"I've got better things to do than pander to my wife's neuroses, you hear?"

I didn't bother replying, but pressed the speakerphone button so that I could light a cigarette without having to crook the 'phone under my chin. My employer's military voice boomed around my flat.

"Are you there? What?"

"I'm here," I said. "Dippy's worried. It's been a while since we heard from Lucy."

"Worried? Why the hell is she worried? Lucy's a big girl. By the time I was her age I'd already swum the length of the Amazon." He paused, "And back! Up and down that bloody river. Hard work. Piranhas everywhere. Lucy's probably fighting pygmies or weaving yurts. For God's sake girl, my wife lives for worrying. Get over there and set her straight."

"I don't think there are either pygmies or yurts in India," I said hesitantly.

There was silence on the other end of the line, an ominous silence that said 'I'm a seasoned explorer and adventurer of international repute and if I suggest that India is crammed full of yurt weaving pygmies aided in their pursuits by wayward daughters then that is exactly what is happening'.

"I'll go right over and talk to her," I said.

"Thank you," he said, "and while you're at it I need you to Fed-ex two hundred iodine tablets to the Happy Alexander Guest House in Siwa."

"Certainly," I began, but Hugo had already put the phone down.

#

            The houses of Oakham Street, just off the Kings Road and a convenient distance from both Sloane Street and Peter Jones, are silly, fondant fancies of houses. It is a terrace of iced cakes drowning in their own cloying sweetness. Each small cottage is painted a pale pastel. Winding wisteria frames doorways and freshly washed sash windows reflect the mud-free Range Rovers and silver Porsche Boxters parked bumper to bumper in the narrow street.

            I used the brass dolphin knocker to beat a short tattoo on the door of number fifteen. I counted to an hundred. There was no answer, so I used my key to get in.

            "Dippy!" I shouted. Still no answer.

            "Dippy!" I shouted, but louder this time. A muffled voice called from upstairs. Serendipity Dawes-Bynon was in her Hugo's study, flicking through the pages of a magazine. Her face was covered in a mud mask. It cracked around the eyes when she saw me.

            "Darling Vee," she said, drawing out the 'eeeeee' like a large sigh. She turned up the corners of her face as she tried to smile. Her face cracked again, the mask shedding like the bark of an ash tree. She kissed the air five inches to the right of each my cheeks. The customary Mwah! came out as uh! as she tried to keep the mask in place. I didn't make any kissing noises as I was staring at the flakes of mud that were settling on a pile of Hugo's pre-war maps of the Sudan. Dippy bent down to flick the mud off the maps. Some of it was still wet and her nails left ugly skid marks across the Sudanese border with Egypt. Hugo would go nuts if he could see this, I thought.

            "You look just marvellous," said Dippy, turning the attention back to her. I thanked her, but knew I looked marvellous. Dippy only gives compliments in order to receive them. I looked at Dippy's dishevelled hair and mud-encrusted face and fell back on my old stand-by.

            "You smell amazing."

            "Oh, darling, thank you. It's the new Santiago," said Dippy rubbing her wrists together and waving them in front of my face. It smelt like a posy of dead old ladies.

            "In bought it yesterday, in Harrods." She pronounced Harrods with the emphasis on the odds. Her inflections are all screwed up. She says Burger King, ice-cream and magazine. Some people find it charming. Dippy's friends fawn over her affectations, sometimes mirroring her strange patterns of speech as though they had always spoken like that. Her acquaintances roll their eyes, call her an unreconstructed luvvie and correct her under their breath. Her greatest champion is her neighbour Cynthia Kind, chairperson of the Kensington Association of Dramatic Art, which is a very grand name for a gaggle of housewives, a couple of students, and one velvet clad retired theatre director, who congregate every summer in a damp town hall to produce dreary plays about cherry orchards and people hanging in barns. Cynthia wishes that Dippy would join their merry band. Dippy ignores Cynthia. Even the velveteen director would ignore Cynthia if her husband were a little less rich.

            Dippy half walked, half staggered to the Chesterfield, and flopped down as though offering me her wrists had exhausted her. Slim varicose veins peeped out beneath her pink kimono. They looked like bruised worms burrowing into her calves. When she's not flaking about in kimonos Dippy favours long loose trousers to cover her legs, thinking what how lucky she is to have a figure that can wear trousers, unlike so many of her acquaintances.

