eight thousand miles across.

Harold is in a very small space with a lot of strange bodies in Bournemouth. A space about five yards across. Strangers with fantastic names he may rarely think about or meet again.

Harold is in the Bella Costa Guesthouse. His life has changed utterly, totally. The strangers crowd all round him. The television blares ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

They are waiting for an invented date which is only important on some parts of Earth. The ‘beginning’ of the New Year, as if the planet were about to start turning.

Harold nearly spent it alone. After the apocalyptic phone call to Lottie, he stayed in his room, trying not to listen for feet on the stairs, in case she phoned back. In the end Mrs Limone had called him, more genteel than usual, from the landing.

‘Coo-ee, Mr Segall! Are you there?’

He had crammed his shoes on, flung the door open.

‘I hope I’m not intrudin’, but I was wonderin’ whethah – you might like to join us all deown in the leownge?’ (She was pulling out all the stops.) ‘Mustn’t be all on your own at the Witchin’ Hour, you know!’

Harold heard himself saying, ‘Yes, very kind,’ as his disappointment faded.

Harold liked beer; Mrs L did not. Her ‘Bar’ stocked port or sherry. But it wasn’t unpleasant, in the warm half-light, sitting listening to yells of television laughter, watching little men in kilts telling jokes (but what am I doing here?).

Every time he shifted in his seat, the white-and-gold wood of the arm creaked. There were two of these chairs, with scrolled bow legs, patently chairs for ladies. There wasn’t any choice, tonight. Every other seat in the leownge was taken. Some of the faces were already known to him, but that didn’t make them any less strange.

The Honeymooners had the sofa as of right. Groom, who was bouncing with health and muscle, took up at least three-quarters of it. Bride was slender and pale as a hair. Harold often caught himself looking at her.

Mrs Limone’s fat boyfriend Francis sat at his mistress’s feet, his bottom almost as large as the pouffe. Mrs L had a vast leather chariot. She looked pink, and fragile, but her hair was sharp yellow. So were the glances she cast about.

Two very old ladies whose names he didn’t know sat in two carvers with their backs to the wall. Their bones showed through; their hair was very white, as Mrs Limone’s should have been by rights.

Harold was glad that the chair which matched his was in a faraway corner. The woman who sat there troubled him, though she sat away from the light. She held herself in with bulging arms. Every other second she let herself go and drank some more, in untidy gulps.

Harold had seen her arrive. He was down in the lobby, just about to phone. She would ‘take a single room, if you have one’. She was ‘not with my husband, at the moment’.

She had suffered through this evening, without her husband. Every eye avoided her. The beginning of a year was very important. The beginning of a year was for booze and smiles, not for alcoholism and dreadful grief.

At the first stroke everyone looked slightly apprehensive, as if it was their turn to go on stage. Their glasses hung suspended. Then Mrs Limone’s swansdown toe dug Francis sharply in the base of his spine. Nothing registered until the fourth stroke, when he suddenly sat bolt upright and bellowed ‘And a Very Happy One! To all of you! A Very Happy New Year!’

Relief. They all drank to the TV set. The two old ladies chinked glasses with each other. Harold realized they were drinking whisky, not sherry. A bottle of – surely Glenfiddich? – peeped from an enormous Gladstone handbag.

Nothing of this was real. He might have died, and been reinvented. Lottie and Davey, he thought, sipping, Lottie and Davey, not all these strangers.

The beginning of a year was important. Why am I here? Must I be here?

He tried to decode the TV show. But he couldn’t understand it, let alone decode it. A host of men in tights with the upper halves of fancy waiters leaped fantastic leaps waving (empty?) champagne bottles, landing at the feet of what might be shepherdesses, if you could go by their beribboned crooks, and the shapes of giant sheep lying dead in the distance. They all wore mauve crinolines and crimson nylon wigs, and all screamed in unison as the trouserless waiters landed.

This could not end well. At twelve forty-five Harold stood up, made a circular, summarizing ‘Happy New Year,’ and trudged up to bed.

Happy New Year, Harold.

He lay in his narrow bed, tipsyish, empty and very, very old. But tomorrow’s a new beginning, he told himself, drifting away on a dinghy of sherry . . .

. . . someone joined him, swimming beside the dinghy, someone frightening in a crimson wig wearing two champagne bottles like waterwings, and he twitched violently, beat her away before he realized it was Lottie, Lottie . . .

Drawing the curtains on the new beginning, he found it was grey sea-mist. Downstairs in the lobby, the woman who had drunk and grieved last night in the fragile chair sat grey and trembling, counting her money by a row of shabby cases.

Breakfast: greyish porridge, startlingly orange kippers and greyish tea. Mrs Limone looked absent, though she served the kippers with a flourish. The beginning of a year was important. You didn’t get kippers every day.