Capital

implied that she trusted him, and half an insult, because it implied that he resembled her.
    In this case, her brief has been explicit. ‘Find out what’s happening, then make it go away.’
    So the first question was, what was happening? The material on his desk had been accumulated by aggrieved householders in a local street called Pepys Road. They had been subjected to what they called ‘a campaign of sustained harassment’. They had written a classic middle-class complaint letter, carefully phrased to press the maximum number of official buttons. According to them, the campaign had begun with postcards of their own front doors, then with videos of their street, and there was also an anonymous blog with photos of the houses, shot at a variety of hours and over a period of time. All of this material, without exception, bore the slogan or motto or injunction or threat ‘We Want What You Have’.
    Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page. He spent about half an hour browsing through it and another twenty minutes looking at the material which had come through the letter boxes. The postmarks were from all around London and the handwriting was the same on all of the addresses: block capitals in black ink. There was no other writing, indeed no other words of any kind except the same five, over and over again. As he did this, Mill began to get an answer to his question and to realise why the task had landed on his desk. There was something disturbing about the material. It was hard to know what it was after and it was hard not to feel there was something creepy about it. Somebody was taking too much interest in this street, in these houses and in the people who lived in them. It felt wrong. That wasn’t the same thing as saying that a crime had been committed, though. Perhaps whoever was doing this had thought about that – about not breaking the law. On his notepad, Mill jotted down:
    harassment
    trespass?
    privacy angle?
    antisocial behaviour
    Then he put a selection of the postcards and DVDs in an evidence envelope and did the paperwork to have them checked for fingerprints. He wasn’t too optimistic about that, but it had to be done. As for the main issue, which was what this whole thing was, Mill’s conclusion for the moment was that he didn’t have a clue.

33
     
     
    Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . . Mary loathed that poem but all her life there were times when she found it hard to get out of her head. Her father had recited it to her, often, and always with amusement. For him, so very contrary himself, up to and far beyond the point of total unreasonableness, contrariness was a positive quality. But Mary didn’t think of contrariness as a positive quality, and didn’t think it was one she had; though the lines did sometimes run through her mind, often when there was something she was subliminally cross at. Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .
    She put the pot of tea, which had now steeped for four minutes, onto the tray, then picked up the tray, then put it down again. Better just to take up a mug; the fewer things there were for her mother to drop or spill the better. And at the same time Mary was trying to defend against the slippage in her mother’s condition by pretending it wasn’t happening, and by setting small rigged tests for her to pass: look, she can still cope with a cup and saucer; look, she’s still OK with a knife and fork. Though in fact Petunia wasn’t, not any more. Her motor skills on her left side had sharply declined and though she could use a fork in her right hand she no longer could with her left. Mary was cooking and serving food designed to be eaten single-handedly, with a fork or a spoon, because it was important to preserve a feeling of normality, even as that normality was giving way to the fact that her mother was dying and there was nothing she could do about it. Mary was trying to postpone her mother’s death by keeping up appearances. Because that was impossible, and also because it is easier being angry than being sad, Mary most of the time felt a low-grade irritation with her mother, with the fact that she was having to stay with her, with London, with the condition of 42 Pepys Road, with the kitchen fittings, with the kettle which did not cut out when it boiled but kept boiling so that you had to watch over it, with the traffic noise which made it hard to get to sleep, with the small-hours wakings she was having to endure to help her