Alligator Playground

ONE

FACING EACH OTHER across the table they took care their eyes wouldn’t meet, experienced enough to know that the ley lines of mutual attraction ought not to be played with irresponsibly. When one gaze caught the other the light in both went out, each pretending to show interest only in the remaining half-dozen at the lunch party.

Diana was surprised to note so much detail in a surreptitious glance. A photographer would never achieve the same intensity as her intuition, would at most highlight a face like that of a prisoner of war — static, bewildered, plain — whereas the reality her eyes took in would reinforce her memory, and become part of a floppy disc in the snug case of her brain.

He had the sort of face she would like to deal with in her sparetime painting, but rather than get out her sketch pad she knew that safety lay in listening to Charlotte, whose cigarette ash powdered into her barely touched soup. ‘This Tory government’s simply got to go.’

‘But how?’ Norman Bakewell’s mischievous call set Charlotte diatribing about housing, education, unemployment, the National Health Service and privatisation. Diana decided to look worried, better to fix on Charlotte’s obsessions than be yanked into another ocular contest with the fit man across the table.

Charlotte was a life-long left-winger, grappling such unregenerate views to her bosom as if her existence depended on them which, Diana thought, it probably did, in that she was kept from chewing ivy in the woods, or headmistressing the local coven. She was about fifty, and a little over five feet tall. Grey and meagre hair hung a few inches down her face, but what made the coarse features interesting were lips shaped in the tiniest of bows — a perfect little bow — so perfect yet so out of place in such a grim visage as to give the effect of benign though implacable intolerance. She wore a brown sackcloth garment resembling a gymslip, and no one, except perhaps Henry her husband, had seen her in anything else, as if she had a full wardrobe and took out a clean one every few hours.

The present meal — always called that, never dinner or lunch — was served on a long table in the living-kitchen. No cloth, of course, but the place-mats were distinctive to Charlotte’s house, each depicting an episode in the struggles of the working class. Diana’s showed ‘The Taking of the Winter Palace’ and, as far as she saw on another quick eye-shot, the man opposite, whom she’d heard called Tom, was eating off ‘The Massacre of Peterloo’. The novelist Norman Bakewell, sitting next to her, had ‘The Last Stand of the Paris Commune’, and Emmy Brites, across to the left, lifted her plate and with her big blue eyes tried to make sense of ‘The Death of Rosa Luxemburg’. Jo Hesborn had been given ‘The Strike of the East End Match Girls’, while Charlotte, as always, ate her meal off ‘The Lord Mayor of London Slaying Wat Tyler’.

Diana was saying something to Charlotte, Tom noted. Every clandestine flash never lessened the attraction of what he saw. The workman type overalls of the best thin cloth buckled over a well cut shirt of pale grey seemed a mite old fashioned, but the way the front came across her bosom made her look absolutely delectable. The face attracted him no less, high cheekbones, and a slightly forward mouth due to her teeth, giving an impression of mischief and availability, which he knew better than to assume was so. Her almond shaped eyes produced a heat in him not experienced since first meeting his wife. A large-stoned ring, not on her marriage finger, could mean anything these days. Fair hair, in a neat line across her forehead, was tied behind. He circled back to her face as if to puzzle out why it was so compelling, then gave up so that he could enjoy it.

Norman Bakewell lit a cigar and puffed so busily between courses that Barbara Whissendine got the full nimbus of his smoke, as if she was the enemy from whom he needed to conceal the industrial capacity of his output as a writer. ‘Don’t they make you sick?’ she asked.

‘Not so far, my love,’ he said. ‘I smoke about seventy a week, and do you know, I was thinking the other day that if you put them end to end for length it’d make over six hundred yards, and since I’ve been puffing like billy-ho for forty years I’ve travelled nearly fourteen miles, which is just about right in my slow moving life.’

‘I suppose you worked that out when you had writer’s block?’ Barbara, a rawboned steely-eyed literary agent who hadn’t got him on her books for the simple reason that she wouldn’t go to bed with such a toad in a million years, felt able to slam him all she liked. ‘Doesn’t your wife worry that smoking will kill you?’

‘Wife?’ His roar stopped all other talk. ‘What’s one of them?’

‘It sounds as if she henpecked you.’

Was it the downing of another glass of wine that reddened his face? ‘Did you say henpecked?’

‘Stop it, Norman.’ Charlotte collected the plates, and took the roast meat out of the oven. She knew him as one of those déclassé working-class men who, thinking he had nothing to blame his parents for, or being too sentimental to know where to begin, had reduced one middle-class wife after another to suicidal misery.

‘Henpecked?’ he crowed. ‘You don’t know one half. I got carpet bombed from morning till night. Then she came out of the potting shed, thank God, and went off with a woman.’

Jo Hesborn adjusted her collar and tie. ‘I can’t say I’d blame her for that.’

‘The trouble was, she came back.’

Barbara angled away. ‘And you let her?’

He paused. ‘Wanted to get my own back, didn’t I?’

‘You mean you picked up with a man?’ Jo laughed.

Light from the afternoon sun flashed on his glasses. ‘I didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve like a patch of snot, or cry into my blotting paper. I had an affair with a girl who was too young to think of becoming a lesbian.’

‘So why isn’t your wife with you now?’ Barbara did her best to smile, and wiped the failure away with a napkin. ‘I’m sure she’d love hearing the same old patter.’

Gazing tenderly, he took her hand in his, till she snatched it free. ‘I’m glad I didn’t bring her, or we’d both been fighting over you, darling. She’s finally hopped it, I’m glad to say. Greater love hath no man than this, that he hand over his wife to the tender mercies of a woman.’

Jo Hesborn picked up her empty glass. ‘You bastard! You walking gasometer!’

The missile shattered against his forehead, but he stayed calm, not only as if such an event happened every other day, but as if his existence would be without meaning if it didn’t take place now and again. Even so, the grin barely lit the middle of his pallid face, thin lips suddenly with more curves in them.

He swabbed the flood, reddening Charlotte’s best linen, and patted Jo’s wrist as if he had injured her. ‘I don’t know why you did that. You ought to be grateful for somebody like me. I’ve probably turned more women into lesbians than any man in London. I thought somebody like you would appreciate the fact.’

Jo was disgruntled at her failure to obliterate — or at least kill — him. ‘Thanks for nothing, scum.’

‘I confess,’ Norman said, fully recovered, ‘that I’m looking for another girlfriend, though I can’t see myself handing her over to you after I’ve done with her. Every likely looking candidate I come across gets a written questionnaire, in any case, so’s there’ll be no misunderstanding. For instance, I want to know whether or not she smokes. I wouldn’t like her to live longer than me and burn all my letters and notebooks, though I expect we’d be separated long before that. I want to know if she’s married. I don’t want to get a dagger in my back from her squash-playing husband. Can she drive? Then I can get drunk at parties and she can take me home. Is she a dab hand at a word processor? That’s essential, because I’m bloody hopeless with them. Does she have a sense of humour? She’d certainly need one. Are both her parents dead? Mine are, so it’s only fair hers are too. Does she have children? I don’t want any of those puking little bastards competing for attention. In any case, little Crispin with the heavenly curls might grow up to be a yobbo and kick me in for hitting his mother. Does she have a job? — preferably with TV or in films, so that she can get my novels put on. Then, of course, will she keep thinking I’m a genius when she hears me fart in bed at night? Does she have a centrally heated flat in the middle of London? I’ve taken a shine to Pimlico. And does she have a cottage in Dorset, with no neighbours to hear the screams when we start quarrelling and I give her a good hiding? And oh yes — God-Almighty, I nearly forgot — can she unravel the mysteries of VAT? A positive response to such queries might result in a satisfactory relationship for a month or two, but in the meantime,’ he ended, with little-boy wistfulness, ‘I’ll go for any halfway personable woman who takes pity on me. Until the paragon turns up, of course, when I’d throw her aside like an old floorcloth.’

Diana noted the admiration on Tom’s face at how Bakewell had ignored the cut from Jo’s glass, and now his awe at such a horrid screed. Her face was warm with hatred, and she wanted to say something that would wither all men to pitiable stumps, though Charlotte came in before her: ‘Norman, I shan’t buy your next novel if you don’t behave to my guests.’

He swabbed his forehead again rather than quarrel with his hostess, and said mildly: ‘You’ll regret it, if you don’t. It’s called The Lovers of Burnt Oak. Bound to get onto the short list for the Windrush Prize.’ He manufactured an expression of repentance. ‘I’m sorry, though. I was feeling a bit on the dark side of bilious when I flopped out of bed this morning.’ He apologised to Barbara, who responded with silence, so he looked around for another victim. ‘Anybody want to talk about modern English literature?’

He lit a cigar when no one did. He was drunk, and Diana hoped everyone would ignore him, but he was malevolent and wouldn’t let them. ‘I’ll tell you about the new novel I’m writing.’ He looked at Tom, whose firm had beaten all competitors to get him on its list during an auction at the Groucho Club. ‘The hero’s a publisher,’ he said, beady-eyeing Tom as if to damage him for having bought him like a slave at the market, and hoping that what he was going to say would turn into a prophecy. ‘Well, his wife has a relationship — dare I call it, Jo? — with a woman. The husband’s quite happy because it takes her attention from a little bit of business he’s got on, also with a woman. Even so, the wife carries on in so shameless a way that at times he feels humiliated, but puts her affair in cold storage, as it were, to be dealt with in the future. Well, our hero publisher and his wife have a grown-up son, who he’s always suspected to be the result of an early affair of his wife’s, though we’ll let that pass. This son has an affair with the daughter of the woman his wife is passionately involved with. Are you following me? A real alligator playground, because listen: both affairs tail off, you might say, but as time goes on the husband feels slighted and his thoughts stray towards revenge. A few years later he has a relationship with the woman’s daughter that his son has by now finished with, and little by little he blasts her life, as only a swine like him can, to such an extent that she does herself in. The mother then lives unhappily ever after, as a played-out harridan.’

‘You’re sheer fucking evil,’ Jo cried, after the silence. ‘I should have pushed this carving knife into your guts.’

‘It’s a very moral tale,’ he huffed. ‘I was hoping you’d see something of that sort in it.’ He began to cry, head forward over the ashtray, and Diana felt a shameful urge to comfort him.

Jo stood, pushing her chair away. ‘The gas-oven’s the only place for a snotchops like you.’

They walked with their coffee through the French windows onto a large well-shaved lawn, the grass dry enough for those who couldn’t find places on the scattered park bench seats. The softened thump of a cricket ball sounded from the vicarage garden next door as Diana went towards the lilac bushes followed by Jo Hesborn.

Jo worked on lay-out for Home and Country. Her grey eyes sparked from behind the smallest of half-moon spectacles which, Diana thought, might be made of plain glass. Her hair was between fair and dark, the androgynous body dressed in a white silk shirt and tie, and checked trousers. She smoked a black papered cigarette from a holder made of bone.

