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really satisfied that Chloe—' she refused to adapt to Dollie; the persistent use of the name seemed to her part of the Stovers' fantasy about their daughter - 'if you're really satisfied that Chloe was intending to visit you and not go straight to the ferry.'
    Jemima heard Mrs Stover's more plaintive voice in the background. It was still unfortunately clear.
    'Show her the letter, Dad,' she was saying. 'We must show her the letter.' Strangled sounds from Mr Stover. A pause and an even more plaintive cry. 'You're wearing your spectacles, Charlie.' Mrs Stover added something which sounded like: 'But the telephone is cheaper on Saturday, Charlie. Your cousin Poppy told us.'
    The image of the two old people in Folkestone - 'near the park, if you know the town' - worrying over their daughter and their telephone and their spectacles made Jemima feel increasingly desperate. Her holiday, her disappearance in London, was being melted away by the most unwelcome compassionate feelings.
    It was not at all difficult for Jemima to imagine the Stovers at home in 'Finches' because she had just completed a programme on the special loneliness of elderly parents whose successful offspring had moved up the cultural scale, leaving them financially secure, but desperately, uncomprehendingly, lonely on their lowly rung of the ladder. It had been called The Unvisited. Chloe Fontaine had not contributed to it. She was, involuntarily and rather too late, contributing to it now.
    'Read it over to me.' It was the best she could do. Yes, Chloe's letter sounded positive enough about her arrival as Jemima listened and the clear light of the August morning filtered delicately through Chloe's Japanese blinds. She imagined 'Finches', an immaculate little home, breakfast long since finished, crockery washed up, beds made, house garnished. The rooms would be small, unlike Chloe's airy palace. There would be plants in rows in unequal pots on the window sills, all green and rather bushy, with a small red flower or two, all quite unlike the graceful symmetrical white and grey shapes of Chloe's floral decor.
    She could imagine photographs. A dark-haired Dollie with plaits winning prizes at her local grammar school. Dollie - now Chloe - in the group photograph of their first year at Cambridge. Dollie/Chloe marrying Lance Strutt? Chloe marrying Igor? Jemima had been to both weddings and not met the Stovers. It was more likely that one of those large romantic photographs of Chloe by Snowdon and Bailey and Lichfield and, best of all Parkinson, which adorned the backs of her novels and almost swamped the paperback versions, causing sardonic grief to reviewers, one of those must surely grace the Stovers' piano. Chloe in a picture hat, nestling on a swing, modern Fragonard, rising out of roses, corrupted Boucher; on one fabulous occasion actually surrounded by a flight of doves - only Binnie Rapallo could have decided to make a pastoral Greuze out of the author of Old Miss Stevenson, a wry tale about a spinster and her past.
    Piano? A memory of Chloe at Cambridge: 'My mother actually wanted to send the piano along with my trunk. A chastity symbol I can only suppose. Certainly it would keep anything more tactile from entering this fearful room.' So the piano waited for Chloe in Folkestone. Like its owners. There would be much waiting done in that house. Waiting for Dollie.
    In Chloe Fontaine's new Bloomsbury apartment on the other hand no waiting had been done at all; Chloe had not even waited to tell Jemima that she intended to visit her parents. She had hardly waited to move into the flat itself before setting off for the Camargue. Jemima heard again the light clack-clack of her high heels and her characteristic rather breathy voice: 'No, no, down the stairs, there's no lift. I'm in a hurry.' A further pang of pity for the unvisited voices on the other end of the telephone seized Jemima; an atavistic pang perhaps for those dead parents of her own, dead before Jemima