"Such an awful place," she said, pushing aside three Aztec funerary jars that cluttered the sofa. Dippy looked around the room. As a collection of exotic ephemera it could win awards, although there were two shrunken heads in a box under the sofa that Hugo should probably dispose of. "I can feel Hugo's spirit here."

            "He's not dead, Dippy," I said.

            "No," she replied, with a sigh and a faint smile.

I rummaged through the various cupboards, sideboards and cabinets that lined the room.

            "Do you know where Hugo's put the iodine tablets?" I asked.

            "Sir Hugo didn't tell me. What are iodine Tablets?" She hates it when the staff don't use his full title.

            "You can use them to purify drinking water," I said pushing aside a mummified cat to reach a large white box at the back of a cupboard. Dippy began to pick at her face mask until her kimono was covered in a flurry of brown dandruff.

            Dippy looked over to where I sat on the floor sorting out the contents of the box. Her eyelashes were heavy with the mascara of the previous evening, or evenings. I have never been sure if she removes her make-up from one week to the next. Dippy is a slattern. She's so convinced that she's lovely that people mostly think that she is. I know better. She wears her knickers three days in a row and has used the same razor blade for eight months.

            "Hugo rang this morning," I said.

            "Was he in a fearful mood?" she asked.

            "Not really," I said, "but he is under a lot of pressure."

            "I do envy you," she said.

            "Yes?" I replied.

            "Of course. You see," said Dippy, "when he shouts at you it isn't anything personal, but when he shouts at me..." She trailed off. I waited. "It's soul destroying."

            "Hugo shouts at everyone Dippy. It's what he does. If he didn't shout he wouldn't speak. Ever. That's how he gets things done."

            "I know, and I do love him. It's just, well, Sir Hugo never takes me seriously."

            This was fair. Dippy is the Woman Who Cried Wolf. Everything that happens to her is a DISASTER, or a CALAMITY, or just VILE. An unpaid bill is a MONSTROUS OVERSIGHT. When Dippy walks into the room with her hand over her mouth and dry sobs racking her chest it could mean that the maid has dropped dead, or that the aspidistra has wilted. Once I found her standing in her drawing room shrieking like the brakes of a train because a mayfly had the misfortune to die on her inherited Persian rug.

            "I am so worried, and he brushes aside my concerns as though I wasn't her mother." she said. She wrung her kimono in her hands as she spoke.

            "I'm sure Lucy's OK," I said.

            "But we haven't heard anything for months."

Five weeks, six days, one hour and fifteen minutes, to be pedantic, I thought. Lucy's last e-mail was pinned to the wall of my office.

            "You know that Hugo thinks that there's nothing to be worried about. She's off having fun somewhere."

            "Do you really think so?" she asked.

            "I do."

            "But it won't be proper fun, will it darling?

            "What do you mean?" I said

            "Oh, you know Lucy, she's so virtuous. I do hope she's not working too hard."

            "Working too hard, Dippy? She's travelling, not writing a thesis."

            "I know that," she said. "But she won't be a normal sort of traveller will she, all beads and bells and funny dreadlocks? She'll have found some ghastly temple to document in the middle of no-where. I bet she's exhausting herself somewhere dreary, drinking water from dirty rivers. Oh my God. Don't Indians put dead bodies in rivers? Did she take any of those water pills you were talking about with her?  She's going to die from a horrible corpse  disease."

            I smiled.

            "Do your remember that summer when we were at university, and she went to Tanzania for two months?" I said.

            "Mmm. We didn't know if she were dead or alive."

            "But she came home, perfectly safe."

            "I know. The thing is, why isn't she having fun like normal girls? If I were her age, I'd be smoking marijuana in Goa, at one of those rave things where they play hypnotic music."

            "Trance music," I said.

            "Whatever," she replied.

            By the time Dippy was twenty seven she'd been married for two years and had missed the sexual revolution. A disastrous season touring the length of Britain in an avante garde production of Anthony and Cleopatra had finally convinced her that the stability of a ring on her finger was preferable to the mortifying reviews printed in the papers. 'Serendipity May plays Cleopatra as a debutante transsexual to hilarious effect' wrote one wise critic. Aware that Shakespeare's tale of thwarted love was no comedy, Dippy put aside her face paint and trotted down the aisle to marry Hugo. She loved acting, but she did not enjoy ridicule. Hugo never reads papers or patronizes the theatre, so married Dippy in blissful ignorance of her short-lived, unsuccessful acting career.