Diana had heard she was a friend of Charlotte’s because she had ‘impeccable working-class credentials’. It was also put about that as a lesbian she had slept with most of the media women in London, who thought it less of a risk to tangle with the working class through her than get involved with an obese plumber or building worker. Diana considered such slander drummed up by a male chauvinist slob who thought it was witty, because she found Jo likeable, plain and straightforward, and envied her for making the only possible protest against Norman Bakewell. After saying so, she asked: ‘Who was that bloke sitting opposite me? Do you know him?’

She spoke with a modified Northumbrian accent. ‘He used to be a writer.’

‘Why is he here, though?’

‘Oh, he did a reportage, for a magazine Charlotte brought out in the eighties called The New Oppressed. She thought his piece was wonderful — social realism stuff straight from the front line, to use Charlotte’s words, far better than Orwell ever wrote, she said, who she’d always thought a traitor to the working class.

‘Tom lived among no-hopers and winos for a month, hung around DHSS offices, talked to kids on housing estates who loved nicking expensive cars and driving them on wasteland to burn. It was a long piece, went through three issues, but the magazine didn’t last long. Even Tom’s brilliant piece couldn’t save it. The chattering classes weren’t all that interested, and the unemployed couldn’t afford it with their giros. They’d have laughed about it, anyway.

‘Tom said that even before finishing it he decided that all he’d met were unhelpable, or just having a marvellous time burning and looting, for which he couldn’t blame them. I’m sure he’s never said as much to Charlotte, which is why she still likes him. Then he went into publishing, and now he’s on the way to becoming a millionaire, or so it’s whispered in the trade.’

‘What about his love life?’

Jo laughed. ‘Don’t ask! When he was slumming among the deadbeats he fell in love with a young married woman he got talking to in the DHSS queue. Or maybe he fell for another at the same time, knowing him. Anyway, it all went wrong. She saw through him, I suppose. Then he went down like a ton of bricks for this hardbitten tart from the North called Angela, a coalminer’s daughter, who worked at his firm. He married her. Got what he deserved, I suppose.’

‘Is he happy?’ Diana wanted to know.

Jo scoffed. ‘No man can be happy, not even if you got him up in heaven and made him God. I don’t know why you’re so interested in him, though. Come and have a drink with me sometime, at my place in St John’s Wood. I’ve always got some Bolly in the fridge. We’ll have a meal afterwards, then try the Swallow Club for a dance. You’ll love it there.’

Diana felt a sudden frisson, but put the hand gently away from her waist, in spite of the steady light in Jo’s grey eyes, which she found hard to resist. She wasn’t ready for that kind of eating, though might give it a try one day — or night — just as almost every woman wanted to have a baby once in her life. ‘It’s a bit far to get to from the BBC.’

‘If ever you feel like it, let me know.’ Wasting no time, she strode between rose bushes and across the lawn to blonde and secretive Emmy Brites, said to be writing her first novel, and whose peach coloured cheeks turned vermilion when the hand went forward.

Languid, dark and late thirtyish, Tom, when chatting at a party (except to a woman) looked continually over the man’s shoulder to see who it might be useful to meet next. He did it without shame, on the understanding that since who he was talking to would know what was in his mind, and was probably doing the same anyway, he could leave without either being embarrassed. He also assumed that those under his scrutiny were talking about him, which was sometimes the case. Glad that Diana had given that lesbian the pushoff, he walked across to talk to her, as she had hoped he would.

He leaned on the arbour post. ‘I had a lot to say to you, and now I’ve forgotten it all. At the table I thought the block would vanish as soon as we were face to face.’

‘And won’t it?’

‘I’ve never felt such an electric connection in my whole life. It was absolutely amazing. It’s still there, even more now that you’re close and there’s nothing between us.’

Fair, for a beginning, especially since he could have been stealing her words. Maybe that was how he had become a millionaire, though these days you could be fab-rich one week and living in Cardboard City the next. ‘I thought it was wonderful, the way Jo Hesborn dealt with that emotional cripple.’

‘Norman? I suppose he did ask for it. But maybe it’s rather admirable, the way he lives like an open wound.’

‘Sewer, more like.’ His envy of Bakewell foxed her for a second, because she hated his misogynistic novels, and didn’t think him worth any talk at all. ‘How come you know Charlotte?’

Such a laugh made it hard to know what he thought, as he leaned close and lowered his voice. ‘I like her. She’s one of the old sort, totally misguided. She can’t go to Russia since Perestroika because the planes don’t run on time, and she might get mugged. It was the only country she felt safe in, but now she sticks to this old rectory, though she hates the place. Complains all the time to poor old Henry, so that she can seem the calm and all wise earthy hostess to everyone else.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be your wife.’ Yet she thought she might, for an hour or two.

Even the overalls didn’t hide her figure, the lovely fruity breasts, body going in at the waist and coming out to delectable hips. ‘I’ll curb my tongue, but if you ask me whether I’d like to be married to you the answer’s yes, any time of the week.’

‘You sound like the perfect husband. I hope your wife thinks you are.’

‘In my experience, only the fatally flawed try to be perfect. I just saw you, and knew we had to talk.’

It was the moment to move on to someone else, easy enough to do. She’d always told herself never to have any truck with a married man, but he had given her no reason to walk away, and she didn’t care to think of one. ‘I’d love to live in a house like this, on such a marvellous day at least.’

‘I’d die here,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with London?’

‘Oh, not much, I agree. But I wake up in the morning plagued by pneumatic drills, or car alarms going off, or a burglar alarm, or a police car screaming to get to the station before the tea gets cold. Then there’s the awful smell, and the traffic.’

Charlotte stood at the door. ‘Who’s going to volunteer for washing up? I only need two.’ She thought it educational to make her guests work after a meal. ‘When it’s done we can go on a nice long walk to the river.’

Tom saw a way to imprison her in talk for the next half-hour. ‘Let’s do it.’

She used cardboard plates at her flat, and squashed them in the bin afterwards, but was happy to say yes. They put their hands up, like children at school, she thought, then went into the house, applauded by the others.

‘Do you know how to get there?’ The thatched cottages and front gardens were so neat she imagined people trying for the best kept village of the year. Even the gravestones looked polished and scoured, surrounding the stark grey church whose sinister tower must be visible for miles.

‘We turn left along here.’ He put a hand on her naked elbow, as if she needed guiding. The others would be left behind, and she liked being near him, though neither could think of much to say after their chatter at the sink. Skylarks and swifts played Battle of Britain in the blue, and the heat wafted an odour of tall wheat from either side of the track.

‘I’ve done this walk quite a few times.’ She wondered who with as they turned down a lane of birch trees, treading over hardrimmed tractor ruts. ‘There’s a keeper’s cottage at the end, then nothing between there and the river.’

Except a band of dark wood. The way opened onto sloping fields of yellow rape, which also patched the rising land across the valley. They stood a moment to enjoy the view. ‘I hear Elgar’s music when I get to this spot,’ he said.

Poppies were worried by wasps of gold and black, and a small aeroplane lazied up from the coast. ‘I see what you mean.’

He put an arm around her. ‘The “Introduction and Allegro”, what else?’ — and kissed her, a slow easing of the tongue into her mouth. Her body burned with the heat of the day, and there was sweat on her upper lip. The kiss was brief, could have lasted longer it was so delicious. She held his hand as they walked, breath quickened and not altogether from exertion. A rabbit zig-zagged out of their way. ‘I know a short cut through the wood.’

Thistles and stubble slowed them down, then she detoured trying to avoid tall nettles, but they brushed her thin overalls and the vague tingle of stings came through, increasing her desire for him. ‘Won’t we be seen from the keeper’s cottage?’

He waited for her to catch up. ‘I expect he’s too busy with Lady C. — if you see what I mean.’

They clambered over a ruinous stile, Tom scuffing a chocolatelooking stag beetle from a beam before handing her across. Unnecessary, but it was fun to let him think he could help. The way down levelled under foliage of clustering elms, brambles and small bushes almost covering the track. He stopped at a clearing.

Collared doves warbled, flapping at the disturbance. There was nothing to be said, hadn’t been since eyeing each other across the table, her hands as forward as his as she drew him down, seeing his glazed eyes and still lips, and sweat on him also. An aroma of damp undergrowth played around the cool wood as she undid the straps of her overalls, and pulled at the buttons of her shirt. The crack of a twig sounded from some animal, or a disturbed branch, and she hoped there’d be no unseen audience.

She had never made love in a wood, while he obviously had, and she wondered at the unfamiliar air so cool to her nakedness. When he took off his shirt and trousers she could hardly bear to wait. The heat went back into her, and they seemed a thousand miles from the nearest human. He knew what he was doing, in ways she hadn’t thought of before, but passion took care of them in any case.

Unexpectedly discovered love put them into a state of indolent stupefaction. She hoped there would be no wet patch on her overalls for the others to notice when they got to the river. His instinct was good, for he passed her a newly ironed handkerchief from his back pocket. ‘Use this.’

‘You came prepared.’

‘Be unforgivable if I didn’t.’ He never felt better than after a good long fuck, and hoped she did too, complimenting himself that it hadn’t been for want of plying the old skill if she didn’t. ‘The idea of sadness after sex must have been a liberal middle-class invention, like socialism or anti-smoking, or not eating meat. Anything to stop people enjoying life.’ Gratified at her laughter, he lit a cigarette. ‘This is the first weekend I’ve had off in months. I get up at six, and am never in bed before midnight.’

‘It certainly keeps you fit,’ she said languidly.

He flicked his ash towards a butterfly. ‘I spend an hour at the gym every day. Otherwise, I’d seize up.’

‘You certainly didn’t get anywhere near it then.’ She wanted to sleep in a big white bed with him, but stood to smooth the aches in her hips.

He straightened his collar. ‘We’d better go, I suppose, or they’ll wonder where we’ve got to.’

He wasn’t there when she next went to Charlotte’s, and she had almost grovelled to get invited. She had to push aside foul Norman Bakewell, who ragged her all through a lunch that would only have been good if you were peasant-hungry. He taunted her at Tom’s absence, as if his wormy novelist’s mind guessed every detail of their encounter.

Walking towards the wood made the distance seem twice as long. She was depressed and chilled in the damp glade, rain trickling from the foliage. The half-hour with Tom had been so perfect, she might have known it was too good to recall. Her mac was like wet muslin on getting back to the house. Luckily, Norman Bakewell was asleep in the lounge, though sending up vinous fumes and the stink of foul cigars.

Home dead beat from work, she picked up the phone to hear Tom’s unmistakably nasal tone. ‘It’s been a long time, far too long, but can I come and see you?’

A month had gone by, and while knowing his number she had waited rather than do him the honour. The stab of wishing they had never met came now and again, but their idyllic summer’s day would return in smell and touch, visual detail flooding in so that the innermost part of her belly yearned.

‘When?’ she asked.

‘Now.’

He came out of the lift wearing Reeboks, jeans, and a Gap shirt. A copy of The Big Issue showed from one pocket of his blue cashmere overcoat, and a bottle of White Horse stuck its neck out of the other.

‘I’m serious.’ He sat by her on the couch, a drink cupped in his free hand. ‘I can’t ever forget you. I love you, and want to see you all I can. The trouble is, I’ve been rushing here there and everywhere these last weeks, and couldn’t find a minute to get in touch.’

