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all really lovely, Maur,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I want tonight to be special, Roy,” she said. And winked at me. “You wait till you see what I’ve not got on under this.”

She was fun. Her lust was Chaucerian in its dedication, honesty and humour.

It was a special night.

After we’d settled down a little in bed, around 2 a.m. she sat up and lit a cigarette. I seldom wanted one. It was always, “Just take a fag if you want, darling.”

“I’ve got something to say, sweetheart,” said Maureen Parner in her pretty, Cockney voice.

“Yes, Maur…” I was half asleep. She hadn’t lied about the new lingerie, and we’d done it justice.

“Sorry, luv, but you’d better listen. I really am sorry, luv. But tonight – this has to be our last time.”

“What…?” I too sat up. I was wide awake, and the brandy suddenly sour in my throat. “Last – last what?”

“Our last smashing time, darling. Oh, Charlie, don’t look so sad.” Her eyes were full of tears.

Mine were dry and burned like acid. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“You know there’ve been – one or two others.”

“Yes, Maur. It’s OK.”

“You are such a lovely bloke. Trouble is, I’ve met someone. And he – well he is… he’s different, Roy. Roy, look, I’ll be straight. I like him a lot and he wants to marry me. He’s not rich but he’s OK moneywise. I can stop work. We can have a bit of a good time. He’s a bit older than me. Not that much. I’m pretty ancient, you know.”

“You’re not old.”

“No. But you’re young, Roy. You’ve got your whole…”

“Life ahead of me. Christ. You’re dumping me because I’m a kid.”

Then she started to cry.

And even in my total hurt and rage and shock, I put my arms round her. I held her, and soon we started to kiss again. We made love again.

But after that, when she held me, I had the sense to know this would be, as even the song had it, the last time. I wasn’t yet twenty. I’d known her just over one year. She’d put a magic spell on me, I’d changed, growing one inch taller, sloughing acne and sexual insecurity in one bound. Even selling a story to a magazine. I didn’t love her, but she was my love. She was mine. My Maureen. And now, not any more. Never again.

It hit me. I stood there, stricken, the piano shining, over thirty years too late.

Not Lynda’s – of course not hers. Joseph was Maureen’s child. Hers and mine.

Mine. Mine and Maureen’s.

She had had to marry the other older man. She hadn’t wanted, being as she was, to pile that responsibility on a callow boy of nineteen with an assistant’s job in a library.

Joseph was my son. He was about thirty – thirty-one-?

He was my son. Almost exactly as he had claimed to be.

When I walked dazedly out of the room I saw the letters again, on the mat.

There had been four. I’d absently counted them.

Now there were five.

XIII

(‘Untitled’: Page 213)

TO dine in his father’s house was always a custom of anathema to him. Yet here he was, seated at the long table of dark wood, the dishes set about, and his family set around them, conversing in their usual dull manner. Vilmos studied them. As sometimes happened after the talons of the ’micrania had let go of him, he seemed both to hear and to see more clearly. Like a painting on glass, his stout anaemic mother and two pale, weed-like sisters. His older brothers, big, and tonight red-faced by contrast, jested and drank, observant only of the stern patriarch. Should he frown they would lower their voices. But otherwise they were always similarly obedient to him, worked at the offices he had demanded, wed when he told them they must. At or because of Vilmos he did not frown.

Vilmos was his curse, the devil somehow borne of the consanguineous line of his house. Vilmos he paid no attention at all. That he even suffered Vilmos, his youngest son, to live, albeit intermittently, in the family home, even to sit at table with him, was due only to a horrible and parsimonious religious ethic.

Meanwhile he did not know what Vilmos had truly done. He was not aware Vilmos had killed three women in the city, and at least eight men – perhaps nine – the fate of Reiner, of course, would never be fully ascertained by any.

Had he known all this, and of other matters to do with Vilmos, how would the patriarch have responded?

Vilmos himself sometimes pondered on this.

At certain times he believed his father would, himself, have summoned an assassin, and had the troublesome offspring excised from the pages of family life. But then again, his religious ethic might restrain him. Rather than murder his son, the father might only confine him in some cellar, feeding him and sustaining him ‘mercifully’, but never allowing him out again into the light.

Thus not only were dinners at his father’s house irksome and angering, they were potentially dangerous. For that reason too maybe, Vilmos still occasionally attended them. His whole existence fled along a razor’s edge, pursued by his own demons, and in pursuit of God knew what. Threat was the sea in which habitually he swam.

But now the father spoke.

At once utter stillness fell, respectful, or more properly fearful, as the Biblical canon decreed.

The three wan women, their lips parted, waited as if to receive his words not only through ears and eyes, but by mouth.

The brothers squared their shoulders, intelligent oxen ready to serve.

“This goose is dry, Saveta,” said the patriarch to his wife.

“I am so sorry, Vladis. I will speak to the cook…”

“Do it. I expect my table, though now impoverished, to serve palatable food at least.”

Vilmos, before he could prevent it, laughed. The patriarch did not even look at him.

When one of the brothers glared in Vilmos’s direction, the patriarch spoke directly to this brother, diverting him. “I