Second Sight: A Novel

McGregor

One

She had left the magazines and books on the table the previous evening. She had been reading the small paperback before she went to bed, and she knew that she had left it open, face down, to mark her page.

But now it lay centre stage, closed, neatly on top of Kieran’s journals. Next to it lay the hardback on Masada, and the dig reports from Syria bound in their pale yellow matt with black spiral spine. Three very correct inches separated each pile. And they were all the same three inches or so from the edge of the table. They faced her in a mute, accusatory grid.

Her first thought had been safety. Ruth could get in at night.

That morning, an hour before, she had turned at the first sight of those neatened books, fury slamming through her along with fear. She had run upstairs in a blind panic, this intrusion one too much, the manipulation one too many, the whole forming one heavy block in her head. She knew then what people meant by the straw that broke the camel’s back. Such a very slight thing bearing down so suddenly and so hard. She had packed as quickly as she could, dropping things unfolded into the suitcases, stuffing them haphazardly into free spaces. Some of her choices were bizarre. A thick sweater patterned with marguerites—she had never even liked it. Deck shoes with worn rope soles that wouldn’t see out another summer.

Every few moments, she had glanced out of the window, to where her four-year-old son lay perfectly still under the trees. Theo was stretched on the ground at the edge of the lawn, as if lying in wait, his gaze fixed on the roots of the beech hedge, his small arm extended, wrist bent, palm upwards as though clasping another invisible hand. The spring morning was dry and cold, and a scouring wind blew straight down the valley, shaking the trees.

Lin had looked up at the hill that rose steeply behind the garden. It was ridged until its very top, a green chalk mound with an indentation at the summit. Beyond that summit rose a higher one, the heathland of the Hamble monument with its crowning white-stone tower. She had stared at it, and then back at the boy. There had been no noise in the valley other than the distant sound of a van toiling up the long gradient of the lane that wound round the eastern slope of the hill. The world was quite deserted, dead.

Lin had glanced at the bedroom clock. Ten thirty. It would be past midday now in Pedhoulas. Kieran would probably ring her at midday, and she had become abruptly afraid of being there for the call, of being plunged into going over the same ground again. She was tired of the ritual: explaining what Ruth had done; listening to his amused dismissals.

She had once believed that he still loved his ex-wife. Now she thought that it wasn’t love but habit and sloth. He liked Ruth’s attention just as an indulged son loves to be stroked by his mother. He did all but curl up in Ruth’s lap and let her smooth his hair. It was Ruth this, Ruth that, Ruth who was so respected, Ruth so sensible, Ruth so kind.

Lin knew that his voice could keep her in the house. And, as she had thought of Kieran, a crazy pattern interrupted her line of sight: the tool-worked leather at the edge of his desk, the reflection of sunlight on a stone path cut by an irregular fence. Castellated blocks danced across the light, and she had closed her eyes and pressed her hand to the side of her head. The piercing image had flashed and subsided.

She had zipped the last case, and run into Theo’s room. The floor was filled with toys: massed ranks of tin soldiers, Star Wars ships, grotesque little plastic aliens. Her son was halfway through a battle that had already lasted several weeks. Each night the lines were moved, the tactics changed, new ranks murdered, the dead resurrected. It was an intensely crowded, complicated world, and she knew with a sinking heart that she was about to destroy it. Biting her lip, she had snatched up two of the largest toys, and filled a carrier bag with some of the figures.

Then, minutes ago, something had stopped her. Some last regret, some steadying hand. She had paused, staring at the wall, then looking out again at Theo still oblivious on his stomach by the hedge. She tried to imagine what Ruth would say, how she would twist this absence.

She had gone downstairs for another look.

Imagine it. To come in at night, with Lin and Theo asleep upstairs. Come in at night, and do nothing at all but walk through to the sitting room and correct whatever traces there were of Lin’s presence. In Lin’s own house. In Kieran’s own house.

In the house that used to be Ruth’s.

So like Ruth not to do more. Another disenchanted, discarded wife might have slashed the seats, ripped the books apart. Or worse: set fire to the house while they slept obliviously on.

Ruth had stood back and taken her exile well. Behaved in such a civilized fashion. There had been no hysterics from Ruth, no accusations, no scenes. Oh … perhaps a little at first. Raised voices in these rooms. Followed by fury of a quieter, more long-lasting kind. Phone calls … there were always phone calls, even now. Ruth needing Kieran in the evening. Kieran going over to her flat to talk.