She was glad, having been too often on the point of ringing him. ‘Is your wife away tonight?’

‘Nothing like that. I’m working late. I always am.’

She sipped whisky and Evian, and fought away laughter at noting that Evian backwards spelled ‘naive’. She felt mischievous. ‘Does she have a lover?’

‘She could, for all I know.’

‘Would you mind?’

He laughed. ‘I’d kill him, maybe.’

‘Suppose he played squash as well? But would your wife kill you?’

‘I’d expect her to try, even if only to prove she loved me, or because I’d made the elementary mistake of letting her find out. It’s never an accident when someone does. There’s malice in it, you can bet. If you really care for each other — I mean, beyond love — you make sure the other never knows. Carelessness in that situation is sheer stupidity, maybe even hatred, or to get revenge.’

Men are all the same, she thought, though she’d never had a lover with the wit to speak so openly, which threw her so much off balance that she could only join in, and give up wondering what he meant by caring for somebody beyond love. ‘What about those who have affairs by mutual agreement?’

He followed her into the kitchen. ‘It ends in disaster, which must have been what they wanted.’

She put two pizzas in the microwave. ‘Hungry?’

‘Starving,’ as befitted, she thought, someone who spoke in such a way. ‘You seem to have had plenty of experience.’

‘It’s all speculation. Or intelligent observation, if you like.’ He leaned across and kissed her. ‘Most of it comes from reading Norman Bakewell.’

‘I do hope not,’ she said into his ear.

Her parents had sold their house in France two years ago, and bought a flat in Sevenoaks. Having too much furniture from that rambling old mill, they had given her a double bed, and because they or their guests had slept on it Diana was put off when sporting with her lovers. Another thing was it took up too much room: all right to stretch out on in summer, but hard to warm with her own heat in winter. With Tom as a lover she didn’t care who had humped on it before.

A call of once a month was hardly sufficient to serve someone like her. She wanted to have an affair, and this was more like a treat from heaven whenever he cornered a spare hour. Time that dragged into a month had a ball and chain to its feet, though as soon as she heard the bell it was as if he had called only days ago. Out of chagrin she would greet him as if he were a stranger, forcing him into his most charming mode to get them back into high romantic style. Not until after the meal and bottle of wine, when she was lying naked on the bed, and he was leaning over in a very satisfactory state, did this feeling come about.

After they had made love she said: ‘I’d like a phone number, in case there’s a need to get in touch with you.’

‘You have the office one already.’

‘The home number, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’m hardly ever there. It would be a million to one if I were to answer it. And I shouldn’t like Angela to.’

She wasn’t so stupid as to go on if anybody but he lifted the receiver.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t even want her to suspect — not one little bit.’

He thought of everything.

‘It would be unforgivable if I didn’t.’

‘You like to keep everybody happy?’

‘It’s the best way of keeping myself happy.’

He wondered why she laughed, unable to understand.

Perhaps she was being unreasonable, and couldn’t think why, not especially wanting to call him at home. Nor, feeling his equal, did she need to test him, or put herself through such futile emotional hoops.

He fastened his shirt almost to the neck, and she pointed out that the buttons were in the wrong place, perversely wishing she hadn’t told him.

‘Christ!’ He rapidly undid them, remembering how he had once got home and, while undressing, Angela noticed his pants back to front, though she was satisfied when he told her he had been playing squash and in a hurry to have a drink. He looked around at windows and doors, as if planning a quick escape, though there was no need. Probably instinct, and in any case it was three floors up. ‘What’s in there?’

‘My spare room.’

‘Full of junk, I suppose?’

‘It’s where I do my painting.’ Daddy had walked into Winsor & Newton’s, and bought a great box for her birthday.

‘Painting?’

She laughed. ‘Therapy I call it.’

‘Look, Diana, I’m off to Rome next week. Can you sham illness at the Beeb, and get time off? I’d love to have you with me.’

Nothing easier. She could see some wonderful paintings. ‘How long for?’

‘Three days, say.’

‘Could swing it. We’re between projects at the moment.’ Which was half a lie, but she didn’t want him to think she was doing any favours.

‘Marvellous. I’ll bell you.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘I’ll never stop loving you.’

‘I know, darling. Love you, too.’

TWO

ANGELA, BACK WITH a hundred quid’s worth of grub and cleaning stuff from Sainsbury’s, hadn’t realised she had left her natty little Japanese tape recorder on. It wasn’t in her to be so witless. But she hadn’t left it on: the cunning little devil started at the sound of a voice.

Operating such technological gimmicks was complicated enough to give a feeling of achievement. The manuals were easier to memorise if you read them aloud and, noting each movement phase by phase, she set the timing mechanisms of the video if a programme on television needed taping while they were out. Tom was baffled by such mysterious gew-gaws, and thought it strange that a woman should be so competent.

As a kid she had wanted to be an engineer and build bridges; he may have praised only to flatter, but it was pleasing to have her skill acknowledged, and flattery harmed no one, as long as you didn’t take it seriously. In any case, she flattered him, being as how he was so juvenile. She laughed at his failures, and said he couldn’t be a genius at his job and understand modern technology as well, a remark that soothed the abrasions of a seven-year marriage.

‘It’s just small enough to get into your handbag.’ He handed it over after his trip to Rome, and thought it useful as a notebook for dictating shopping lists into, or reminding her of something while driving the car.

She sat on the bed, holding the unobtrusive recorder which usually lay in the hairpin basket by the bedroom telephone. The playback mechanism reproduced a door clicking, drifts of music from the kitchen, a police siren, or the roarpast of a souped up van along the normally quiet Holland Park street. When traffic was thick around Shepherds Bush a few rogue vehicles, or reps handy with the map, used it as a slip road.

The black box was something of a miracle, and one day soon an invention would let you talk into a recorder and, at the touch of a switch, after attaching it to a word processor, a printer would bang the text neatly out. Bang also would go the secretary’s job, and if such a thing had been possible ten years ago she might not have been a rich man’s wife with a very des res in Holland Park.

Whatever she was she had never stopped being herself, because if she hadn’t always been as much of herself as possible she wouldn’t have become Tom’s wife. She supposed the process began by the sudden revelation at school that she was of better quality than anybody around her, and that O Levels could be passed if she tried.

She dropped a few pegs in her self esteem when no office in Wakefield would set her on. ‘You’ve got a long way to go before you’re any good to us,’ every smarmy personnel manager seemed to say. She was given work at a meat pie processing firm and, despite rock bottom wages, saved enough to buy a typewriter, and went to night classes to learn shorthand. It was hard to say whether the worst part of her year was being at home, or having to sweat with a row of foulmouths at the factory. The woman in charge of the conveyor belt was as much of a bully and even more dirty minded than her father, while the others were on the same mental level as her mother and sister. Maybe the combination had been invaluable in giving the energy to flee from both.

Angela supposed she came from the sort of place in Yorkshire which journalists referred to as ‘a close-knit community’. The phrase made her want to throw up. Those who used it would never live in such a place, not in a million years, though she could see them shivering with almost sexual pleasure while tapping the phrase out. Even her father, getting it from television, had used it with pride before cursing her as a fool on hearing she was going to live in London.

She couldn’t wait to get out of the village. London next stop, she said to herself, sniffing the odour of the carriage at Doncaster. They could stuff their close-knit community where a monkey stuffed its nuts.

It wasn’t hard to land a job, and she was soon able to mimic posh talk because of splitting a flat with Debbie and Fiona in Putney. They thought her patois charming, but when she began to sound more or less like everyone else, found her less agreeable, so she rented a room in West Ken, happy to be on her own.

Anyone who asked where she’d come from and deserved an answer was told Leicester, a safe bet, but a few months later she would mention Luton, and after a year she fobbed off whoever asked with the request that they mind their own business or, if they were trying to get at her, and if she was at a party and sufficient drink had put her into an awkward mood, she would revert to what she had once been and tell them — as she had from time to time fishwifed back as a girl to one or two collier slobs calling some funny business from the doorway of a chippy, or from the bus shelter on a windy night — to fuck off, which she was gratified to find worked marvels at a London party.

Such a whiplash rejoinder, from someone who could talk the Queen’s English with the best of them, did not reveal that such language was a basic part of her. In any case there was enough on television for any gently brought up girl to pick out for use.

She didn’t care what they thought, but if she had realised that Tom was close when she let fly a mouthful at the party she would have folded with horror. She didn’t approve of such talk — oh dear no, she laughed in recollection, of course I fucking well didn’t — but on falling into it had been consoled by imagining there were two people inside her instead of one and that, she liked to assume, was where whatever strength she had came from.

She singled Tom out on her first day at the firm. He was one of the directors in charge of the editorial division, and she recognised him as the sort of man who often appeared in her erotic and romantic dreams. He was said to be clever, the only person in the place with any imagination. The combination of charm and ruthlessness was carried with confidence, and his self-assured handsomeness was hard to deny, even for London where there were so many fit men, though his personality alone would have attracted her. You could tell by his face and manner that in a few years he would be at the top.

He was tall, with dark curly hair, and thin curving lips always on the point of saying something which would either burn you into the ground or make you fall on your back and open your legs — though she didn’t feel herself a candidate for either fate. She rarely heard him talk, he just walked into the department, spoke to someone in the distance about schedules or book jackets — as if he owned the building and could manage the mortgage with no trouble at all, thank you very much — then went back to his office where, she imagined, a nice thick sheepskin rug lay in front of his desk.

His nicely shaped ears picked out every word within radius, that was for sure, and though she couldn’t tell what he had heard exactly, her vile language got him talking and, being too pissed to know what about, she listened in such a way as to make him think she wasn’t interested, which caused him to go on longer than he thought worthwhile to this pert office runabout from somewhere north of Potters Bar. Her look of glazed indifference offended yet intrigued him, for she was amazed at him wanting to flirt with her, while asking herself who the blinding hell he thought he was?

Knowing she was as good if not better than everybody else, she paid as much to have her hair cut before the party as her father earned for a fair week’s slog down the pit. The mirror showed how attractive she was on getting into her wine-dark dress, though she didn’t need a flattering glass to confirm it. Full lips and a small firm chin, straight slim nose, and sufficient expanse of forehead, gave the impression that she could be efficient and intelligent, which she knew she must be compared to most other girls at the firm. She’d had too much of a struggle getting there to act as conceited as them.

Lots of famous people were at the party, mostly writers the firm published, but she wasn’t good at picking them out, and anyway so what if they were famous? She supposed those who were there and didn’t work in the office must be writers, except that there were so many unknowns from other departments that as far as she was concerned a lot of them might be writers as well. You couldn’t tell. Writers, she found, dressed like everybody else, and other people got so togged up that they might also be writers.

A man in a three-piece gravy brown suit and a cravat for a tie, crinkly grey hair, and stinking of whisky and aftershave, pinned her against the door. He told her he was a novelist, with the sort of leer not beamed in her direction since living in Yorkshire.

‘My name’s Norman Bakewell. I’m sure you’ve heard of me.’

