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  My eyes grew huge.

  ‘William Caulard,’ I demanded indignantly, ‘have you been lying to me all these years? Because if you have, I think I’ll kill you before I divorce you!’

  A look of purest innocence passed over his face, and he said, in his most beautiful voice, still the colour of antique claret: ‘No, Miranda, I haven’t. Surely you remember what I told you – that vampires never lie.’

  I’m still not altogether sure if I believe him.

  PAPERWORK

  Ruth Rendell

  My earliest memories are of paper. I can see my grandmother sitting at the table she used for a desk, a dining-table made to seat twelve, with her scrapbook before her and the scissors in her hand. She called it her research. For years three newspapers came into that house every day and each week half a dozen magazines. Her post was large and she wrote at least one letter each day. My grandfather was a solicitor in our nearest town, four miles away, and he brought work home, paperwork. He always carried two briefcases and they were full of documents.

  Because he was a man he had a study of his own and a proper desk. The house was quite large enough for my grandmother to have had a study too, but that was not a word she would have used in connection with herself. Her table was in the sewing room, though no sewing was ever done in it in my time. She spent most of her day in there, covering reams of paper with her small handwriting or pasting cuttings into a succession of scrapbooks. Sometimes she cut things out of books and one of the small miseries of living in that house was to open a book in the library and find part of a chapter missing or the one poem you wanted gone from an anthology.

  The sewing room door was always left open. This was so that my grandmother might hear what was going on in the rest of the house, not to indicate that visitors would be welcome. She would hear me coming up the stairs, no matter how careful I was to tread silently, and call out before I reached the open door, ‘No children in here, please,’ as if it were a school or a big family of sisters and brothers living there instead of just me.

  It was a very large house, though not large enough or handsome enough to be a stately home. If visitors go there now in busloads, as I have heard they do, it is not for architecture or antiquity, but for another, uglier, reason. Eighteen fifty-one was the year of its building and the principal material used was white bricks which are not really white but the pale glabrous grey of cement. The windows were just too wide for their height, the front door too low for the fat pillars which flanked it and the portico they supported, a plaster dome shaped like the crown of my grandfather’s bowler hat and which put me in mind, when I was older, of a tomb in one of London’s bigger cemeteries. Or rather, when I saw such a tomb, I would be reminded of my grandparents’ house.

  It was a long way from the village. The town, as I have said, was four miles away, and anything bigger, anywhere in which life and excitement might be going on, three times that distance. There were no buses. If you wanted to go out you went by car and if there was no car you walked. My grandfather, wearing his bowler, drove himself and his briefcases to work in a black Daimler. Sometimes I used to wonder how my mother had gone, when I was a baby and she left me with her parents, by what means she had made her escape. It was not my grandmother but the daily woman, Mrs Poulter, who told me my mother had no car of her own.

  ‘She couldn’t drive, pet. She was too young to learn, you see. You’re too young to drive when you’re sixteen but you’re not too young to have a baby. Funny, isn’t it?’

  Perhaps someone had called for her. Anyway, a denizen of that house would be used to walking. Had she gone in daylight or after dark? Had she discussed her departure with her parents, asked their permission to go perhaps, or had she done what Mrs Poulter called a moonlight flit? Sometimes I imagined her writing a note and fastening it to her pillow with the point of a knife. I used to wonder about these things, for I had plenty of time and solitude for wondering. One day I overhead my grandmother say to an acquaintance from the village, ‘I have never allowed myself to get fond of the child, purely as a matter of self-preservation. Suppose its mother decides to come back for it? She is its mother. She would have a right to it. And then where would I be? If I allowed myself to get fond of it, I mean?’

  That was when I was about seven. A person of seven is too old to be referred to as ‘it’. Perhaps a person of seven months or even seven days would be too old. But overhearing this did not upset me. It cheered me up and gave me hope. My mother would come for me. At least there was a strong possibility she would come, enough to keep my grandmother from loving me. And I understood somehow that she was tempted to love me. The temptation was there and she had to prevent herself from yielding to it, so that she was in a very different position from my grandfather who, I am sure, had no temptation to resist.

  It was at about this time that I took it into my head that the scrapbook my grandmother was currently working on was concerned with my mother. The newspaper cuttings and the magazine photographs were of her. She might be an actress or a model or some other kind of famous person. Did my grandparents get letters from her? It was my job or Evie’s to take up the post and on my way to the dining room where my grandparents always had a formal breakfast together, I would examine envelopes. Most were typewritten. All the letters that came for my grandfather were typed letters in envelopes with a typed address. But regularly there came to my grandmother, every two or three weeks, a letter in a blue envelope with a London postmark and the address in a handwriting not much more formed than my own, the capitals disproportionately large and the g’s and y’s with long tails that curled round like the Basenji’s. I was sure these letters were from my mother and that some of them, much cut about, found their way into the scrapbook.

  If children are not loved, they say, when they are little, they never learn to love. I am grateful therefore that there was one person in that house to love me and a creature whom I could love. My grandparents, you understand, were not old. My mother was sixteen when I was born, so they were still in their early forties. Of course they seemed old to me, though not old as Evie was. Even then I could appreciate that Evie belonged in quite a different generation, the age group of my schoolfellows’ grandmothers.

  She was some sort of relation. She may even have been my grandmother’s aunt. I believe she had lived with them since they were first married as a kind of housekeeper, running things and organising things and doing the cooking. It was her home but she was there on sufferance and she was frightened of my grandmother. When I wanted information I went to Mrs Poulter, who was not afraid of what she said because she did not care if she got the sack.

  ‘They need me more than I need them, pet. There’s a dozen houses round here where they’d fall over themselves to get me.’

  The trouble was that she knew very little. She had come to work there after my mother left and what she knew was from hearsay and gossip. Her name she knew, and her age of course, and that she wanted to marry my father, though my grandparents would have liked her to marry anyone but him.

  ‘They called her Sandy. I expect it was because she had ginger hair.’

  ‘Was it the same colour as the Basenji?’ I said, but Mrs Poulter could not tell me that. She had never seen my mother.

  Evie was afraid to answer my questions. I promised faithfully I would say nothing to my grandmother of what she told me but she distrusted me and I daresay she was right. But it was very tantalising because what there was to know Evie knew. She knew everything, as much as my grandparents did. She even knew who the letters were from but she would never say. My grandmother was capable of throwing her out.

  ‘She wanted to throw your mother out,’ said Mrs Poulter. ‘Before you were born, I mean. I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this at your age but you’ve got to know some time. It was Evie stopped her. Well, that’s what they say. Though how she did it when she never stands up for herself I wouldn’t know.’

  Basenjis are barkless dogs. They can learn to ba