‘What kinds of things? I’m not just being polite – I’m liking hearing about this.’
‘Well, for instance, if you’ve always lived in a derelict house with no gas or electricity or running water you won’t know much about cooking a meal and eating it at a table with knives and forks. You’ve probably had take-away food all the time, or eaten straight out of tins of baked beans and soup. So you don’t know how to use a cooker or how to shop for food.’ When he talked about his work the reserve melted a bit, and his whole face looked different. ‘Or even simpler things than that,’ he said. ‘Like how to switch on an immersion heater to heat water for a bath, or change a light bulb. So we have halfway houses where we put a group of them for two or three months, and try to teach them. It’s better to use fairly remote places for that – some of them can be a bit undisciplined. But if that goes all right, we promote them to a bedsit if we can find one, and from there to acquiring employment skills. I do think Deborah Fane’s house would make a good halfway house.’
‘It’s an unusual line of work,’ said Fran thoughtfully. ‘Do you deal with any of the asylum seekers? Some of them are quite young, aren’t they?’
‘We’ll probably have to in time. At the moment we’re leaving them to the government organizations, though.’ He gave her another of the sideways glances. ‘When it’s successful, it’s rewarding work,’ he said, and Francesca had the feeling that he had considered first whether or not to say this, in case it gave away too much of his inner self.
‘It must be very rewarding indeed.’
‘There’s a high percentage of failures. Some of them inevitably revert to type. Sleeping rough, dealing in drugs.’
‘We get the drug problem at my school sometimes – I don’t suppose there are many schools that escape that, though. And we get the usual quota of difficult teenagers, of course. It’s not always easy to know how best to cope with them. They’re so defensive.’
‘Everybody’s defensive sometimes,’ said Michael, and Francesca felt, as if it was a tangible presence, the barrier of reserve click back into place.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Liam Devlin’s office in Ashwood was on the first floor of a beautiful old building that might once have been the town house of an Elizabethan merchant. His room was disgracefully untidy, but Francesca thought it was the kind of untidiness you would rather enjoy working amidst. She glanced at Michael and had the impression that he thought so, as well. There were masses of books and documents, and ancient Ordnance Survey maps, and several nice old prints on the walls. The jutting bow window apparently overlooked the main street, but it was difficult to see out of it because a large black cat composedly occupied most of it.
‘You do realize,’ said Liam, having let them in and introduced himself, ‘that this appointment is wholly out of character for a man of the legal profession. It’s six o’clock on a Friday evening, and everyone else has gone home. In fact the conventions require me to have left the place about three and headed for a golf course, or the local Conservative Club, or a mistress’s bed.’
He did not look as if he ever did anything as conventional as play golf, and the only political organizations he might be likely to support would be ones with romantic or rebellious aims, on the lines of restoring an exiled monarch or fighting for downtrodden serfs. On the other hand, Francesca could easily believe in the mistress’s bed. She said, ‘It’s very good of you to meet us so late.’