The titles he ran off reminded her of the names her mother used to read aloud before going up the street to put bets on them at the bookies. Glittering eyeballs winked through heavy glasses that must have cost a bomb but looked dirt cheap.

‘I’ve read every one of them,’ she lied.

His lips were too close. ‘I only came to this firm because they said I could go to bed with any lovely woman who worked here.’

‘Written in your contract, is it?’

‘I insisted: a fat advance, twelve free copies, and any girl I fancied.’

‘And what part of the world do you come from, crumb?’

He winced. ‘Norman, if you please. A place near Wakefield. The name’s on the jacket of my latest bestseller.’

The village wasn’t far from hers, so he didn’t need an interpreter to understand the argot telling him to put his head in a bucket of cold water and keep it there for fifteen minutes. He moved to another girl, who had been at the firm long enough not to shove him away so abruptly.

She was getting undressed for bed, and couldn’t understand why Tom had been so attracted as not only to blab for half an hour, though mostly about himself and what a big shot he was, but even to fetch her another drink and, later in the evening, ask if he could see her home. Her no to this bumped his self confidence into paralysis, but she couldn’t bear him to see the slummy house at 24 Dustbin Grove where she lived.

Her put-down hadn’t been unpleasant, though however well she behaved she was always aware that her inborn mannerisms might give her away. The split drained her, but now she could feel the beautiful all-powerful woman because even Tom was interested in her. While settling into bed she was sorry not to have come back in his car instead of by the packed Tube. He was sure to be good at making love, certainly better than the deadbeats she’d so far tried it with.

She had held him off for so long that he became dead set on marriage, though not more keenly than she. He had made as good a husband as he was capable of, and while that seemed all right most of the time for both, it didn’t entirely come up to par for her. Something was missing which he was incapable of giving, a limit he couldn’t pass, unless what she sensed lacking wasn’t really there. Perhaps it was something in herself, though she didn’t see how.

He thought the fact that he could fuck well covered a multitude of sins, and much of the time it did, but at her most discontented she wondered whether the deadness in him was what stopped the uxorious devotion she craved from coming out. Even so, she supposed she was as much in love with him as she could be with any man, his only fault being that he gave too much time to his work.

A year after marrying she had a miscarriage. No, they had a miscarriage. For no known reason, the great event of their lives never happened. Did he wish it on her because he wondered if he was the father? He had no reason to, but every insane notion came to mind, to such stony country had the loss driven her. All talk was loving while she was expecting: Saul for him and John for her, or Rebecca for her and Mary for him. They discussed the matter for days and weeks, filling a chest of drawers with clothes for either sex and any age up to ten.

Her laugh was acidic. Toys and trinkets, tuckers and bibs, cups and a silver spoon, stashed and no longer looked at, the trunk locked. Lavender was powdered between cot blankets and cot sheets, as her mother had shown. The stupefaction lasted months. Maybe it was still going on, when she thought about it. She’d had tests but nothing was wrong — fuck-nothing was her anguished cry. Tom’s ebullience reasserted itself, telling her they could only exist and let the pain evaporate, and that nothing could part two people who had suffered such a blow.

She sat on the bed, and the sad resonances of Elgar’s music put her in mind of a motor excursion up the Wye Valley and into the Malvern Hills. Tom had arranged the trip to divert her from the miscarriage, but it only expanded the wilderness of loss, for how could anything other than going deeper into yourself find a solution as to what had gone wrong?

Such music indicated that she had done well for herself since leaving Yorkshire with a cheap and overfull suitcase, all that time ago. She had often thought of slinging the case away — a treasured memento in the attic — but pictured the dustbin men footballing it into the van with a laugh, wondering how such a shoddy item came to be in her opulent house.

Tom soon had a firm of his own, and travelled the world for business, a big man in it, youngish though he still was. She gave up her job, since more money was available from his gaudy books than they could throw about on everyday expenses. Habits of thrift from Yorkshire made her unwilling to spend unless for something essential.

To be lavish with his money would make her feel unequal, parsimony a counterweight to remaining herself, and not being completely taken in by a man who could give himself more cash in a week than many earned in a year.

And what an efficient little wifey I’ve turned into, she thought, grooming and mooning, entertaining and chatelaining. She supposed she’d hoped for it on running away from home, because didn’t you always achieve what you dreamed of in your ignorance, and even get that bit of romantic extra you never quite admitted to wanting for fear it wouldn’t happen?

Twice a year she loaded the Volvo with whatever pressies her parents might like, and ferried them up to Yorkshire: a hamper from Selfridges, a video and some James Cagney movies for her father; a camcorder in case they felt like making a memento of them staring at each other and saying nothing week after week.

Tom told her he loved Fred and Janice, and Angela laughed at how they behaved with their language and fussed to make him comfortable. He was too busy to go more than twice, but liked to choose their gifts, once sending a box of chocolates so big they joked about roping it to the luggage rack.

On the Great North Road she always stopped for lunch at The George in Stamford. She liked the old fashioned place, because Tom once booked them a room on their way to the Edinburgh Festival. She sat in the lounge afterwards for coffee. Feeling herself to be a woman of mystery and elegance, she surprised herself when, seeing a man come in who she fancied, she wondered whether she would go away with him for the weekend if he asked.

‘Fell off the back of a lorry, did they?’ her father said, seeing the gifts. ‘I hope the police won’t be round in the morning. We don’t want to upset your mother, do we? Do we, Janice?’ he bawled.

‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said. ‘We should be glad we’ve got such a nice son-in-law.’

Her father grumbled, no gracious corpuscles in his blood. ‘I like to look life in the eye.’ The first time he met Tom he said to Angela on the QT that such a man would end up either as a millionaire or in prison. A real judge of character, but that was his way, and she could never stand being at home for more than seventytwo hours.

The first day was tolerable because she took from her parents all that had been useful in her early life. Not much, but it served, though she was irritated at feeling sentimental about it. People gawped as she walked around the village, wondering what she was up to in the call box by the main road trying to get through to Tom. She strode to the stone-walled fields, and remembered running across them as a kid. Now she wore trousers, and laughed at the fact that she was too tall to graze her crotch anymore.

On the second day in the terraced house the silence was even thicker than the walls she had clambered over, and an effort was needed to stand up and go outside. But after the midday dinner of overcooked lamb, potatoes and cabbage, her father took his jacket from the back of the door and said: ‘Come on, Angie, let’s walk down the road to the pit. The men have been laid off, and the women have set up a protest camp outside gates. You’ll need a scarf and hat, though.’

Maintenance men kept the mine humming so that seams wouldn’t collapse or water pour in. Pits were closing all over the coalfield, he said, but the miners wanted jobs not redundancy money. ‘The government’s playing arsy-versy one minute, and changing its tactics the next, just to unnerve everybody. They treat people like bloody schoolkids.’

Three women were warming themselves at a coalfired brazier, all dressed in various styles of anoraks, rainbow scarves and woolly hats. One young woman sat on a plank between two barrels, helping a young boy to drink out of a titty-bottle filled with warm tea.

An elderly grey-haired woman in a duffel coat, tall and thin, came out of the headquarters caravan. ‘Up from London, are yer?’ she said, when Fred had introduced Angela. ‘My name’s Enid. You don’t talk like us anymore.’

‘I can’t help that, can I?’ The woman had spoken with humour perhaps, but Angela had never liked that kind because whoever used it only wanted to put one over on you. She regretted her sharp tone, and even having opened her mouth.

‘Well, here we are,’ Enid went on, ‘doing the only thing we can to mek the buggers see sense. I’m not sure how far we’ll get, though. They’re doing their best to shift us. Last week they set the bulldozers on us, but the drivers refused to do it, bless ’em. The media and TV was here, and the powers that be didn’t like that, so they ’ad to call ’em off.’

A young woman came out of the caravan with mugs of coffee and gave one to Angela. ‘We was at school together, don’t you remember?’ The wind blew the flaps of her headscarf this way and that. ‘We was in Miss Griffin’s class.’

She said yes, now I do, and knew she would have been here as well if she had stayed and married a man whose only hope of work was down the pit — being bossed about by this woman who had set herself up as their leader.

‘The men are used to the work, and get good money,’ Enid said. ‘It’s the only job they can do, and there’s no other. If many more pits close it’ll be a disaster. Even now, all these villages are dying, and the crime rate’s soared. At one time you could go out without locking your door. We used to police the place ourselves, you might say, but nowadays the young lads break in and tek everything. It goes on all the time.’

‘Enid’s one o’ the best,’ her father whispered. ‘None better. The salt o’ the earth.’ Such phrases suggested matiness, and bigotry, yet she listened, asking the right questions, with words and gestures natural to her. Still feeling a fraud, yet knowing they had more of a case than anybody else, she signed the petition, and gave a tenner for the fighting fund.

Enid told her father he had a lovely daughter, and there were tears of pride in his eyes. He held her hand affectionately by the back door, but let it fall as they went in, for fear her mother would see.

On the third day she said she had to go home and look after Tom, and was as happy to get away as the first time, unable to smile till reaching Doncaster and heading south. To have stayed longer might have turned her back into someone she had always had a horror of being, only feeling what she assumed to be her real self when a tea tray was brought to her table at the hotel in Stamford.

Tom was away in Frankfurt again — or was it Bologna — conferring with publishers about translations, reprints and bestsellers. He was all over the place these days, but would shine in tomorrow, merry and bright before burying himself back in the office.

The melancholy notes of Elgar stopped, and Tom’s voice vibrated at her ribs, as if he had been dead a year and was talking from the other side of heaven or hell, if there were such places, which she wouldn’t believe till she had been there and seen for herself. His tone was low-pitched, and eerily confidential in case someone who shouldn’t be was pressing an ear to the other side of the door.

‘Diana? Tom. It’ll be marvellous. Can’t bear to wait. I know. Have to, won’t I? We both will.’ He gave a sneaky laugh, new to Angela. ‘It’ll be worth it, I know.’

She sat in an armchair, and his voice was clearer. Her flesh felt as if coated with ice. Last night she had been to see a play at Notting Hill Gate. He had come in before her, and complained of exhaustion when she got into bed with nothing on and laid lovingly by him.

‘No, I won’t pick you up. Get a taxi, or a minicab, if you like. All right, a proper black cab. Safer these days. I’ll see you at the check-in. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be there. Who? Norman Bakewell? How did his interview go? Yes, he’s always very good. I’ve never known him not to be, providing he’s interviewed by an attractive woman. You saw him afterwards? What did he say? No, he doesn’t know about us. Nobody does. He is a vile old gossip. Angela? Glad to get rid of me, I expect. How do I know what she does? Of course she doesn’t, so don’t get nervous. I must hang up, though. See you at the check-in. You’ve got your ticket and passport?’ Another sneaky laugh. ‘You’d look a right charlie getting there and finding it was out of date. I’ve heard of it happening. Mine? I check it every morning before brushing my teeth. Can’t wait, either, my darling. Love you. Yes, a lot. Love you, then. ’Bye. All right. ’Bye, love.’