            "I never travelled, you see. Hugo won't let me go with him. So protective. He does look after me, doesn't he?"

            "He's very good," I said. Hugo would drown himself before he'd invite Dippy on one of his adventures. I was almost out of the door when Dippy called out.

            "Darling, I know you've got a key but could you knock before you come barging in?"

#

When I first met Hugo he was trimming his beard with the scissors of a Swiss Army knife. He declined to shake my hand, being preoccupied with his toilette, and instead motioned for me to sit. We took our places on either side of a huge partner's desk that sat in his study like a ship in a sea of maps and curios.

            "So!" he said, the scissors snipping away, "You're Lucy's friend. From Wotsit. That auction house." I nodded.

            "Criminals," he said, and then repeated it, banging his sunburnt hand on the desk. He smoothed his fingers over his moustache.

            "Criminals?" I said, although I knew perfectly well what he meant. Often I'd pick up my 'phone at the reception desk to hear a voice that said, "Hallo, is that Shifties?" followed by a burst of upper class laughter.

            "A bunch of crooked, braying pawnbrokers, the lot of them," continued Hugo, eyeing me as though I were a likely candidate for Holloway.

            "They are awful."

            "Quite, quite. Good girl. The only decent one was Charles Smyth and he was run over by the 22 bus in '86. Damn shame. Queer as a Bangkok lady boy, but knew his stuff." Hugo lay the Swiss Army Knife on the desk and leered at me, revealing ragged rows of pale brown teeth.

            "Cigarette?" he asked and rose from his chair to extricate a crumpled packet of Gitanes from the corduroy back pocket of his trousers. I took one, and leant over for Hugo to light it. He lit his own cigarette with much puffing and coughing and handed it to me, taking my own unlit cigarette from my fingers. The tip glistened with the unmistakeable sheen of his saliva. I wiped the filter with my thumb, and then wiped my thumb on my trousers. We smoked as Hugo read my CV, which he had, after much searching, found under a piece of toast.

            He waved at me to stop staring at him, which was difficult. I'd never met Lucy's father before but I knew him by reputation. His quirks are the stuff of legend. He never cuts his hair but keeps his beard trimmed to half a centimetre. He will not use scissors on his nails but tears or bites them instead. He never travels by night, not even by plane, and he can wrestle a lion into submission in three minutes flat. I made the last bit up, although he might be capable of it. Hugo's six foot six and almost as wide. The lion would get a raw deal.

             My cigarette smoked and stubbed, I uncrossed my legs and walked to the far side of the study where the whole wall was a cemetery for speckled moths, leggy spiders, delicate butterflies and cockroaches the size of cookies. Fanged beetles straddled sharp pins, caged in framed boxes. Their wings shone despite the grey London light. 

            I placed her hand on a sideboard, leaning closer to inspect a locust. The label said, 'Eritrea, 1927, Manson Dawes Expedition'. It was accompanied by a curling photograph of two pith-helmeted young men, their arms around the other's shoulders. They looked guiltily happy, like boys caught setting up a practical joke.

            Something that looked like a dung beetle scuttled over my hand and buried itself in the clutter on the cabinet. I leapt away.

"What the hell is that?"

            "Is what?" barked Hugo, looking up for a moment.

            My mouth hung open a fraction.

            "A dung beetle?" I said..

            "Ah, that's where she's got to. Pop her in a jar will you?"

            "A jar?"

            "There's some specimen jars at on that shelf."

I looked around and found one but the dung beetle had disappeared. Once, I rescued a Pomeranian that had trapped itself between a Schreibshrank and a suit of armour. It was a  heavy Schreibshrank and a delicate Pomeranian. Pomeranians and beetles are very different things but I find that there's a solution to most problems if you concentrate.

            Jar in one hand and magazine in the other, I scanned the tops of the cabinets. Nothing. I lifted papers and books, faded National Geographics and carved curiosities. Nothing. I poked about in the dry soil of a plant pot. Nothing. I lifted an open atlas. Nothing. I stood still, wondering and listening. The only sound was Hugo getting to his feet. Then, there was a noise. A faint, scratching noise coming from under the cabinet. I lowered myself to the rug and lay flat on the ground. There was the beetle, covered in dust and looking calm in the shade.

