.

settled. ‘I need to lock up,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’ She waited as Cara scrabbled round for her bag. ‘Here, let me carry that.’ She picked up the cloth carry-all that the other woman always toted around with her, and slung it over her shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said again.

      Cara followed her slowly, looking back over her shoulder at the window. A rendezvous? Was Cara in the habit of meeting a boyfriend on the canal towpath, or in the gallery? There didn’t seem much point when she had a perfectly good flat upstairs.

      She headed up the stairs, stopping when she realized Cara wasn’t following. ‘Cara?’ she said.

      ‘I’m coming.’ Cara had stopped to look at the poster for Daniel’s exhibition, the reproduction Eliza had been looking at earlier, the hanging man. She gathered the baby closer to her. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said.

      ‘I suppose it is,’ Eliza said briskly. Cara still seemed reluctant to move. ‘Do you want some coffee?’ Eliza regretted the impulse almost as soon as she had spoken. She was cautious about socializing with Cara. Eliza felt sorry for her, but she didn’t want – she didn’t have time for – the demands a lonely teenager might make on her.

      ‘OK.’ Cara seemed to make a decision. She looked back at the gallery and then followed Eliza up the stairs. Eliza set the alarm and locked the doors behind her. She thought she heard the echo again as she and Cara walked towards the exit that led to the flats, but when she stopped and listened, everything was quiet. The alarm was sounding its single note, then dropped a tone and stopped. Eliza found herself listening, waiting for the alarm to go off in response to an intruder in the gallery, but nothing happened. She relaxed. ‘You really think it’s bad, that painting?’ Cara said as she followed Eliza up the stairs. She was talking about Daniel’s poster.

      ‘Not bad,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Disturbing.’ Something was nagging at her and she wanted to pin it down, but Cara’s chatter was distracting her.

      ‘Why does Jonathan want to exhibit him?’ Cara went on. Her eyes were nervous, darting round the walls of the stairway and landings.

      ‘Who? Daniel Flynn? That reproduction is just a part…You need to see the exhibition as a whole.’ Eliza was trying to fit her key into her lock. She could never get it the right way up. If Cara had been upset by that small detail, then she would find the rest of it devastating.

      ‘I know. I thought…It’s creepy, that’s all.’ Cara followed Eliza through the door into the flat.

      ‘Good art is meant to disturb you. But it’s only here for a week.’ Eliza dumped her work bag and Cara’s carry-all, and switched on the lights.

      ‘Hey, nice!’ Cara looked round the loft space.

      Eliza was pleased. The Trust had run out of money before the loft conversion was complete. Her loft had been renovated to the point of habitability, the roof and the walls repaired, plumbing installed, the floors fixed. She had moved in to bare bricks and raw timbers. She had needed accommodation urgently. There was no time – and no money – for carefully thought out schemes. She had painted everything white and black, had moved in with her bed, her chairs, her lights and her painting equipment. She’d arranged the room carefully to create living and sleeping and working spaces. Now, it looked spacious and inviting, the chairs made splashes of colour close to one of the arched windows overlooking the canal. At the far end of the room, Eliza had set up her easel, and her painting, her Madrid painting, glowed its Mediterranean warmth against the winter night. Behind her, the kitchen welcomed with red tiles and bright pots.

      Cara moved over to the window and hovered uncertainly, the baby sling distorting her outline like a misshapen pregnancy. Eliza shifted the papers that were set out on the chairs, photographs, slides, notes, some of her planning for the exhibition. ‘Why don’t you put it – I mean her, down?’ she said.

      ‘She might wake up,’ Cara said. ‘She cries a lot.’ She looked at the child, an expression of bafflement on her face, then went over to the chairs as Eliza went to make coffee, and began to unhook the sling. The baby stirred as Cara put it down, tucking a shawl round it. ‘I get so tired,’ she said. She slumped into the chair next to the one she had put the baby on. ‘It’s a lot, when there’s only you,’ she said.

      ‘It must be hard work,’ Eliza said. She wondered what Cara had expected. She poured out the coffee and put it on the table. She looked at the infant’s sleeping face. She didn’t know much about babies.

      ‘You know,’ Cara went on, ‘I thought that having a baby would be…you know, it would make me special. Now I’m just…I dunno.’ She shrugged.

      Eliza looked at Cara, wondering how to respond to that. Cara was tucking the shawl around the baby as she spoke, and her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. Her face, under the dramatic make-up she favoured, looked thin and pinched.

      ‘Do you need a baby to make you special?’ Eliza said.

      ‘I don’t know.’ Cara frowned. She picked up her cup. ‘This is nice.’ She leant back in the chair. ‘I’d like to have my flat as nice as this. I used to think about it when I was carrying her.’ She nodded at the baby. ‘I was going to have my own place and make it really nice. I wanted those drape things over the windows, you know, like they have, and I thought all plants and that. And they had such lovely baby stuff, I wanted…’ Cara’s voice faded away as she contemplated the plans she had had. ‘I used to think that no one could say you were useless if you had a baby. You’ve got something to do then. They used to go on at me all the time: “You’ll never get anywhere, you’ve got to work if you’re going to pass any exams…”’

      ‘Didn’t you want to?’ Eliza had always been successful at school, had enjoyed shining in a system that had never struck her as too challenging. Her degree had taken her to London, and then to Italy and Spain. Education had opened up the world for her.

      Cara shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like school. I wasn’t clever and they were always on at me, you know…’

      ‘So you had a baby?’ Eliza said.

      The rain drummed against the window. Cara looked out at the canal and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that really.’ Eliza wondered if Cara had anyone to talk to. She was a solitary figure, drifting through the gallery, cuddling the baby against her in its sling. ‘But when I got pregnant I thought, well, it would be nice. To have a baby.’ She finished her coffee and smiled at Eliza. She looked round the room again. ‘This is nice.’ She was curled up in the large chair, and the tense, pinched look was leaving her face. She was as thin as a child.

      Eliza finished her coffee. She could see that it was doing Cara good to have some company, but Eliza had things to do. She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Well, I need to get on,’ she said. She saw a look of – what? Apprehension? – in Cara’s eyes. ‘We must do this again,’ she said. There was no harm in the odd half-hour spent talking to Cara.

      Cara’s smile was rather strained as she nodded and gathered up the baby. ‘It’s been nice,’ she said.

      Eliza saw her out of the flat, then pulled out the sheaf of notes she had made downstairs. If Daniel was coming tomorrow, she wanted to be ready for him. The rain spattered across the window. It was just the night, just the weather for a couple of hours with Brueghel’s macabre vision of the apocalypse.

       TWO

      The road from the cemetery had been dark and wet. Kerry had got lost, taken a wrong turn, and then she had been wandering along dark lanes, like the countryside, where the wet grass slapped at her ankles and green tendrils hung over walls and caught and tugged at her hair. She’d found her way back to the main road eventually, but it was dark now. She looked at her watch.

      Lyn would be waiting for her at the café where they always met. She’d