No more voice. She knew she should laugh, but her lips wouldn’t untwist. Like an episode from one of Bakewell’s gloating and cynical books. Well, the next chapter would be hers. The heating was on full but her hands and feet were cold. Maybe an unknown voice would come out of the hissing tape with the gen on how to kill herself. Better still if it told her the best way of doing him in without being found out.

She couldn’t think, so neither was likely, head blocked solid till her eyes were sore. At the end of the Elgar she had needed to go into the bathroom and pee, but didn’t want to anymore. When she did she might squat over those lovely bespoke frilly fronted shirts he was fond of poncing around in.

Diana, he had called her. ‘Diana,’ she said aloud, ‘I’ll fucking Diana her. I’ll dish him, as well. I’ll make the bastards spit tacks.’ The only time he had shed tears was once when she asked him to peel some onions before a dinner party.

THREE

TOM TOOK INTO account only the surface features of life, and never went properly into the depths to try and make sense of the turmoil, and bring it under some form of control. In any case, to imagine it would be beneficial or worthwhile or — more important — costeffective, was futile. Wasn’t the dazzle of the surface more attractive than trawling for significance in the stinking slime? Such nitpicking was the work of novelists like Norman Bakewell who, in their hit or miss fashion, manage it fairly well, and make it amusing to read about.

Any answers might be too gloomy to endure, or too bland to respect, and only those without a satisfying life deceived themselves into thinking an explanation could be dragged out of the subconscious (whatever that was) or that any good was to be had from fruitless revelations. And suppose you were telling someone about yourself, who would be interested in self pitying maunderings rather than hearing of bizarre and manly events that made a fascinating story?

Only pathetic and inferior people got involved with the therapy of analysis, or took drugs to blast a way through the obfuscations to a mind that was still as puerile when the dust had blown away. Tom thought that the less he knew about himself the more of a puzzle he would seem to everyone else, and there was much advantage to be gained from that.

After three days of unmitigated sex he travelled back on a different plane to Diana, thus avoiding any taint of suspicion. He left nothing to chance, yet his unthreaded spirit plagued him as he stretched both legs in first-class and poured from a half-bottle of champagne. The stewardess wondered why he laughed, and why he drank so obviously to himself by holding the glass up to her. Poor slob, she thought, he’s put his girlfriend on another flight, and now he has to go home and face his wife.

Tom found it encouraging to believe that whenever he had been to bed with Diana — or whoever else — any young woman within range would be curious about him. It could be that his marriage to Angela had made him an interesting if not near perfect man for other women who, being clever and intuitive, felt it — which thought made him smile as he fastened his safety belt.

Yet things didn’t seem as right as they ought to be, and there were times when he felt timid and insignificant, having nothing, deserving nothing, and existing in an aura of boring mediocrity, an utterly dissatisfied state of mind which no one else was allowed to suspect. To lift himself out of this near fatal fit of corroding worthlessness needed such energy as, when he succeeded, gave him a shark-like and not unsubtle advantage in dealing with anyone at work (and elsewhere) who stood in his way. He never knew the reason for this sudden descent into a bleak landscape, had no indication as to where it was or where it had come from. God-given and God-smitten, was all he could say. Maybe it was the curse of the black dog, which resulted from too much good living, too much hard work, and too much sex.

A glimpse of Hyde Park between the cumulus helped him back to an awareness of the world, making him feel as if London and everyone in it belonged to him. He never travelled with enough luggage to put on the conveyor, so could go through the nothing to declare — but not too quickly in case the Customs people suspected his briefcase to be bulging with crack — and take a taxi straight to the office.

The M4 was blocked as usual, by a lorry that had shed its load — or was it a burst water main, or a chemical spill, or one of those common accidents involving a half blind non smoking teetotal vegetarian of eighty hurrying for his (or her) insulin shot? Well, whatever was wrong with Tom, he knew he was in love with Diana, and that their liaison was worth all he put into it, because the more you did the better it would get, which was better for both and so, ultimately, best of all for him.

Walking up the path at dusk, a raddled tiredness made every limb ache, but he forced a brisk pace, because for some reason it annoyed Angela when his behaviour suggested he’d had a hard day at the office. He supposed that even signs of a back-breaking slog down the coalmine would have put a curve of disapproval on her lips.

Leaves blowing erratically against the background of a lighted window made it look as if the house was on fire. She usually sat in the living room with her evening vodka and orange, but she wasn’t there. An empty bottle and glass lay on the low table, and every light from the entrance hall to the attic had been left on.

Not in the dazzling white kitchen, either, two plates on the floor overflowing with bits of something gone crispy and black. Upstairs two at a time, he found her by the uncurtained window of their bedroom, holding the little black tape recorder he had been so good as to bring her back from — where the hell was it?

She wore the dress in which he had first noticed her at the office party, the line of small gold buttons on the plum coloured material moulding her bosom to a good figure still. The white lace collar set off her face, though her normally wavy dark hair was as straight as if she had just walked in from a monsoon, which he thought strange, for the hair drier was of the latest powerful make. Even the strongest of men would have been alarmed at her pallid cheeks, as if she had been poisoned by a long afternoon sleep.

‘What is it, love?’

At the press of a switch the sound of his voice couldn’t be denied. He’d heard it before, but is that what it’s like? Scrape, scrape, mumble and snigger. Well, it would be, for something like that, wouldn’t it? Hoping he wasn’t betrayed by the pallor of his own skin brought a laugh up from his ribs when she pressed the machine off.

‘Oh, that!’ he said, ‘I was reading a bit of Norman Bakewell’s latest while getting dressed, sort of acting it out. And you thought I was up to something else! What a beautiful, suspicious and adorable person you are! I love you more and more for thinking that, because it shows how much you love me. You don’t need to flatter me to that extent, sweetheart.’

An ominous sensation told him that his patter wasn’t convincing, not even to himself. You bet it wasn’t. But he went forward to embrace her.

She stepped away. ‘Who’s Diana, you two-timing fucking rat?’ The tape recorder shed pieces after bouncing against his forehead and hitting the floor.

He hoped the liquid was sweat rather than blood, recalling Bakewell’s noble stance at Charlotte’s lunch party when Jo Hesborn had clobbered him for far less than this. ‘She’s a character in Norman’s novel. It was so enthralling I took it to Germany with me. Looks like we’ve got another bestseller on our hands. I left it at the office, but I’ll finish it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have put it down, but I wanted to be with you for the evening.’

‘Oh, did you?’

‘Thought we could go out for a meal.’ He put a hand over his face. ‘God, that really hurt. What did you do it for?’

There was something to be said for not saying very much, but there was even more to be said for saying so much that she wouldn’t be able to disbelieve the lies he was forced to tell. Failing that, she would be mystified by what she thought he was trying to say — the verbal equivalent of drowning a treaty in ink. All the same, this was life on the Heaviside layer. He would have to take even more care, knowing by her blow what a pity it was that technology hadn’t stopped at the bicycle, the battery-run wireless set, and the wind-up gramophone, but had progressed, if you could call it that, to the diabolical invention of a tape recorder set going by the human voice.

‘I asked you who she was, you lying deceiving gett.’

He was disappointed by how easily she went back to her origins, and she could sense him thinking it, which pained her so much that she angled a heavy glass ashtray halfway upwards. ‘Who is she?’

He flinched. ‘Throw that, and I’ll phone the police.’

‘Will you?’ she raged.

He certainly would. ‘I’d rather them handle you than me kill you. I’ve no intention of running the firm from a prison cell.’

She lowered it, not her plan to kill him — yet. He would die by a thousand cuts. ‘Why don’t you call mummy and daddy, and tell them what a pathetic fix you’re in?’

‘They’re dead, and you know it.’

‘I expect you broke their hearts.’

Better and better. Talking was all she wanted, no one could resist it, proof of his recognition that she was alive, and he was fulfilling his obligations towards her as a human being. ‘They died of old age. I was a late birth, the only son. They loved me, and I loved them. Oh, you know all that.’

She sat, hands on her knees, skirt rucked up. It excited him, the bastard. She pulled it down. From now on I wear nothing but trousers. ‘And they spoiled you rotten. You’ve allus seen yourself as God’s gift to humanity, but you’re not to me anymore.’

‘I never thought I was any of that. But I loved you and still love you.’ Shame she yanked her skirt down. ‘I love you more than ever. I’ll always love you.’

‘You won’t if I know it.’

‘I will. You can’t stop me. I adore the ground you walk on.’

‘Oh, do you, then?’

‘Yes, I do.’ They were bickering. Better than ever. But he was angry with himself because stupidity was unforgivable, and bad luck frightening, which made him want comforting, so he became tender towards her in the hope that she would provide it. She mistook his attitude for contrition, and for the moment regretted her violence, almost willing to put aside the enormity of what he had done, because really there was no point when the only thing to do was walk away from this state of five-star humiliation.

Gradually she was soothed and, after kisses that sealed a lightning-charged truce, he put on the suit in which he too had been at the party — thinking it a nice touch — and walked her to a restaurant across Holland Park Road.

A bottle of champagne and the best food on the card would bring her round, though between each lovey-dovey clinking of glasses he reminded himself that in the morning he must go through his wallet and fax book to make sure there were no clues as to Diana or her whereabouts.

He doesn’t know me. They had made very satisfactory love and now he had gone to sleep. He thinks an orgasm makes up for everything, and I’m going to say no more, when he’s been doing it on me ever since we got married. I see now why my body threw out his rotten kid. And all those times I went to Yorkshire on my own he was pushing his filthy cock up all the scruffy tuppences he could find.

No wonder he’s always had so much work to do at the office and been so knackered when he got home. I could go on the razz myself but I wouldn’t do it just to get back on him. I don’t see any men I fancy these days, and if I did I don’t suppose they’d fancy me, but if ever I do do it I’ll do it in my own good time.

He’d be easy to deceive because the only person he knows about is himself. All the times I’ve gone through the gamut of a bad cold or the flu without him being aware, but when he caught it, whining about who had passed it on at the office, he moaned in bed for at least three days. When they both had colds she had to deny hers because two people could no more have one at the same time than they could complain of a common misfortune — and he’d never noticed.

The issue stopped her getting to sleep, when up to now she had fallen off the ledge and felt nothing till morning. Whoever robbed her of slumber was guilty of murdering her dreams. Her language lapsed again, something else to destroy him for: I’ll fucking kill ’er. I’ve had the sort of upbringing where I would never let anybody put one over on me. I’ve been spoiled by having it that easy, spoiled even rottener than him with his pampering, which is something he’ll never understand.

Changing position didn’t help. His snoring, as always after he had swined and dined, was like a lawnmower going over rocky ground, but she was bothered more than before because he had set on a stoat to eat up her brain. The shit-nosed little animal was halfway through the front lobes and getting on very well towards the back, thank you very much, but soon there would be nothing left so it would turn round and start again at the front, hoping a few scraps remained from the first time through. The more it stoated back and forth the more determined she was to clock Tom and his moll who had let it loose. First of all — getting out of bed — I’ll go through his things and find out just who that bitch Diana is, because she’s not going to be like herself much longer.