            "Aha!" said a foghorn of a voice next to my ear. I stood up so quickly that I caught my hair on a metal drawer handle.

            "There he is!" said Hugo. "Silly bugger. A stowaway. Came back with me in my suitcase. Been looking for him for days."

            His knees clicked as he stood up.

            "What. In the name of God. Are you doing?" He asked.

            "I seem to have caught my hair on one of the drawers," I said, pulling at the knot of strands that bound me to the cabinet.

            "Silly cow. What the bloody hell did you do that for?" He bellowed. "Hang on. Soon get you free."

            Hugo didn't look like a man with a way with hair. He went to the desk and fetched his Swiss Army knife.

            "Sir Hugo, if you just give me a minute I'm sure that I'll be able to deal with this," I said, my eyes widening with alarm.

            "Nonsense!" he said, and began to chop at my locks with the stupid little scissors. His breath smelt of coffee and brandy. Snip, snip, snip, and I was free. And I had a chin length fringe. Only six year olds can get away with fringes.

            My grandmother used to say that my hair was my crowning glory. It's thick and straight. In the sun it turns from mahogany brown to a hundred shades of red. On the morning of the interview it reached my waist in a waterfall of colour. By seven o'clock that evening I'd persuaded the local barber to razor it into a blunt bob. Long locks littered the floor around the chair. My beautiful warm hair may have been lopsided no longer but it had been replaced by a uniform brown helmet. A hundred years earlier I'd have sold it for wigs, I thought, like an Italian noviciate, or Jo in Little Women. As it was, Pepe swept it up and dumped it in the bin.

            "Are you crying?" said Hugo, leaning back into his chair.

            "No. No, not at all. Just a little bit of a shock, getting caught like that. It might be hay fever. Or something in my eye." I said. I only cry when angry or disappointed, which is infuriating in itself.

            "Good, good. No time for sissies around here. Getting your hair caught in a cabinet? That's not a shock. When I was fifteen I climbed the Matterhorn. Know where that is?"

            "Switzerland," I sniffed, recalling a school trip where I broke my wrist after falling three feet off a ski lift when I leant over to kiss Paul Curtis. I misjudged the distance and threw myself not at him but past him and to the ground. Old school friends still know me as ‘The Jumper'.

            "I did it alone," said Hugo, "Single-handed. No help. Buried in an avalanche on the way down." He paused.

            "Really?" I said.

            "Yes, really, Three days before they found me. When I took my socks off, my big toes went with them. Frozen right off. That was a shock, my girl."

             I've always been impressed by foolish acts of bravery. Later I came to know the truth. He had fallen asleep, dead drunk, with his feet in a campfire in South America five years ago and burnt his big toes clean off. A surgeon had to saw down the stumps of bone at a missionary hospital outside Lima. The gave him local anaesthetic but Hugo was still drunk and he thought they were going to amputate his feet. He punched a nun and was ejected from the mission before the remaining burnt toes were bandaged. He then spent a week in a five star hotel moaning in self-pity and running the staff ragged, before returning to England in high dudgeon.

            The dung beetle scuttled in a circle in the jar. Its legs made a hollow, tinkling sound against the glass.

            "So, Genevieve! Odd name. Popish?" said Hugo.

            "My mother's a Catholic", I said. His face turned into a scowl as I spoke. Hugo distrusts religion, authority, politics and orthodoxy, in that order.

            "Hmm. And you can use a computer?" he continued.

            "Yes," I said.

            "Right," he said. "And it says here you 'are an experienced telephone operative'?" He tapped the glass of the jar, causing the beetle to jump.

            "Yes, I have considerable experience using telephones," I said, thinking back to my final performance report as a receptionist. ‘Genevieve should spend more time answering the phone and less talking into it'. Hugo lifted a bottle of surgical alcohol from the desk and began to unscrew the lid.

            "I'm not difficult to work for and the job's easy. Just your usual PA stuff," he said.

The lid unscrewed, and laid to one side, he put his hand over the top to stop the beetle escaping..

            "Typing, making travel arrangements, sourcing supplies, answering fan mail. You will be Operational Control, as it were."

            "Right," I said.

