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herbrutally. He crushes her and the children and she knows there is no way she can possibly escape him. If she hadn’t loved him and he hadn’t loved her it wouldn’t matter so much – or at least it’d be a different kind of tragedy. She kills herself out of knowledge of what he is and what she’s become.’
    ‘Do you think that’s what really happened?’
    ‘There’s another possibility. She kills herself in revenge. She knows what it will do to him, and he knows what she’s intended to do to him. She has wanted to punish him, and she’s succeeded, and he can’t bear the idea that anyone’s had that degree of power over him. From now on, he’ll never run that risk again. Once she’s dead, he changes and becomes more and more isolated. He’s suspicious of everyone. Friendship and family are finished – he’ll be sentimental to his daughter but he’ll never let anyone get close to him again.
    ‘Before Nadya was buried, he took note of who came and who didn’t come to view her body. He stayed there for hours, marking them all down, making certain that they’d pay for it if they hadn’t behaved right.
    ‘It’s what they said that interests me, the two of them, before she died.’
    ‘Does anyone know?’
    ‘No. But she left a letter. He read it and immediately destroyed it.’
    Joe lifted his beer bottle and drank.
    ‘It was a key event,’ he said.
    Key events were what Joe searched for. He would ask me to analyse my own life in terms of key events.
    ‘No, no,’ he would say impatiently, when I told him about the shoebox again. ‘That’s not what I mean. Theshoebox is what you were meant to know about. But what weren’t you meant to know about?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    ‘There was a case in the paper. Some people who owned a house with a large garden sold off part of the land for development. When the builders uprooted a pear tree they found the bones of a newborn baby under it. In the end, the story was that a mother and daughter had lived together. An old woman and a middle-aged woman. But the daughter had become pregnant, God knows how or by whom. She was thirty-eight, but her mother kept her in the house for months and took the baby the night it was born, smothered it and buried it under the pear tree. Then she pretended it had never existed.’
    ‘What did the daughter do?’
    ‘She went along with it, it seems. But what if she hadn’t? What if she’d suspected her mother might harm the child, and she’d dragged herself off her bed immediately after the child was born, and put the child in an old shoebox, and crept out of the house to leave it in the backyard of an Italian restaurant, so that it would survive?’
    ‘That’s not what happened,’ I said. His words rasped me. Story was all I had and I wasn’t having anyone else retelling it. Not even Joe, not then.
    ‘You’re right,’ said Joe. He rose to get another beer. ‘It’s not what happened, but sometimes the real story doesn’t tell you the truth. If I were telling your story – or mine –’ He bent down to look inside the fridge, and his voice was muffled. ‘If I were telling your story, I’d tell it from an angle. You wouldn’t necessarily know atthe outset that it was your story at all. The facts wouldn’t seem to fit at first.
    ‘“ Where’s my shoebox? ” you’d ask. “ There isn’t any shoebox in this story so it can’t be mine .”’
    I laughed. Joe spun round, waving a bottle of beer. His face glowed with excitement. ‘But then you’d read on, Rebecca. You’d start to recognize things. You would know where you were, because the pattern inside the story fitted the shapes inside your life.’
    ‘But think how well you’d have to know someone, to do that.’
    ‘Do you think I don’t know you well enough?’
    We were silent, looking at each other, until Joe glanced down at the beer in his hand.
    ‘Do I want this?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, you do. Pass me one, Joe.’
    He bent