Diana often swore she would never have an affair with a married man, not realising till too late that whoever said never would sooner or later be inveigled into doing whatever they’d said they would never do never about. In the first place, the hole and corner complications would drive her spare, and in the second, if the other woman found out, she might be miserable, which Diana was too humane, or too loyal to her own sex, to gloat over. In the third place she didn’t want to get close enough to another woman to the extent of sharing her through her husband.

And now here was Tom phoning to say that his wife had pulled the big whistle from her bloomers and blown it long and loud after their time in Rome. He wouldn’t be seeing her for a while, he said, though there was nothing he wanted more in the world. He could be lying, of course, because what more appropriate time was there to end an affair than after a wonderful few days on the Mainland? His tone was so adoring that she had to believe his spiel, though her faith in his abilities went down a notch or two at his wife finding out. Had he done it deliberately? Shit-headed Norman Bakewell said that people only let their opposite know of their entanglements when they wanted a bit more excitement; and that sort she could well live without.

She opened a half-bottle of Beaujolais and threw the cork in the bin. Such a sexy weekend made her want to see him next day, tonight, this minute, instead of waiting the fortnight he implied she might have to. She tore off the plastic and put a steak under the grill. His pleading tone was something new. He was afraid of his wife. It was worth a laugh, because most men were. A programme arranged in Sheffield would keep her away for a week, and if her craving didn’t diminish she would see who might be possible among the camera crew. Tom was sleeping with his wife, so she had a right to a diversion as well.

The first message on the ansaphone was from who else? ‘All I know is I’m in love with you,’ he said, and it felt as if a hand were already reaching across her breasts, ‘totally, passionately, irreversibly. Can I see you on Wednesday evening?’

‘You certainly can,’ she said, phoning his office.

Then came six calls from the same heavy breathing person who, not finding her home, wouldn’t commit a voice to tape, but was trying to get her with eerie persistence. Well, you got all sorts in the world, meaning London, so it wasn’t worth thinking about. After the usual hellos from parents and friends she went to the twenty-four-hour shop and stocked up the larder. Supper done, she would stand with brush and palette in the spare room, finishing her notion of a female nude.

Instead of his usual month at a time Tom came every few days, as if the new situation fired his libido. Diana kept the interpretation to herself, but was glad at his visits, couldn’t have enough of them, because a higher intensity came into their affair for her as well. Some evenings the phone sounded several times while they were in the bedroom, most of the callers — or caller, she was sure — did not go on to talk.

‘Someone’s phoning me,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know who.’

He sloped in the best armchair, blowing rings from his long thin cigar. ‘Probably wrong number.’

‘It happens too often.’

‘Any theories?’ He sounded uninterested.

She had picked up the phone once and, expecting a call about work, had stupidly given her name. ‘No, have you?’

‘Could be an old boyfriend trying to get in touch.’

‘I never went with slobs like that.’

‘People do funny things,’ he said.

‘They say them, as well.’

Ash showered onto her carpet. ‘It won’t do any harm. Could be Angela, I suppose.’

‘I wondered that.’

‘Hard to find out without giving us away. I told her we weren’t seeing each other anymore.’

‘Was that wise?’

‘It was easy. You don’t know Angela,’ he said, at the contempt on her lips. ‘Oh, hell, I wonder how she got the number?’

He sounded petulant, but who wouldn’t? ‘You should know.’ ‘I don’t, though.’

‘Anyway,’ Diana said, ‘as long as she doesn’t find out where I live.’

At the back of his address book was a seven-group, unlike any other, and she altered each digit a number ahead. Didn’t make sense. Changing them for the one behind produced a recognisable London number which, when dialled, got this posh trollop on the ansaphone. Naturally, she gave no name, but it must have been her.

She had to laugh at how simple it was. He was piss poor at making codes, and that was a fact. In another part of the book Diana’s address was made plain by similar deciphering.

He had promised, oh so easily, but she knew he wouldn’t stop seeing his Diana because if she had been in love no one would have spoiled her affair, certainly not him. In one way she couldn’t care less whether they broke it up or not, because if it weren’t the whore Diana he would be having somebody else.

She would never trust or love him again, but fired herself to do the job nevertheless, because without much thought he had kicked her so brutally in the guts that the pain still brought tears and such a bumping of the heart that she wanted to vomit. It hadn’t been exciting enough for him to just have the woman but he had to plant the tape recorder where she was bound to play it back.

He came home, and Angela wasn’t there. She so habitually was that the fact worried him. He sat in the kitchen eating bread and salami, a glass of red by his elbow. Diana had been too upset to feed him. And at the office he’d had Norman Bakewell haranguing him in the most obscene language about the jacket of his next paperback. Angela came in with an expression of satisfying superiority, and a shine of dislike for him in her eyes. The curve to her lips discouraged friendliness, at a time when, not long out of his girlfriend’s bed, it was vital for him to show it, even if only to diminish the guilt which harried him since she had found out.

He stood. ‘Hello, darling!’

Scales at the gym told him his weight had gone down in the last weeks. Hers had, as well, so that both looked raddled and mean. She had put herself on the machine, and laughed at the notion of selling the idea of an adulterous affair to Weight Droppers Anonymous. If a couple wanted to economise, only one need do it.

‘What’s funny, love?’

She sat facing — looking, she assumed, right through him. ‘You.’

‘How come?’

‘You said you’d packed her in.’

‘Who?’

‘There’s more than one? I’m not surprised. London’s full of ’em waiting to fall on their backs and open their legs for a walking cock like you.’

‘Oh, don’t let’s go into all that again.’ Again? She hadn’t stopped since that fateful day nor, he supposed, would she ever. Did she want a divorce?

She didn’t. ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’

Nor did he. It would disturb his life too much.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You want everything.’

He wondered whether silence wouldn’t be better, but his mouth took control again. ‘Who doesn’t? You can have a divorce, if you like.’

‘When I feel like one I won’t ask you.’ She didn’t want to swim around in the slime of the alligator playground for the rest of her life. But she was in it, couldn’t help herself. He’d pushed her under and she was drowning. ‘I don’t need permission how to run my life from a scumbag like you.’

Back into the maelstrom, and who needs it? A divorce might be the only way, but would mean defeat, and more trouble than he wanted to face. Men were often too busy having affairs, Norman once said, to have time for a divorce.

‘I want you to give her up,’ and then she would leave him.

‘I’ve told you. I have.’ He’d never be able to, apart from not wanting to surrender on principle. Women who were easy to get were hard to let go of.

‘You haven’t.’

‘You’ve got to believe me.’ She had played the spoiler with Diana’s phone all evening, belled the number ten times and stultified both in mid-pleasure. Knowing who it was infected them with despair, compounded by each being aware that the other knew but was trying not to say. He couldn’t even manage twice, and Diana had only half come. In her edgy mood she had puffed a cigarette, after giving them up a month ago.

Angela’s smile alarmed him, and he wondered if she was sane. If she had followed him to Diana’s his lies would have to be more convincing, but he had hit the limits of his ingenuity.

Even so; he decided to give his artistry one more try, but with no warning she leaned across the table and battered his face with the whole weight of her left fist. He told himself later he had seen it coming and could have dodged, but a malignant imp far down in his psyche — and he couldn’t say better than that — hadn’t let him. Nor did he avoid another ferocious knuckling to the other side.

‘You can’t shit on me, you bastard.’ She crashed him again, caught up in a heady mix of despair and enjoyment.

He retreated to the sink, and slid around the table, but only felt safe when halfway up the stairs. Well, almost, because she pursued him to give more of the same, telling herself, when he ran into the bedroom, that she wasn’t a coalminer’s daughter for nothing. She sat on the stairs to exult, because he wouldn’t like what he saw after locking the door against her.

Diana looked on the white Ford Escort parked outside her flat on Primrose Hill as an additional room that she could travel around in if she had to. Daddy had bought it for her when she landed a job at the BBC, proud of her working there, because he had lapped up the ritual of the nine o’clock news throughout the War, while doing his duty at the Food Office.

Nippy as a devil in town, the car was good for long distance too. A cardboard box in the boot contained plastic bottles of water, oil, brake fluid and antifreeze, as well as spare bulbs, fan belt and jump leads, and an entrenching tool in case she got caught in snow, put there on her father’s advice, whose favourite refrain had always been that you must prepare for every eventuality.

In the glove box was a torch and a tub of sweets should flood or pestilence strand her. She’d added a box of tampons and a packet of Mates, leaving nothing to chance. On the empty seat was a box of Kleenex, an A to Z of London, and a road atlas of Great Britain so that she could go anywhere at no notice.

A long day’s stint in Guildford made her glad to slot into a convenient space by the door. She needed a hot drink, then to bed, whacked utterly after the twenty mile slog-and-jog through jams and traffic lights. Tom’s eager presence would be too much this evening, and even a bit of therapeutic painting wouldn’t soothe her strange mood.

All the way back she had wondered whether their liaison hadn’t gone on too long. Boredom and emptiness had replaced the excitement, and she wasn’t born to put up with an affair once its first passionate flowering was spent. Though never to be forgotten, maybe it was time to be free again, and she couldn’t imagine him unhappy at being released to flash his talent at someone else. Life was too short to stick with one man. She might just as well be married, and who would go into that kind of death?

She supposed the woman who bent at her window wanted directions, London crawling with idiots unfamiliar with a street atlas. Dark, even attractive, but there was something manic about the eyes, nothing strange, after all the loonies had been kicked out of the hospitals, poor things. ‘Yes?’

‘Are you Diana?’

Rain trickled over the windscreen, and she hoped for a downpour to run off the dust and pigeon shit. She reached for her handbag to stow the key. ‘Yes, why?’

‘Tek this!’

Thinking of a photograph, she would never forget that visage painted with an aspect of insanity and wrath, and justice about to be done. Eyes unfathomable with vacancy made one blink of the shutter, exultance another — Diana named many sorts — except they flashed across too quickly, everything vivid, then forgotten as one shutter-smash after another compounded the blows that seemed to come from every direction.

She put a cold towel to her head, hoping to decrease the swellings and pain. ‘I’m calling the police.’

Tom was at the office. ‘No, don’t do that.’

‘Fuck you!’ She wanted everyone around him to hear. ‘Your fucking wife came and beat me up.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’m coming right over.’

Diana couldn’t understand why she hadn’t got out of the car and plastered her back, except that the concatenation of righteous blows only stopped when she put the ignition on and closed the windows, at which Angela kicked a tyre and was halfway up Primrose Hill before Diana could get out and reach for the entrenching tool with which to do murder.

She hated herself for crying, and giving him a reason to hold her close. Full of rage, his false concern was too much to bear. ‘She ran away. She was raving mad. She didn’t care what she did.’

He held her shaking body, so warm and pathetically trembling he wanted to make love on the spot. ‘It’s all over with me and Angela,’ he said, ‘and she knows it. I can’t tell you the disgusting things she did with my clothes.’ He stood aside. ‘Look at me! This is how I went to the office today.’

A flowered shirt, pale unseasonal trousers, and a bomber jacket. ‘That’s how you often dress.’

‘Yes, but I usually have a choice.’