But then … this.

Lin had changed the lock on the front door, the great Georgian wood door that faced down the drive. She had assumed, a month or so ago, that that was where Ruth came in. Straight through the front door.

But Ruth must have more than one key. She must have the keys to the whole house.

Lin stared now at the table.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No more.’ Her fingers closed over the piece of paper in her pocket: the address in Hampton, her old student flat.

She went back to the hall, not running this time but walking with a confirmed purpose, her face set. She picked up the first case and went out to the car. Then, with the car loaded, she went around the side of the house and out onto the long, sloping lawn that ran down to the river. The grass was bumpy, yellowed in places, patched with moss. The chestnut trees hung over it, splattering uneven shadows, their rustling, whispering and swaying filling the air.

‘Theo!’ she called. He didn’t move.

She walked over to him. She took several deep breaths, the pain in her head squeezing the last to a sharply drawn sigh. Theo didn’t look up, and she lay down full-length at his side, resting her head on her folded arms. The salt marks of that morning’s tears felt like paint on her face.

Her son’s small fist clenched suddenly on her arm.

‘Look,’ he said. He had managed to prise the last upside-down flowerpot from the mound, and gave a little cry of triumph. ‘Nest!’

She turned her head and looked at him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Waking them up.’ He had a pointed stick, and was prodding the cone-shaped patch of earth.

‘They’re already awake,’ she said. She gazed at the ants feverishly scouring the upturned ground, by turns caressing and dragging the disturbed pupae back to the dark.

‘Look … they running.’

‘Yes. They’re frightened,’ she told him.

The wingless females toiled in the earth, the smallest frantically circling the storehouses, driven by the need to maintain the salivary secretions of the bodies of their young. Lin glanced at Theo’s preoccupied profile, his four-year-old absorption in their task, the inner darker red of his parted lip, the smoothness of his face, the curious forked crease at the corner of each eye, the fair lashes under dark brows that gave him such a surprised look.

‘Theo,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘In a minute.’

She got up, smoothed down her clothes, and looked back at the house. It was lovely. The vast square flint-and-cob building dominated the small rise above the village, set in its own half-acre of lawn.

A prickle of sensation ran down one side of her head, slightly behind her ear, from below the crown to the edge of her jaw. She put up her hand to feel the path of the pain: a curious, blunt blow of electricity.

She held out her hand to him. ‘Time to go.’

He rolled on his back. ‘Where we going?’

She pulled him to his feet, stroked the grass from his sweatshirt. Even in the racing shadows of the branches, the wind tasted of the chalk blown from the hills above them. She held him to her, resisting his squirming, and pressed her lips to his hair.

‘Away,’ she murmured. ‘We’re going away.’

Two

Ruth Carmichael was listening.

Her face was turned away from her patient as she pressed the stethoscope against Caroline Devlin’s back. She found the other woman’s proximity, if not unpleasant, certainly unappealing.

As she looked to one side, she could see the ordered neatness of her own desk, the peace lily with its naked white bloom, the uncurtained white blind drawn across the window. Her surgery office had a view of the Victorian street below, and the park across the way. Directly opposite, a giant copper beech had just begun to darken on the long journey to its bloodied summer black. She glanced at it, then beyond to the clock tower beyond the trees. It was midday. The surgery was running late. Caroline Devlin was her last patient.

‘What can you hear?’ the woman asked anxiously. ‘You can’t hear anything unusual?’

Ruth took the instrument away from her ear. ‘I can’t hear anything at all if you continue talking,’ she observed mildly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Caroline replied.

The skin of the woman’s exposed back was very pale. It was mottled with tiny threadlike moles: an example, if ever Ruth had seen one, of a body replicating a personality. Caroline Devlin was a marriage-guidance counsellor: a thin, wispy woman with a frayed manner, as if on the edge of an anxiety attack. A long ponytail of greying brown hair was twisted into an artfully untidy pleat whose strands hung down her neck. The knot of hair was secured with a wooden pin four inches from Ruth’s face. The hair smelled of talcum powder.

Ruth closed her eyes and listened to the echoes of the heart.

