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kitchen sideboard there were letters waiting for the postman, at least two letters a day. Healways took them, posted them in town. He had collected the post, too, from Sal at the end of the road, but now, he supposed, Isabel would object, once she noticed. Fear clutched at his lungs. Already he was relegated to the kitchen as if he had never gone beyond; Isabel’s rule prevailed. He saw the erosion of his tasks and also saw, with contempt, that there was one envelope addressed in a clear hand, larger but similar to Serena’s microscopic script. Her own were important letters, Serena said. He looked at them as he scooped them up in one large paw, ready to leave without a word, sick with a kind of envy. George wanted his house back. He was also waiting for an accusation from Isabel. She gave me those things, he would say. Gave them me. I never took them.
    â€˜S erena Burley has Alzheimer’s disease,’ John Cornell told his son, with a slight satisfaction he found difficult to hide. ‘She’s on her own,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘and going barmy. Now that isn’t a good thing.’
    â€˜She might not have Alzheimer’s,’ said his son, looking up from the catalogue. ‘Rumour has it she’s been getting very strange and eccentric, that’s all.’
    â€˜I know what I’m talking about. I had several drinks with Doc Reilly. It’s not eccentric to set your own coal-house on fire: it’s mad. The doc says it can only get worse.’
    â€˜Well, I think that’s very sad, because she’s always been a charming woman, and anyway, I don’t always believe in Dr Reilly’s diagnoses.’
    What an unholy alliance they were, his father and Doc Reilly.
    Cornell senior snorted into his coffee mug and kicked the rostrum where Andrew sat.
    â€˜Just as you don’t really approve of the good doctor. Or filthy commerce, or earning a living. What
do
you approve of, Andy?’
    Better to shrug, pretend he was not paying attention, distract Father with something else, to stop an early-evening conversation, at that time of day when Dad needed a drink, from escalating into the kind of destructive exchange of words that was more a swapping of insults than a row which achieved something. Not even a clearing of the air, since the air between them was always thick with misunderstanding, beyond the curing of either of them. Andrew did indeed struggle with the unpicturesque partnership of Doc Reilly and his own dear old Dad. It had begun over the years while Father graduated from wheelchair to sticks: from fallen glory to wily strength. He and the Doc were a pair of small-town, clever rogues in a constant process of graduation to something worse. If they had lived in a Wild West town, Dad would have been an undertaker and they would have carved up business between them. Doc Reilly, for instance, did not abide by any code of confidentiality when one of his patients was dying, especially a patient who might possibly have a house to sell and furniture for the picking. The auction room in which they sat contained three sets of deceaseds’ effects, all of them erstwhile visitors toDoc’s surgery, asking for him in particular, and while most of the stuff was reasonable rubbish, some of it was always far better. Andrew could see his father now, hovering over Serena Burley’s ugly house and exquisite furniture like a fat vulture unable to wait for the victim to be entirely without movement, too impatient for the last sign of breath. Nearly dead was as good as dead.
    â€˜Too early for fog,’ John grumbled.
    He did not even look like a Steptoe; that was the problem. He looked like an old gent.
    I t was a rich little conurbation in which they lived, prosperous market town on the one hand, ugly on the other, full of Midlands contempt for anything fancy. The ugly end had made John Cornell his money after he had built the two cheap estates in the sixties,