She sat. ‘I’m terrified. She might come back. I’ll have to triple lock the doors.’

‘So you should.’

She laughed, hoping not too hysterically. ‘Yes, but look at this,’ and reached behind the sofa. ‘I brought it up from the car.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t use that.’

‘If she gets in here I will.’

And he could see that she would. ‘I put a chest of drawers against my bedroom door last night. She’d cut my exercise bike to pieces with a hacksaw.’

Diana laughed. ‘Top marks for malice,’ then groaned from her bruises.

‘It’s not funny.’ There had been no long lunch today, and famishment made him hollow, which put him in a state to announce: ‘We’ve agreed on a separation at least. She’s leaving in the morning, and I’m not going back tonight.’

‘You can book a room at Claridge’s, then, though I don’t suppose they’ll let you in looking like that. But there’s the phone if you want to use it.’

‘Oh, come on, you don’t think I’m afraid of her, do you? If I start to hit back I might get into even more trouble than you with that entrenching tool.’

A man would think that, wouldn’t he? He could shack up in Cardboard City for all she cared.

‘I’ll be glad when she’s left, though. She’s been putting things in the Volvo since yesterday. I’ll give her an income. She’ll be able to live fairly modestly up North.’

‘Maybe she’ll find a nice big expensive flat in Nice.’

His squash playing shoulders were no longer taut, nor his features so cock-a-hoop. Something had cracked, though she wasn’t dim enough to imagine it would last very long. Unregenerate, he would get back to the same old ways as soon as he was married again.

‘I don’t care where she lives, as long as it’s a long way from me.’ He didn’t love Angela anymore because she wasn’t the same person as when he had married her. Then again, in the early days he hadn’t had time to get into his own stride. Even so, what she had changed into now that he had, wasn’t to his taste. Love at first sight hadn’t been solid enough for him to endure her recent fits of shark-ripping violence. She could go her own way, though he wasn’t sure enough of the justice of his conclusion to mention his thoughts to Diana, who waited for him to say something while he faced her from the sofa. ‘She can go to hell for all I care,’ he said.

‘I still think I should let the police know. She’s not fit to be on the loose. She should be in the loony bin.’

He thought the same, but tried to smile. ‘They’d only laugh at you.’

‘Not at me, they wouldn’t.’

‘After all, it’s just a domestic tiff.’

‘Oh, is that what you bloody well call it? Well, I don’t. I really think I ought to bell them, even if only to stop her doing the same to anyone else.’

‘It would get in the papers.’

So that was it. ‘You’d better go,’ she said, ‘before I start throwing things as well.’

The car was overloaded, so she would check the tyre pressures at the next garage. Then she could look forward to lunch at The George in Stamford. Surprising what few things were her own, though she had filled the old suitcase which had come down with her in the first place. Whatever was left could go to Oxfam. Maybe she would click with a very fit man in the restaurant.

She had been gratified at her strength on manoeuvring the trunk into the car, that they had maniacally filled before her miscarriage. Lifting it onto the tailgate had been a job, Tom looking on but not offering assistance. If he had she would have spat in his eye, and he knew it, so he was too cowed to take the risk. He thought her barmy as she worked it slowly in like a coffin. She didn’t altogether know why she wanted to, except it was impossible to leave such a cargo to someone like him.

Nor was she driving north for the last time. None of that end of the world dramatic stuff for her. She would come up shopping or to see a play whenever she felt inclined. ‘I’ll never go back up there,’ had often been her cry, but in those days it would have meant a defeat whereas now it was better than hanging around in the hope that Tom would wave his cock in her direction now and again.

He was free, so she supposed he would install one of those numbered ticket machines on the outside of the house. They used to have them at the deli counter in the supermarket, and people would pull out a little tongue of paper with their number on it so that they could just stand around and not look like they were queueing. The women waiting to go in and let him fuck them wouldn’t fight as to who was first.

Wherever she was going or would end up she’d get back to being herself before deciding what to do with her life. At least she had learned that nothing was forever. As for him, let him laugh, and go on with the only existence he was fit for. In any case, who cared for adventures when the discovering of her true self would be as much of one as she could attend to? She would screw enough money out of him to pay for a three-year stint at whatever university would take her, never mind that she would have gone by such a roundabout way to get there. Maybe she’d even do something in mechanics or engineering.

A man who couldn’t be true to you, and was only happy doing the dog-paddle in the turdy waters of the alligator playground, wasn’t worth the shoes he stood in. She would rather be on her own than know anyone like that. Whatever world you lived in was as big and as rich as you made it, and hers, she could only hope, would be bigger and richer than the one fading in the rearward mirror.

FOUR

TOM REMEMBERED CHARLOTTE saying — during dinner table chitchat at her house in the country, on a night when hail was driving almost horizontally against the windows, and Charlotte was waiting for a power cut so that she could set out candles and let them sample the lives of workers and peasants of seventy years ago — that a man who left his wife, and took up with a girl young enough to be his daughter, would soon repeat the mistakes which had destroyed the previous liaison.

Henry agreed. He had to. But Tom replied, pushing his cup forward for more coffee, that making the same irreparable gaffes with a new spouse was more interesting than staying with a woman to whom there was no more of your bad side to show. In any case, some years must elapse before boredom or acrimony crippled the new union, and by that time you might be dead.

Another disadvantage of not enduring the first ordeal, Barbara Whissendine suggested, was that a man never really got to know himself, and there was surely some value in that.

Tom, under scrutiny, retorted — and he was of course backed up by Norman Bakewell in this — that even supposing there was no more for a man to discover (and he may even so be well aware of all that there was) to remain in one emotionally arid gridlock would nullify all that experience had taught him up to that point, rather than illuminate the mind in any way — or words to that effect, after the prose was honed up in Bakewell’s ever-working brain.

A third point, perhaps more perceptive, not to say provocative, was that the gadabout was incapable of reasoning along such lines. Tom threw this in free. He was a man of action, he went on, not a vegetable deadbeat languishing at his fireside, like Henry, who may, he thought, for all anybody could tell, be a deeply philosophical character, though the only effect was to keep him securely under Charlotte’s thumb, and what kind of philosophy was that?

Too much reflection was often more useless, and demoralising, than too little, and made action difficult if not impossible. Norman Bakewell, who was at his most acute when cogging into others’ thoughts, went on to comment that whatever move one makes, even if it does little good, or even if it exacerbates the situation, must be better than the abandoned marital state of ongoing bitterness and eternal inertia — he concluded, reaching for his glass and then becoming too drunk to come out with anything that was either sensible or readable.

‘To stay in one marriage for life under any conditions deadens a man,’ Tom said, riding roughshod through Charlotte’s silence, ‘and argues deadness even in a woman’ — a nod to Barbara and Emmy Brites, who were holding hands — ‘but a man who gets hitched two or three times may have done so in order to try and rectify genuine errors.’

Nearly everyone around the table chipped in at this point, Emmy Brites coming up with the barb that a man has to be diabolically flawed to marry a third or a fourth time, an inference which Tom absolutely disagreed with, considering himself the opposite of a failure in life.

‘Men are blest who marry often,’ he said, and stood up to say it. ‘Those who don’t try more than once could be said to lack energy or, let’s face it, money, or confidence, or the good fortune to pick ’em and the know-how to have them fall in love with him. Most men, like most women I suppose, whether due to love, loyalty, or the inanition brought about by the inborn ability to put up with ongoing turmoil, stay with the same partner for life.’

‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’ Charlotte filled his glass in the hope that he would get too drunk to speak, a mistake, because he swigged it off, looking at Emmy Brites and hoping, that since Norman sat boggle-eyed and out for the night, she would put his words if not into her present novel then plough them into the next. ‘Men who go from one woman to another must be more interesting and attractive than those who don’t because they can’t. Those who can’t look on those who can and do as amoral villains, or lucky dogs, according to the way they feel about their own marriage.’

Recalling such an evening did Tom little good as he sat by himself in the club with his bottle three-quarters empty. To say his fourth marriage was going badly was, as a negative exaggeration, the understatement of the decade. He was unable to understand why a man like himself, who knew so much about women, and loved them more than any other creatures in the world, couldn’t keep a marriage going for life (though on his own terms) and so give more time to his work.

The first try with Angela lasted seven years, and he justified its ending by saying he had never really loved her but had been trapped into marriage by her spiderish act of keeping him for too long at a distance. What held them together was at best infatuation rather than love, luckily broken on her taking umbrage — a real North Country set-to there — at his affair with Diana.

Calling for another bottle, he remembered that his love for Diana began with crashing sexual magnetism at one of dear old Charlotte’s lunch parties. What love didn’t start in a similar manner, he would like to know. Unhappily for both, his affair with Diana turned into something they mistook for love. In those heady days he prided himself that, like Bismarck, he was able to learn from other people’s mistakes, with the result that he never saw the big ones coming.

Unable to be apart from each other, in those dangerous weeks after Angela had gone, and when their affair seemed to be ending, he made the biggest blunder of his life and, as soon as the divorce came through, asked her to marry him.

Fireworks, he recalled, Catherine wheels and exploding rockets replaced the umbrella of nuptial starshells. Who would have realised that their allotted bliss had been used up already during their passionate affair? In little time at all they were unable to tolerate each other. They endured for a while through misplaced pride or obstinacy, so that after a year they were like siamese twins and couldn’t live without each other. Neither could they live with each other, which galled them so much that they could only sit back appalled and hope the other would leave first.

Because the other — whoever it was at some vindictive Jason and Medea moment — was unable to act due to the potency of the original infatuation, their sterile marriage went on for almost three years. Tom hoped to find her gone on getting back from the office. After he had left for work Diana prayed he wouldn’t come home again. Tom knew that if he returned exhausted from work to find she had flitted he would cut his throat. Diana realised that if he didn’t show up at the expected time she would hang herself.

Tom was aware that such a perfectly balanced emotional pendulum was diabolically organised by something more powerful than either, and might keep them close forever. Diana assumed that, though able to walk out at any moment, she couldn’t unless he went first.

The hour Tom felt most able to light off was between eleven o’clock and midnight, but by then he was too half seas over to crawl on hands and knees to the car. He could do nothing more than find the route to bed, though mumbling his absolute determination to scarper at the first blink of dawn. He would be at Heathrow in no time, and a few hours later Diana would get a telephone call from as far off as Lisbon or St Petersburg. Before being released on his alcoholic decline into sleep he would even pencil a reminder and leave it under the alarm clock on the bedside table, telling himself: ‘Leave her definitely today,’ but on waking with a fuddled mind, and hollow for breakfast, his only thought was to eat and get away early for work.

He surmised that such a marriage must have been brewed up in Antarctica, while Diana placed the destructively spewing volcano of Krakatoa at the geographical centre. The fact of their mismatch was all they could agree on, though to say so was unnecessary. Foreseeing far more anguish if they separated, it was only possible to stay together as if observing someone else’s marriage, while realising too late that they were looking in on their own, and were humiliatingly bound by it. Whatever emotional profit there was in being taken beyond the limits of a tolerable existence, which someone like Norman Bakewell might have seen as a positive advantage for his writing, was not enjoyed by either.