She admired this rhythm more than any other. She had found it mysterious from being a child, lying with her head fastened with pressure against her own pillow. The relentless opening and closing, the perfection, the immediacy of response. The human heart pumped five litres of blood a minute, beating ninety thousand times a day, more than thirty million times every year. A large muscular fist, tethered in the chest by its arteries and veins, and protected by a double-walled sac attached to the breastbone and diaphragm, its beating—the dull and sharp double contraction—controlled by the autonomic nervous system originated in the brain. Ruth always thought of this superior operator of the system, the brain, rather than the slave heart itself when she listened to that blunt-peaked thud in the chest. Behind every beat, an imperative. And she was also deeply fascinated by the sound of a heart fractured and labouring.

Which she could not hear now.

She took the stethoscope away and looked at Caroline Devlin.

‘Tell me again what happened,’ she said.

Caroline laced her fingers together in her lap. ‘It was very curious,’ she said, ‘very sudden. I was simply reviewing my caseload before work. I had drunk a cup of coffee, taken a phone call … and felt this sensation as if I was been pressed between two closing walls …’ She looked up at Ruth. ‘I really think it’s nothing,’ she added hastily. ‘If it hadn’t been for my colleagues overreacting—’

‘And your arm felt strange, you said?’

‘Just the merest numbness, a little tingling. It went away very quickly.’

‘Which arm?’

‘The left.’

‘And where exactly was the tingling?’

Caroline spread her hand. ‘Here in my finger. Just one finger, the third.’

‘Any other symptoms?’

‘No.’

‘Have you experienced this before?’

‘Never.’ A rigorous shaking of the head.

‘Any history of heart disease in your family?’

A silence while Caroline Devlin paled. ‘None.’

‘Have you had a blood cholesterol test recently?’

‘Not recently. Five years ago. The reading was about seven.’

‘Did you feel nauseous when this happened, this morning?’

‘No.’

Ruth nodded at Caroline’s clothes folded on the chair next to the couch. ‘You can dress again now,’ she said, moving away to her desk, where she sat down and began to make notes.

From the other side of the curtain came Caroline’s voice. ‘I really think this is due to stress, you know,’ she said. ‘We’ve been terribly busy. One of our office staff told me this morning that there’s this enormous nerve running down your chest, and when it clamps up, it feels just like a heart attack.’

Ruth did not look up. ‘Does it?’ she murmured. ‘How interesting.’

Caroline Devlin emerged and sat down on a nearby chair.

Ruth was not a particularly popular GP. She was not effusive, friendly, or necessarily approachable, although she was perfectly capable of such reactions if they were needed. Yet she did have an impressive, unhurried calm. Patients often said that she had time to listen to them. Either that or the other side of the coin: that she would not be rushed.

Now she put down her pen and gazed at her notes in silence for some time. Then she glanced back to Caroline.

‘We’ve got a portable ECG in the nurse’s room,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to have a check on that.’

‘I see,’ Caroline said. ‘I’ll make an appointment.’

‘There’s no need,’ Ruth replied. ‘The nurse will have finished her list, so I’ll pop through now and get it organized.’

‘Now?’ Caroline echoed. ‘I can’t possibly do that. I have clients this afternoon.’

Ruth smiled as she stood up. ‘Just a check. Nothing to worry about.’

She left the room and walked along the corridor to the short flight of stairs. As she reached the top, she heard the receptionist call her. The woman was leaning out from the counter, looking up the stairs.

‘Dr Carmichael?’ she shouted. ‘Are you there?’

Ruth came slowly down the stairs. The woman’s confusion cleared.

‘Ah … must have just missed you. Call for you. Outside line.’

‘I’m just coming for Antonia. Where is she?’

‘Finishing a vaccination,’ said the other receptionist, from behind a wall of records: hundreds of bunched yellow envelopes kept on bulging shelves.

‘Call her for me,’ Ruth said. She picked up the phone irritatedly. ‘Who is it?’

‘They didn’t say.’

Ruth looked at the receptionist coldly. She put the phone to her ear.

‘Yes?’

‘Ruth … it’s Lin.’

Ruth’s face did not alter. She continued staring expressionlessly into a space beyond the counter, between the two women facing her.

‘Can you hear me?’

‘I can,’ Ruth said.

There was a pause. Lin sounded frayed, shadowy, her voice almost drowned by the noise of traffic.

‘Keep away from me,’ Lin said.

‘I’m sorry?’

Another crackling, booming pause.

‘You heard me, Ruth. Keep away. Just keep away.’ Lin hung up.

Ruth listened for a moment to the buzz of the disconnection, then replaced the receiver on its rest below the counter. She allowed herself the faintest, briefest of smiles.

‘OK?’ the receptionist asked, looking over her shoulder.

‘Chris, come here,’ Ruth said.

The woman took a couple of steps towards her, eyebrows raised.

Ruth lowered her voice and leaned towards her.

‘Don’t ever shout for me like that,’ she said. ‘Do you understand? There’s absolutely no need to shout up the stairs. No need at all to raise your voice.’

The other woman blinked.

‘Do I make myself clear?’ Ruth asked.

‘Yes,’ the receptionist replied. A flush of embarrassment crept up her face.

‘Tell Antonia to stack up the ECG and call me when it’s ready,’ Ruth said.

Utterly composed, she turned and walked away.

Three

The phone rang at precisely midnight.

‘Lin … is that you?’

‘Yes.’

She heard Kieran try to control his voice. ‘Where’s Theo?’

‘Right here.’

She glanced over at the open door leading to the only bedroom, a tiny eight-by-six room under the eaves, where Theo was now soundly asleep. They had a bedroom, sitting room, and a bathroom down on the half-landing. Sometimes, in the darkness, Lin could hear the slow, muffled bleep of the alarm on the front door of the shop far below.

‘Is he all right?’ Kieran asked.

‘Of course he is.’

A pause.

‘I’ve warned you, Kieran,’ Lin said softly. ‘Dozens of times.’

‘Where are you exactly?’

‘We’re in Hampton.’

He gave a deep, impatient sigh. ‘When did you get there?’

‘Yesterday.’

Another silence, then, ‘This about beats all.’

‘Maybe now you’ll take me seriously,’ she said quietly.

‘I spoke to Ruth last month—you know that.’

‘You told her not to come to the house any more?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She denied it, Lin, as I could have told you.’

She stared around the living room. The phone was next to the sofa where she slept. There were no curtains on the window. No need so high above everyone else, with a view of roofs and the winding hill and the river.

Kieran’s voice came back softly. ‘I just got in and found this message,’ he said.

‘I rang you at noon.’

‘We’ve been filming up the coast from here,’ he said.

‘Is it hot?’

‘No, it’s raining.’

She said nothing. Filming was misery in rain. She ought to know. She could hear other voices, a great many, but far back from the phone he was using.

Two thousand miles away, Kieran glanced about himself. He was in a small Cypriot hotel in a mountain village. The reception desk was a counter four feet from a door that had probably been propped open for a hundred years. The floor was a lurid green linoleum, the steps from the door bright blue. Calor Gas cylinders lined the steps and the pavement outside. And beyond the door the rain sheeted down in one solid curtain, straight and heavy. There was no breath of wind. The temperature was stuck at sixty-five.

‘How is Harry?’ Lin asked.

‘Never mind him. Lin …’

She felt his exasperation. ‘This is your doing,’ she told him. ‘She still comes around, Kee. She was there on Monday.’

‘Look, I accept it’s something of a pain,’ he said. ‘You know what she is. Needs to be in there. Can’t you just tolerate her? It’s not as if she’s malicious—just the opposite.’

Lin stared in exasperation at the ceiling, knotting her fist on the lumped-up blankets that covered her.

‘I wonder how much you would stand of it if you were here more often.’

‘I’d be glad to see her. I like Ruth.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘You obviously do.’

‘You’re letting this get out of proportion, Lin.’

‘She comes in at night! What more do I have to say to convince you? She comes at night, for God’s sake!’

‘To do what?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing. That’s it, don’t you see? She just sits there, rearranges magazines …’

‘She rearranges magazines?’ His tone was now incredulous. ‘You’ve left home because my ex-wife rearranges your magazines?’

‘Yes!’ Lin retorted. She felt tears beginning to block her throat. ‘She has a set of keys and comes into our house at night, Kieran. Or when I’m out during the day. I know she’s been there.’

‘Have you asked her about it?’

‘What?’ Lin said.

‘Have you asked her if she’s doing it?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then how do you know it’s Ruth?’

‘Oh, God.’ For a moment, Lin put the receiver down, then lifted it again to her ear. ‘If it isn’t her, I’m in even worse trouble,’ she said almost tonelessly. ‘I’ve got a stranger coming into my house at night and fumbling around, moving things. Never taking things. Never destroying things. Just moving stuff around. Can’t you see how crazy it is?’

