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had been a great one for clutter. He sipped his drink and eyed the mantelshelf denuded of Capo di Monte snuff boxes, Meissen pugs and the fussy French carriage-clock which had been her pride and joy. Contentedly he savoured his whisky, considering without rancour his errant wife, and began to laugh out loud at the thought that, had the house not belonged to him as it had before their marriage, Celia would have that, too. Or perhaps not, he thought. A tiny house in a Chelsea cul-de-sac was not comparable to the establishment on Barnes Common owned by Andrew Battersby into which Celia was planning to move next. There was, too, a house in Gloucestershire. How meteoric had been Andrew Battersby’s rise in the City since Celia divorced him. From ‘something or other in insurance’ the name of Battersby had grown to giant proportions in the financial world. She won’t divorce him a second time, Sylvester thought, sipping his whisky; she will turn a blind eye to pretty secretaries. She won’t want to stay long in that new flat; she has to remarry before some other girl catches him. She should have stuck to Battersby; I was never more than an inadequate safety net, a five-year stop-gap. Five long years. Phew!
    How quickly, he wondered, would she get around to asking for a divorce? How would she word it? Would she expect him to divorce her? Unlikely. Would she want to divorce him? What grounds would she find? Sylvester pondered. He had not been unfaithful; he had not been cruel or violent, rather the contrary. Celia was not a woman to inspire crimes of passion; he had let her go taking most of the contents of their home with her without a bleat of protest. ‘Good luck to you, Celia,’ he said out loud, ‘first and about to be third wife of Andrew Battersby.’

SEVEN
    J ANET HEAVED HER BAGS of shopping into the ground-floor flat and kicked the door shut.
    Sorting out groceries in the kitchen, she pondered over the growing pile of letters lying in the communal hall addressed to Piper.
    She knew her lover Tim would say, ‘Leave well alone, don’t interfere. It’s not as though she was a friend. We are new here, we don’t know the situation,’ and so on and on. She popped a fresh loaf into her Provençal bread pot and consigned the residue of last week’s loaf to the litter bin. Then she switched on the kettle and brewed herself a mug of instant coffee, which she drank standing. As she drank, she thought of the Piper woman in the top-floor flat. Divorced, one had gathered, but visited rather often by her ex. Presumably he had access to the child? Access night or day, if one went by the shouts and thumps one could not help hearing even two floors down. There had been no disturbances lately, though, and a perceptible absence of noise from the child. Nor had she seen the Piper woman passing through the hall. She couldn’t be away, not if the Indians from the corner-shop had been up to see her. Funny, that. Lovely colour that sari—sallow? I am not sallow! Frowning, she scrutinized her face in the glass. It’s the autumn light, must be. Why not be neighbourly? Take her some of Tim’s aunt’s apples. Hard to know whether they were cookers or eaters. She’d brought far too many; sitting there, they’d turn to cider before one found out. Janet picked out half a dozen fruits which looked all right and put them in a plastic bag. In the hall she gathered up the pile of letters, mounted the stairs and knocked on the door of the top flat.
    When Julia opened the door, Janet said, ‘I am Janet. I live with Tim Fellowes on the ground floor. I wondered whether you would like some of the apples Tim’s old aunt brought us from the country? She didn’t say whether they are cookers or eaters, but they smell quite nice.’ So saying, and gaining impetus from good intentions and curiosity, she pressed forward so that Julia willy-nilly stepped back and, peering over her shoulder, Janet could see into the room.
    ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh!