Portobello

'Dr Cotswold,' she said. 'To see Mr Roseman.'

'One moment.'

A growling sound was followed by the gates slowly parting. She drove in across a huge bare expanse of paving. Parked on that stony plateau, her car looked very small. It slightly alarmed her that the right-hand half of the double front doors was opened before she had set her foot on the first of four steps. Standing inside was a woman in a dark-blue dress, which would have been a uniform if there had been an apron over it or a label on the breast pocket. She might have been a mute for all she spoke to Ella, leading her across marble and polished wood and perilous scattered rugs.

There appeared to be no doors in this house and no means of excluding daylight. It was one of those brilliant October days, which would be all over by five in the afternoon, but now sunlight streamed in through walls of glass and a domed skylight. Rooms were separated from other rooms only by a cunning arrangement of walls and half-walls serving as screens. On one of these hung a painting, a large oil of a mermaid inside a goldfish bowl but apparently struggling to get out through its narrow neck. The woman led Ella behind the wall with the painting on it and there, in a silver leather chair behind a desk, sat a fat white-haired man holding a silver phone receiver in his right hand.

He acknowledged Ella with a small dip of his head. The woman waved one hand at a chair and she sat down. For about a minute Joel's father, for this was surely who it was, continued to talk on the phone. Then he said a rapid, 'All right, that's enough. I get the picture,' and put the receiver into a rest. He came over to Ella with hand outstretched, said, 'Morris Stemmer. I believe you were my son's medical attendant?'

Ella had never before been called a medical attendant and she wondered why he had used the past tense but she shook the hand that was offered and asked if she could see Joel.

He smiled slightly, a smile that turned his fat cheeks into bulging cushions. 'You may see Mithras if you like.'

'I don't understand.'

'This whole business is hard to understand, Dr Cotswold. Perhaps it is best to accept that Joel has become a different person and one who may be easier for the rest of us to live with.'

She could think of nothing to say.

'If there are any fees owing to you perhaps you will send me an invoice and I will, of course, gladly reimburse you.'

'You owe me nothing,' Ella said, 'but I would very much like to see Joel. Even if he is ill. Especially if he is ill.'

'Mithras,' he said. 'He only answers to that name. It's best to remember that.'

Now he was on his feet she could see how extremely fat Morris Stemmer was. That overused word 'obese' might have been coined for him. His girth had reached the stage where an apron of fat hung down against the taut cloth covering his swollen thighs. His breathing was laboured and he sighed when he sat down. Ella wondered how a man whose much-loved little daughter had drowned could bear to have that picture of the desperate mermaid in his house.

A bell was pressed and the woman reappeared. She stood in front of Ella, waiting for her to rise to her feet. Ella followed her. The woman opened the only interior door in this central hall of the house. This room was the antithesis of the flat in Ludlow Mansions with its velvet curtains and drawn blinds, and if not as light as the rest of the house, more than dimly lit. It was furnished pleasantly in soft colours, a deep pile carpet covering the floor, a trough of house plants under the thinly curtained window.

The man who sat on a green velvet chair against leafy wallpaper was Joel, yet was not. His dark hair was a bright blond and wavy, his normally doleful face wearing a slight smile. For surely the first time since she had met him he was without sunglasses. The smile widened when he saw who had come in, yet she had the impression he didn't recognise her. He would have smiled like that at any newcomer.

'Hello,' he said in a tone unlike his usual Joel voice. 'I'm Mithras.'

'Ella,' she said, her voice shaking. 'I'm Ella.'

The voice was higher-pitched, the vowels flatter and he had a slight lisp. 'I think we've met before. In another life maybe.When I had a heart. Before they took it out. You can't be a human being without a heart, you see. You're a spirit or a god.'

A movement behind her made Ella turn round. Wendy Stemmer had come into the room. She made a little low sound, a soft whimper, and, walking over to stand beside her son, began stroking his newly blond head as one might stroke a cat or dog. But she looked sad, more real than Ella had ever seen her, all the meretriciousness, the desperate girlishness gone.

Joel suffered the stroking, yet he managed to behave as if no one was there. He picked up a book and began to read it. His mother withdrew her hand.

'There is no point in staying here,' she said. 'He'll read that book for hours. It's always the same book, he reads it over and over.'

Ella saw that the title was that of a currently popular work on schizophrenia, the picture on its cover a brain pierced by a lightning flash. This was the book that had been beside him along with the vodka and the pills when he tried to revisit 'death's door'. She turned, gave him a last look. They left the room and Ella found herself once more facing, across gleaming emptiness, the struggling mermaid in the bowl of water.

Wendy Stemmer closed the door behind her. 'I'll come out to your car with you,' she said.

For the first time since Ella had met her she was wearing a skirt that covered her knees. She pulled it down when she was in the passenger seat.

'He bleached his hair himself. He must have used kitchen bleach because he never went to the shops. The carer said he didn't go out at all. I don't know why he did it.'

I do, Ella thought. Mithras had fair hair and he wanted to become like Mithras, to become Mithras.

'I found him like that, the way he is now, talking nonsense, saying he had come back with Joel – he talked about Joel as if he were someone else. He said Joel had fetched him from a city made of cloud but when he tried to take him back again he couldn't. Joel stayed there and he – this Mithras – had to stay here.'

'But your husband,' Ella said, 'what happened to change his attitude to Joel?'

'I don't really understand.' To her surprise Wendy Stemmer clutched at her hand and held it. 'It frightens me. It makes me feel I've two mad people to deal with, not one.'

'But what happened?'

'I'd tried to tell him Joel was having this – this delusion. That he was someone else, I mean. That he was this Mithras and that he'd dyed his hair and talked in a different voice and all of it. Morris listened – he doesn't usually listen to me – and he said quite suddenly, "I'll come with you." I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

'I thought nothing would change my husband's mind, but hearing the state Joel was in did change him. He came with me to Joel's flat and – well, I don't know.' She looked at Ella and looked away. Her voice was so low Ella could hardly hear her. 'He said – my husband, I mean – he said, this isn't my son, this is someone else. We'll take him home with us. It was as if he could never have forgiven Joel but this man, this Mithras, he could accept him. He has accepted him. He came here with us quite willingly.'

Ella said stiffly, 'Has Joel -' she couldn't call him Mithras '- has he seen anyone? A doctor, I mean?'

'The psychiatrist, Miss Crane. She came here.'

'So someone's looking after him?'

'Oh, yes. He's in her care. She's prescribing his drugs and she says he can stay here. There's no need for him to – well, go away if you see what I mean. He has two psychiatric nurses, one for day and one for night. My husband says to spare no expense. Money is no object. You know how Joel wanted to be in the dark all the time? Well, this Mithras – I call him what he calls himself – he prefers twilight. Dusk, he calls it. He says it's always light, day and night, where he comes from but he doesn't want that yet. He's not my son any more, doctor.' Tears came into her eyes and she caught her breath in a sob. 'It's like we've got a spirit or an angel living with us. I must go in now. But that's what my husband wants, not Joel but a different person.'