‘It’s crazy all right,’ he murmured.

She caught his meaning. ‘You mean Ruth can’t be crazy, so I must be?’

‘Now—’

‘I’m the ridiculous one. She’s the one constantly ringing up and coming round here. But I’m the ridiculous one. I’m crazy. I’m … what? Overreacting? Of course. It’s me—that’s right, I forgot.’

She closed her eyes. The room suddenly felt cold. She had a sensation of being cast away, isolated. There was a sudden violent thump from Theo’s room.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said into the phone.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Theo. Wait a minute.’ She dropped the phone and swung her legs down off the couch. In the dark she ran over to look into his room. But her son was lying perfectly still, on his back, the bed coverings still tucked tightly around him. She leaned down, checked his breathing, the sweet warm smell of him.

Lin went back to the living-room couch and picked up the discarded receiver. ‘It was nothing,’ she said.

Kieran had obviously taken the time to gather himself for their next flurry. ‘I’ve only been away six weeks.’

‘I know that.’

‘And you say she’s escalated to this in six weeks?’

‘I’m telling you—’ Lin began.

‘This is such a petty thing to do, Lin.’

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ she asked.

‘About what?’

‘Afraid for me. Someone’s coming into our house—’

‘But not breaking in? And then doing what? Do you really think Ruth would come in and just sit there? Just fiddle about with the furniture? Why? What’s the purpose?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lin said miserably.

‘Do you see how utterly fantastic this sounds? I’m more afraid for you there now, wherever you are.’

‘I’m not imagining it.’

‘I didn’t say so.’

‘I can hear it in your voice.’

‘Well,’ he said, smiling to himself. ‘You do have a wonderful imagination.’

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She fisted one hand and put it to the side of her head. If he had been present in the room, she might have hit him. She sat with her knees now pulled up to her chest, her free arm wrapped around them, her breath coming in short, progressively laboured gasps.

‘Kieran,’ she said slowly, ‘don’t belittle me.’

For some time there was nothing but the background voices on his end of the line. She heard someone loudly ordering drinks. She could even hear the whispering slush of the rain.

‘I’m all right here,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a little flat, over a shop in the Liddles.’ That was a warren of market streets just out of the centre of Hampton: a mixture of delicatessens, bookshops, secondhand-clothes stores. ‘Don’t you remember Edith Channon? With the shop? She lives below me. She—’

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, as if he had heard nothing of the last few sentences. ‘To leave home over this—leave our beautiful home—’

‘Your home,’ she corrected him. ‘Yours and Ruth’s.’

‘No, no …’

‘Yes, yes. She still thinks it’s hers. It’s like …’ Lin finally broke down, much to her own disgust after all her attempts to seem rational. She wanted to play this trump card calmly. Ruth or me. Choose Ruth or me. And instead she could hear herself weeping, gasping.

‘Darling,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to have to leave the house,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she murmured, a private plea that was barely audible.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

She fumbled for a tissue on the table alongside the sofa. She found nothing, and wiped her free hand over her face. ‘What?’

‘Your headaches.’

‘Oh … OK.’ This was a lie. Something in her head, something in the way she looked at the world, the messages she processed through, was awry. She couldn’t determine the exact difference. It was as if the world were made of some subtly altered substance: the same and not the same.

Another long pause. ‘Are you working?’ he asked.

She stared at the phone helplessly. ‘Frightened I won’t finish your script?’

‘Don’t be funny.’

‘Or the editing?’

‘Lin, please.’

She made a grudging face to herself. ‘I’m working,’ she told him. Working in the moments—sometimes no more than fifteen minutes at a time—that Theo would allow her. Her bursts of sharpened, irregular concentration had also changed, heightened and distorted. Sometimes, as she sat down to write, the page seemed to lie at the end of a kaleidoscopic tube. Then, closing her eyes, reopening them, this image would vanish.

She was so very tired.

‘You know what this is?’ Kieran asked. He sounded closer now, as if he had cupped his hand over the receiver. ‘This is blackmail.’

‘What can I do if you take her word over mine?’

‘I don’t take her word over yours. I’m simply …’ Another selection of the correct phrase. ‘I’m simply astonished,’ he said finally. ‘And disappointed.’