            Hugo took the bottle of alcohol and poured the contents into the beetle's jar until it was full to the brim. Then he screwed on the lid. The beetle struggled. Its legs tried to grasp a foothold against the glass. With last, valiant wiggle, it died. Hugo put  the jar on the desk but the surface was uneven with mess. The jar tottered, then wobbled in a circle. With a thud it hit the floor and smashed into six sharp pieces. The beetle lay motionless on its back in a widening pool that flowed through the cracks in the floorboards. Hugo nudged the mess with his foot. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dropped it on top of the puddle on the floor.

            "Can you start today?" he said.

#

My mobile rang.

            "How's the job?" Just like my mother. No cheery good morning or kind question about my welfare.

            "It's OK," I said, rifling under through Hugo's desk looking for a pink post-it on which I'd written Fed Ex's telephone number .

            "Only OK?" Jesus. Parental concern still makes me cringe. The sound of my mother asking 'Are you OK' brings back memories of first periods and awkward interrogations about contraception.

            "It's better than OK. It's fine."

            "Good. Just don't get sacked. You know what you're like."

            "I've been doing this job two months and I've not been sacked yet. What do you mean 'you know what you're like'?

            "Nothing, sweetheart. I didn't mean anything. I'm sure you're very good at it." There was a smile in her voice.

            "I AM very good at it," I said, hunting under the display cabinet for the elusive post-it.

            "I'm sure. Only..."

            "Only what?"

            "If you remember that holiday camp fiasco..."

            "I was eighteen. And I needed the money." I said.

            "But you told them you could swim. And the children you were supposed to be looking after had to pull you out of the lake."

            I blame my fear of water on my brother, who used to chase me into the sea at Whitstable when we were little. He'd push my face into the pebble beach as waves flowed over my head. 'Look for doubloons!' he'd shout. I'd hold my breath and try to struggle free. I thought doubloons were small creatures that would nibble my flesh from outside in.. When I paddle in shallow water I still look down, not quite believing that the human eating doubloons are not out there to get me.

            "No-one died."

            "No, thank God. But you lied and they found out."

            "That was a long time ago."

            "And then you were desperate to make it in television." I knew she'd bring up my short lived media career.

            "It required an enormous amount of ingenuity," I said.

            "And a total disregard for the safety of others."

            'Lots of Antiques' was my big break. It was a cunning amalgam of antiques and decorating. Perhaps not so cunning because it folded after six shows. The contestants were families who had to identify given antiques, price them, invent a likely provenance and then re-design a room in the other contestant's house to accommodate whatever old  monstrosity I'd managed to pick up cheap. Given an unlimited budget I'd have bought Sevres plates and life size Meissen porcelain bears; pretty,  witty things. As it was, each week the producer handed me an envelope containing a couple of twenties and told me to see what I could find.

Forty quid doesn't go far when it comes to fine art. Car boot sales are useless. Anyone with a television is an antiques expert these days and prices have gone through the roof. The age of the bargain is dead. I was reduced to trawling the streets the night before rubbish collection. I once found a beautiful but broken iron jardinière propped up against the bin bags outside an antique shop in Chelsea. When I got it home (on the bus, quite a feat) I bashed off the broken side with a hammer and painted the rest cream, highlighting the raised rose patterns in gold and pink. Et voila, a set of contestants had a Victorian fender to wonder at and design around. I lasted three weeks until Mrs Edith Humble, elderly matriarch of the Humble family from Croydon, sat on a chair I had created by sawing a rotten Edwardian garden bench in half. It collapsed on live television and severely bruised her bottom.

            "You didn't lie to Sir Hugo, did you?" she said

            "Of course not. He took me on because I knew Lucy and she said I was great."

            "Yes, well. She hasn't known you very long. Dad and I can't keep bailing you out, you know."

            "When was the last time you did that?"

            "January. When you lost the job answering the 'phone."

            "I was a receptionist."

            "That's what I said."

            "I've told you I'll pay you back," I said.

            "You know there's no need for that, but it is time you stood on your own two feet. I've told your brother not to help you either."

            "Yes mum."

            "So be good."

            "Yes mum."

            "And don't get sacked."

            "No mum."

            "Are you being sarcastic Genevieve Fysh?"

            "No mum."

            "Oh, talk to your father. You never listen to me anyway." That was true. She shouted at him to pick up the phone There was a click as he picked up the extension.

            "Do you need money?" he said.

            "No, I've still got my job."

            "Good. See you."