"So who needs prayers?"

She tapped the side of her head.

"Find yourself a gullible journalist, then use a bit more of this. Even you might get somewhere. She"s an opinion-former. You fool her and she fools everyone else."

"That stinks!" declared the woman incautiously.

"It"s only the b.l.o.o.d.y psychos they"re ever interested in. The rest of us poor sods can go hang ourselves for all they care."

Something rather unpleasant shifted at the back of Olive"s tiny eyes.

"Are you calling me a psycho?"

The woman smiled weakly and retreated a step.

"Hey, Sculptress, it was a slip of the tongue." She held up her hands.

"OK? No harm done." She was sweating as she walked away.

Behind her, using her bulk to obscure what she was doing from prying eyes, Olive took the day figure she was working on from her bottom drawer and set her ponderous fingers to moulding the child on its mother"s lap. Whether it was intentional or whether she hadn"t the skill to do it differently, the mother"s crude hands, barely disinterred from the day, seemed to be smothering the life from the baby"s plump, round body.

Olive crooned quietly to herself as she worked. Behind the mother and child, a series of figures, like grey gingerbread men, lined the back of the table. Two or three had lost their heads.

He sat slumped on the steps outside the front door of her block of flats, smelling of beer, his head buried in his hands. Roz stared at him for several seconds, her face blank of expression.

"What are you doing here?"

He had been crying, she saw.

"We need to talk," he said.

"You never talk to me."

She didn"t bother to answer. Her ex-husband was very drunk.

There was nothing they could say that hadn"t been said a hundred times before. She was so tired of his messages on her answer phone tired of the letters, tired of the hatred that knotted inside her when she heard his voice or saw his handwriting.

He plucked at her skirt as she tried to pa.s.s, clinging to it like a child.

"Please, Roz. I"m too p.i.s.sed to go home."

She took him upstairs out of an absurd sense of past duty.

"But you can"t stay," she told him, pushing him on to the sofa.

"I"ll ring Jessica and get her to come and collect you."

"Sam"s sick," he muttered.

"She won"t leave him."

Roz shrugged unsympathetically.

"Then I"ll call a cab."

"No." He reached down and jerked the jack plug from its socket.

"I"m staying.

There was a raw edge to his voice which was a warning, if she had chosen to heed it, that he was in no mood to be trifled with. But they had been married too long and had had too many bruising rows for her to allow him to dictate terms. She had only contempt for him now.

"Please yourself," she said.

"I"ll go to a hotel."

He stumbled to the door and stood with his back to it.

"It wasn"t my fault, Roz. It was an accident. For G.o.d"s sake, will you stop punishing me?"

EIGHT.

Roz closed her eyes and saw again the tattered, pale face her five-year-old daughter, as ugly in death as she ad been beautiful in life, her skin ripped and torn by the exploding gla.s.s of the windscreen. Could she have accepted it more easily, she wondered as she had wondered so many times before, if Rupert had died too? Could she have forgiven him, dead, as she could not forgive him, alive?

"I never see you," she said with a tight smile, *so how can I be punishing you? You"re drunk and you"re being ridiculous. Neither of which conditions is any way out of the ordinary." He had an unhealthy and un cared-for look which fuelled her scorn and made her impatient.

"Oh, for G.o.d"s sake," she snapped, *just get out, will you? I don"t feel anything for you any more and, to be honest, I don"t think I ever did." But that wasn"t true, not really.

"You can"t hate what you never loved," Olive had said.

Tears slithered down his drink-sodden face.

"I weep for her every day, you know."

"Do you, Rupert? I don"t. I haven"t the energy."

"Then you didn"t love her as much as I loved her," he sobbed, his body heaving to control itself.

Roz"s lips curled contemptuously.

"Really? Then why your indecent haste to provide her replacement? I worked it out, you know. You must have impregnated your precious Jessica within a week of walking away unscathed from the accident." She larded the word with sarcasm.

"Is Sam a good replacement, Rupert? Does he wind your hair round his finger the way Alice used to do? Does he laugh like her? Does he wait by the door for you and hug your knees and say: "Mummy, Mummy, Daddy"s home"?" Her anger made her voice brittle.

"Does he, Rupert? Is he everything Alice was and more? Or is he nothing like her and that"s why you have to weep for her every day?"

"He"s a baby, for Christ"s sake." He clenched his fists, her hatred mirrored in his eyes.

"G.o.d, you"re a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h, Roz. I never set out to replace her. How could I? Alice was Alice. I couldn"t bring her back."

She turned away to look out of the window.

"No."

"Then why do you blame Sam? It wasn"t his fault either. He doesn"t even know he had a half-sister."

"I don"t blame Sam." She stared at a couple, lit by orange light, on the other side of the road. They held each other tenderly, stroking hair, stroking arms, kissing. How naive they were. They thought love was kind.