Her heart went cold. She tightened her grip on the phone.

‘Just tell her,’ she said very evenly, ‘to stay away. Leave us alone. Have her own life. Not mine. Not yours.’

‘All right,’ he conceded at last. ‘All right. I’ll phone her tomorrow. But, if I do, you must promise me one thing.’

‘What is it?’

‘Go back to the house.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, really!’

‘No,’ she repeated.

She started to put the phone down, then rapidly pressed it back to her ear. ‘Don’t tell her where I am, Kieran,’ she said.

‘Why should I?’

‘Promise me.’

He laughed to himself. ‘Hope to die.’

Exasperated, she gave in to a childish impulse and hung up on him. She listened to the street, the silence.

‘You don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘You don’t know.’

On the other side of Europe, he put down the receiver.

‘What is it?’ Harry asked him.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Kieran said.

Harry handed him a drink. Kieran’s agent had been holding ready two thumb-smeared glasses, a quart of Scotch tucked under one arm. Harry was a short man, carrying much more weight than he could afford, who looked older than his forty years, with a heavily greying beard and a rumpled, battered look. Kieran allowed himself an amused moment of pity.

Ever the concerned agent, Harry had arrived only two days before, scenting trouble and trying to avert it. Kieran was already enmeshed in another running battle with the crew over locations, changing his mind, altering the script, scorching the telephone lines between here and London. Ben Lazenby had already gone home, and left the last half-episode to his assistant.

Harry felt like the original fish out of water. He had spent barely two hours, on first arrival, in his pre-booked hotel; for the rest of the time he had been accompanying Kieran on bumpy, sweaty, dank journeys along tracks whose overstated scent of thyme and breathtaking views did nothing at all to ease Harry’s mood. They had spent last night here, where Harry had grumbled for a full hour about the stacks of empty Beck’s crates and a 1930s bathroom of peeling, verdigris grandeur.

‘Why are we here anyway?’ he had demanded. ‘There’s a beautiful hotel just down the road.’

‘Not with this view,’ Kieran had told him.

They had been sitting outside, looking over the white church in the valley, while a thin Cypriot girl swept the path and the empty road.

Harry put a hand on his arm now. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on?’

‘She left the house.’

‘Lin? Why?’

‘Because of Ruth.’

Harry put down his glass, looked at his feet.

‘That’s what she says—but it’s not true.’

Harry glanced at him. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s too absurd.’

‘Oh, absurd. Right. What exactly?’

Kieran considered for a moment, then shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. She’ll come back.’

‘You are having a great month. Anyone left to insult?’

Kieran waved his hand. ‘She often goes away for a couple of days to do research. She always has. This is just that, dressed up—dramatized. She’ll be all right by the time I get back.’

Harry was staring at him. ‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

Harry bent his knees to look up into Kieran’s downturned face. ‘You’re a piss-poor liar.’

Kieran ran his hand through his hair, but made no reply. Then, with a grudging smile, he extended his own hand, flat, and pushed Harry’s face away.

Harry went back to the bar.

In the corner, an elderly couple were staring at Kieran, both with the bemused smile reserved for the unknown confronting the famous, as if Kieran were an illusion capable of vanishing at any moment.

And Kieran possessed, Harry had to admit, a perfect television face.

They had altered the graphics on The History House this year. The programme was impressive, no longer giving off that made-in-the-provinces aura. It was immensely slick now, with a cellophane-wrapped quality. Some of the original quirkiness had gone, of course, ironed and airbrushed away. Hand-held cameras, with their choppy style, had edged out the static frames of the first episodes. But that had suited Kieran all the more—made a good partner to his casual charm.

Kieran was in his mid-thirties, dark, tall and lean, with a lazy sexual smile that rattled the screen. Since The History House began two years ago, he had become a national name.

The opening credits of the programme were imposing: a packed sequence of ramparts, Elizabethan courtyards, country houses, bones in burial ditches, air-shots of the Thames, causeways, and vast Neolithic rings bleaching through downland. Stone eagles transmuted to Byzantine horses, each image bordered with the red-and-gold of the programme logo. The horses in turn melted into flags, swords, crowns and crests, with Kieran’s smile miraculously and handsomely appearing between the familiar faces of politicians, newscasters, actresses, and sports stars. All to a throbbing and insistent tune written specially by a