![]() ![]() Jane was listless, her mind a blank with vivid little jets of dissatisfaction firing off in it. (For Robin, blind on his bed with a headache and sex fantasies and short-circuiting flashes of insane ambition, his sister, mutely protesting-she simply stood there till he got up and pushed her out and locked the door behind her-was a visitant from his insipid past, when they’d been friends.) Allsop smoked, with a casual elegance that startled Jane, but only on the silk-stole evenings, or if she had women friends around for tea. When Jane strayed into Robin’s room (“Buzz off, shrimp, you’re not permitted across my threshold”), he was curled up on his side on the bed, his clasped hands between his drawn-up knees, his glasses off, and his book propped across his face, Pink Floyd playing subduedly on the stereo. Only Jane’s brother, Robin, was allowed a special dispensation, because he was studying to get into Oxford-it was all right for him to have his head stuck in a book all day and to go around scowling, complaining that the sun gave him headaches. It was part of the family code that sport and physical exercise were meaningful ways of passing leisure time without them, you risked dissipation, letting value slip away. (She didn’t know her old friends anymore that was what happened when you were sent away to boarding school.) She said she was heading inside to find her Jokari set (a rubber ball attached by a long elastic string to a wooden base-you could hit the ball back and forth with a paddle all by yourself for hours on end). “Why don’t you call up some of your old friends?” Mrs. She certainly seemed to have her mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind. Jane coveted this stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at herself in the mirror-although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. ![]() She was immensely capable tall and big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Allsop-dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress-was wielding her secateurs up a ladder, pruning the climbing roses. But her mother said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone, and Jane couldn’t read outside with the same absorption there was always some strikingly perfect speckled insect falling onto your page like a reminder (of what? of itself), or a root nudging into your back, or stinging ants inside your shorts. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice beside a streaming windowpane, reading about the Chalet School. It wasn’t acceptable in Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly they longed for rain. It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. (She wasn’t clever or literary, and was nervous of new words, which seemed to stick to her.) “Cerulean” was more of a blank, baking glare than mere merry blue. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky, from which Jane couldn’t unfix the word “cerulean,” which she’d learned in the art room. ![]() This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the nineteen-sixties, when parents were more careless. Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. ![]()
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