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her phone engaged so long? Who was she talking to? She should have been talking to me or Huw or Hazel. I could get up. I could get up quietly and phone her now. At this time? On a night like this?
    My father is dead. This is the only day that he will die on. September 9th. No. It is past midnight, the 10th. Yesterday he died. Already it is yesterday, the past. September 9th. Last September 9th he didn’t know he only had a year to go. You have a deathday just like you have a birthday, the only difference is you do not know it. It is a secret like so much else.
    Daddy never knew about Foxy and me, of course he didn’t. I never said to Mum, don’t tell him. I couldn’t, since it was only tacitly known by her. But as well as that it is implicit in our family code that we don’t tell Daddy things he wouldn’t like. Didn’t tell. Soon the past tense will catch up with him, but, despite midnight, today is still his deathday, he can still be present tense today.
    â€˜What did he tell you about his war?’ I asked my mother once, egged on by Foxy. Until I knew Foxy I had never noticed my mother’s reluctance to talk or think about my father’s past.
    She moved her hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Hardly a thing. He used to try and talk but … oh, I really don’t remember. Best not to dredge up the bad memories, best to bury them. Look forward not back. That’s what Ralph does. You should respect that, respect his privacy.’
    I repeated that to Foxy.
    She choked on her coffee. ‘Respect his privacy!’
    â€˜Yes.’
    She wrinkled her nose so that her spectacles rose up indignantly. ‘It’s like letting gold flow down a drain,’ she said. ‘It is treasure, Zelda, it is part of you.’
    I wonder if Foxy would feel differently if she knew who she was? She was adopted at the age of six weeks. She tried once to discover the identities of her natural parents, she found only that it was a private adoption; her mother a young girl, her father an American GI. That’s all she knows. Her adoptive mother told her on her sixteenth birthday. I thought that must have been traumatic but, ‘No,’ she said emphatically, ‘not in the least. I liked to know that. I always felt I didn’t belong.’ I didn’t say that nor did I. I didn’t feel I belonged to my family either. I am short and solid and dark haired while Mummy and Hazel are tall and slim and blonde. If someone had told me I was adopted I would have been delighted, excited to shed part of my identity.
    Even now?
    A fantasy: my mother rings me up. She confesses that Daddy wasn’t my real, my biological, father, that she had an affair with someone – oh, Paul Newman, say. That used to be my fantasy. How would it make me feel? I don’t know. I am so tired. And anyway it’s stupid because although I haven’t inherited my mother’s Scandinavian looks, I am like Daddy.
    Foxy still loved her parents after they told her the truth although she started, immediately, to call them May and Reg instead of Mum and Dad. May is her best friend. They talk on the phone for ages every Sunday night, gossiping and guffawing with laughter and often meet in London for a drunken lunch followed by a stagger round Harvey Nichols or Harrods, daring each other into ever more extravagant purchases. May knows about Foxy and me, treats me like a daughter-in-law. I am Foxy’s third live-in female lover. Third time lucky, I say, and Foxy flicks her eyes to heaven. Even the slightest allusion to superstition gets up her delectable nose. And it has lasted longest. Five years almost. I wonder how many women she has made love to? And men too. None of my business.
    But, an anomaly: although Foxy is almost obsessive in her plundering of other people’s pasts, while she salivates at the combination of a Zimmer frame and a memory, she has not bothered with the background of May or Reg.