"I resent him."

She heard him blunder against her coffee table.

"That"s just b.l.o.o.d.y spite," he slurred.

"Yes," she said quietly, more to herself than to him, her breath misting the gla.s.s, *but I don"t see why you should be happy when I am not? You killed my daughter but you got away with it because the law said you"d suffered enough. I"ve suffered far more and my only crime was to let my adulterous husband have access to his daughter because I knew she loved him and I didn"t want to see her unhappy "If you"d only been more understanding," he wept, *it would never have happened. It was your fault, Roz. You"re the one who really killed her." She didn"t hear his approach. She was turning back into the room when his fist smashed against her face.

It was a shabby, sordid fight. Where words had failed them -the very predictability of their conversations meant they were always forearmed they hit and scratched instead in a brutish desire to hurt. It was a curiously pa.s.sionless exercise, motivated more by feelings of guilt than by hate or revenge, for at the back of both their minds was the knowledge that it was the failure of their marriage, the war they had conducted between themselves, that had led Rupert to accelerate away in frustrated anger with their daughter, unstrapped, upon the back seat.

And who could have foreseen the car that would hurtle out of control across a central reservation and, under the force of its impact, toss a helpless five-year-old through shards of broken gla.s.s, smashing her fragile skull as she went? An act of G.o.d, according to the insurance company. But for Roz, at least, it had been G.o.d"s final act. He and Alice had perished together.

Rupert was the first to stay his hand, aware, perhaps, that the fight was an unequal one or because, quite simply, he had sobered up. He crawled away to sit huddled in a corner. Roz fingered the tenderness round her mouth and licked blood from her lips, then closed her eyes and sat for several minutes in restful silence, her murderous anger a.s.suaged. They should have done this a long time ago. She felt at peace for the first time in months, as if she had exorcised her own guilt in some way. She should, she knew, have gone out to the car that day and strapped Alice into the seat herself, but instead she had slammed the front door on them both and retreated to the kitchen to nurse her hurt pride with a bottle of gin and an orgy of tearing up photographs.

Perhaps, after all, she had needed to be punished too. Her guilt had never been expiated. Her own atonement, a private rending of herself, had brought about her disintegration and not her redemption.

Enough, she saw now, was enough.

"We are all masters of our fate, Roz, including you."

She pushed herself gingerly to her feet, located the jack plug and inserted it back into its socket. She glanced at Rupert for a moment, then dialled Jessica.

"It"s Roz," she said.

"Rupert"s here and he needs collecting, I"m afraid." She heard the sigh at the other end of the line.

"It"s the last time, Jessica, I promise." She gave a hint of a laugh.

"We"ve declared a truce. No more recriminations. OK, half an hour.

He"ll be waiting for you downstairs." She replaced the receiver.

"I mean it, Rupert.

It"s over. It was an accident. Let"s stop blaming each other and find some peace at last."

Iris Fielding"s insensitivity was legendary but even she was shocked by the sight of Roz"s battered face the next day.

"G.o.d, you look awful!" she said bluntly, making straight for the drinks cabinet and pouring herself a brandy. As an afterthought she poured one for Roz.

"Who did it?"

Roz closed the door and limped back to the sofa.

Iris drained her gla.s.s.

"Was it Rupert?" She proffered the second gla.s.s to Roz who shook her head to the brandy and the question.

"Of course it wasn"t Rupert." She lowered herself carefully on to the sofa, half lying, half sitting, while Mrs. Antrobus stalked across the soft fluff of her dressing-gowned chest to b.u.t.t her chin with an affectionate head.

"Could you feed Mrs. A. for me? There"s an opened tin in the fridge."

Iris glowered at Mrs. Antrobus.

"Horrible flea-bitten creature. Where were you when your mistress needed you?" But she disappeared into the kitchen and rattled a saucer anyway.

"Are you sure it wasn"t Rupert?" she asked again when she reemerged.

"No. Not his style at all. The fights we have are entirely verbal and infinitely more bruising."

Iris looked thoughtful.

"You"ve always told me how supportive he"s been."

"Ilied."

Iris looked even more thoughtful.

"So who was it?"

"Some creep I picked up at a wine bar. He was more fanciable with his clothes on than off, so I told him to get stuffed and he took exception." She saw a question in Iris"s eyes and smiled cynically through her split lip.

"No, he didn"t rape me. My virtue is intact. I defended it with my face."

"Hm. Well, far be it from me to criticise, my love, but wouldn"t it have been more sensible to defend your face with your virtue? I"m not a great believer in fighting over lost causes." She drank Roz"s brandy.

"Did you call the police?"

"No."

"A doctor?"

"No." She put a hand on the telephone.