The wineskin of torment burst for Diana when Tom made the situation remorselessly clear to her one evening, after the meal, of course. She ran from the house in a fit of the miseries which even her paintbox and easel could not dilute.

Crossing against the lights at Notting Hill Gate, she was sorry not to have been flattened into the asphalt, but immediately felt better on being comfortably installed in a taxi, and telling the driver to drop her at the Swallow Club in Soho.

She somnambulated to a space near the bar, and saw Jo Hesborn, who was halfway through a bottle of champagne.

‘Now why did you have to turn up?’ Jo said.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Diana snapped, though noting there were no men in the place.

‘Have a drink of this, anyway.’ Jo called for another glass. ‘I can’t believe my luck, that’s why I sounded a bit sharp.’ She held Diana’s hand, who felt thrillingly at ease, and not willing to withdraw it. ‘I’ve been madly in love with you ever since that lousy lunch party at Charlotte’s,’ Jo said. ‘And to say I’ve been repining for you would be putting it mildly, but I have. So come on, love, knock that back, and let’s have a dance.’

For Diana it was more of a coup de foudre than the first encounter with Tom. ‘So,’ he sneered, when she took no trouble to hide the fact that she had stayed the night with Jo, ‘you chose freedom by falling in love with a woman.’ He wanted to find Jo, and crush her dry hard body to bone and gristle but, recalling her vicious attack on Norman Bakewell at Charlotte’s, thought better to leave her alone. ‘Anyway, you can clear out.’

‘I don’t see why.’ Jo had told her she shouldn’t, at least not in a hurry. ‘Marriage ought to be able to contain me having a relationship with a woman. Ours ought to, certainly.’

Oh, ho, tell that to Tom. He couldn’t bear the thought of touching her sexually from then on, without imagining he was with a woman he had picked up at a party, though he conceded, in order to have peace, that she might have a point about staying on, because when she brought Jo to dinner he didn’t dislike the situation, to his surprise and Diana’s chagrin. They were both women, after all.

At such cosy get-togethers he was uxoriously polite to Diana so as to make Jo jealous, but put on his maximum charm to Jo, who had a certain louche pull (though she was too thin in form and somewhat outspoken) until Diana thought his behaviour was working even on Jo in the same old way, so that Diana who, he couldn’t help noticing, was more in thrall to Jo than she had ever been to him, fell into a discussion with Jo about buying a chocolatebox cottage in deepest Wales, in which they could live much like the ‘Two Ladies of Llangollen’. Tom was glad to note that Jo thought more of her job in London than this promise of eternal clitoral bliss.

Tom was embarrassed when he and Diana went out together, because she looked at young women with the same famished intensity as himself. Neither liked the competition, but should have been happy to know that after years with nothing in common they now had one in which both hungered after the same sex.

Tom was more jealous than if she’d had affairs with men, or so he claimed during arguments stoked up with even more bitterness than before. With a woman the odds were piled too high. Maybe it was envy. It certainly was. She lusted after the women he fancied which, after the amusement had worn off, he didn’t like it at all. Such tackiness was undignified.

At a party one night, while Jo was visiting her family in Northumberland, Diana purloined a girl from under his nose. On another occasion, when he saw her smitten by a very good-looking middleaged woman, he sidled in and worked his charm, so that Diana didn’t get her — the sex war to end sex wars.

Such argy-bargy — or was it hanky-panky? — led him to observe that any woman he reckoned he could get into bed within half an hour was invariably an easy conquest for Diana as well.

Perhaps Diana’s way with women was a final attempt to prove her love for him, stunts he had not previously imagined and certainly not wanted. Maybe she thinks I’ll turn queer, he thought, so that we’ll be a devoted couple into old age. ‘Fat chance, mamma,’ he snarled, in their last bout of cat and dog fury.

Assuming that almost every woman was drawn to the lesbian condition as they became older, he took Norman Bakewell’s advice and found a young one before she’d had time to think it worth a try. Nineteen-year-old Debbie worked as a waitress. Wearing a caramel coloured shirt and a tie, she had a shapely bottom but not much bosom, hands lightly clasped behind her back, waist nearly reached by her rope of dark hair. Pale-faced and with a somewhat pinched and distant expression, she brought Tom’s soup to the table as if it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, or to be seen doing, then stood by the wall to stare contemptuously in turn at everyone else who was eating. When she came with his steak au poivre he asked if she liked working here.

‘I don’t like working anywhere.’

He laughed. ‘Then why do it?’

‘My father just died, and my mother threw me out.’

He was fascinated by the inch of white ankle between the top of her boots and the bottom of her brown trousers. ‘We ought to talk about it sometime.’

‘You can if you like.’

He ate there the following week, surprised she still had her job. ‘Thanks for that tip,’ she smiled. ‘Nobody’s dropped me a tenner before.’

As a device for being remembered it was worth every penny. ‘What part of the world do you come from?’

‘A little semi in South East Ninety Eight. Shitville.’

At least it wasn’t Yorkshire. Or Sevenoaks. ‘That’s not far away.’

‘It’s too close for me, though. I might as well still be there, having to work in this pig-dump, and living in a squat.’

‘It sounds all right,’ he said, wanting to hear more of her fairly basic lingo, which he assumed covered a profundity of unexplored emotion — and love.

The head waiter, or maybe he was the boss, came close. ‘Haven’t I told you not to talk so much to the customers?’

She stood so high Tom thought she would break her toes. Nobody was going to show her up in front of a man who’d left a ten pound tip. ‘Well, you know what you can do, don’t you?’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You can fuck off.’

Nor was anybody going to humiliate him on such a busy night. ‘I rather think that’s what you’re going to do, my dear, and this minute — if you don’t mind.’

Tom, ready to get up should the man give her that smack in the chops which she certainly merited, enjoyed being in a real life situation. She let a napkin drop to the floor as if it was a dead rat, and stepped on it. ‘You don’t need to tell me twice.’

‘Oh, I shan’t. Out, out, out,’ he said, walking away with Tom’s plate.

She lit a cigarette, and made sure the smoke clouded over the next table until a woman waved it irritably away. ‘He thinks he’s the fucking cat’s whiskers because he can’t fancy me.’

Tom had fallen in love with her by succumbing to a so-called general truth from Norman Bakewell, a fatal way to behave, but what way was not? ‘Let’s meet outside,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’

He took her to the best pubs and clubs, feeling in the prime of youth when older men saw them as so apparently happy. He installed her in the house which, for a while, she kept scrupulously ordered and clean, scrubbing and polishing (in stiff checked aprons Tom lasciviously provided) as if it was a big new toy unwrapped for her birthday.

Even before marrying her he ought to have guessed that such a sloppy proletarian underlip dripping tea into the saucer, or onto herself if the cup was at too much of a slope, meant trouble. What he had assumed to be an endearing pout was the shape of her mouth that had not evolved since birth. It was even more emphasized now that she was transmogrified into a grown-up married woman.

After a few months of wedlock Daddy’s little darling became, as she put it, too bored to live, and took to going out on her own. She came home in the middle of the night, usually on the back of a motorbike ridden by a leather jacketed, well-studded and bearded land pirate.

Tom shouted that it had to stop, as she walked upstairs looking worn and well used in her harlequin shirt of yellow hearts and red stars. She had taken to sweeping her hair up into a bun, which seemed always in danger of crumbling but didn’t until now, when he slapped her.

He had caught her on the rebound from her dead father, though what two lovers didn’t meet in that way, if he thought about it. As an unregenerate specimen she was even more determined in her behaviour than he. Her fixed smile of half-open mouth was too disturbing to look at for more than a moment, so he slapped her harder this time, and she fought back with the violence of a demented cat.

Angela’s departure had been like a loving wartime sendoff compared to hers. A biker gang must have held an all day rave before helping to do the house over, and the professional firm called in to clean up the squalor charged five hundred pounds.

He wondered if he were choosing the wrong sort of woman, or whether the wrong sort of woman was singling him out for special treatment, and if so why? He had spoiled Debbie by keeping her in a style to which he now hoped she would never again have the possibility of becoming accustomed. Norman Bakewell said he shouldn’t have done it, while listening with set mouth and appreciative wide-awake eyes to the sad narrative of his troubles.

A year after being divorced from Debbie he met Diana at a hotel in Leeds. She had come down from a disastrous visit to Northumberland with Jo, and he was there to talk at a publishers’ conference. He asked her to eat at his table and, in a calm, adult and deliberate manner they fell in love again, she missing coffee and he his cigar in the scramble to get up to his room.

He couldn’t hold back from asking what had happened to Jo Hesborn, whispered the query into an ear never known to be of such a warmly beautiful and exquisite shape.

‘That’s all finished. Maybe she went back to her father, or maybe her mother, I don’t know, but I’ve come back to you.’

He stood behind, undoing her blouse while looking over her shoulder into the full length mirror, till she stood naked and half fainting with a sharp and unfamiliar lust as if from the first stirrings of puberty, turning so that they could kiss each other step by step towards the bed.

He couldn’t understand, didn’t care to, and in any case, wasn’t able to because they were fired beyond the limits of reason due to knowing so much about each other, a resurgence of all their previous intimacies fuelling them into a mutual delirium that reminded him of his first lubricious affair with an older woman at sixteen.

They had no option. This time it would be different, and forever — they decided, on marrying again. They went through days and nights of infatuated madness. Why did they leave each other before? She was the only woman for him. Tom was still the same man for her, whom she had been so intoxicated with at Charlotte’s lunch party. She would do anything for him, and he would do whatever his beloved wanted.

She gave up her job at the BBC so as to paint all the time at home, sculpt when she tired of painting. ‘All I want is to be in the house and make sure you’re taken care of,’ she said, ‘but I also need somewhere to paint.’ They sold the place in Holland Park and bought a manor house in Hertfordshire with a suitably spacious barn that could be made into a studio. It cost him an extra twenty K, but his love had never been so intense, genuine and satisfying, which made it easy to be generous.

On reflection — and it had to come sooner or later — he had ricochetted out of his disaster with Debbie, and Diana had ricochetted from the slime of her long affair with Jo Hesborn, and when two ricochets clash in interstellar space the rate of burnout as they fall in the direction of Planet Earth, though not phenomenal to the naked eye, certainly becomes fast when they reach the pull towards gravity. And where do the star-struck lovers hit the deck, except on the lush banks of the alligator playground?

Marrying her again was another worst fatal move he had ever made. The two year itch excoriated, sooner perhaps than could have been expected, but no less sure for that, and he wondered how and when the split would come.

Itch? St Vitus didn’t know he was born. Diana bored and harried him more than he could remember, the complications of their reunion making a Black Forest clock seem like Stonehenge. Why had he been such a fool as to give her a second chance, which she took as an opportunity to spill out all the unresolved grievances saved from the first time? Her muted way of tormenting him, honed by the mill of her abnormal existence with Jo, generated more pain than in their first, which even so had been unendurable.

She declared herself to be an artist, obviously a road which Jo had set her on, but he could make no sense of her splashy style, and hardly knew whether he liked it or not. On a wet Saturday afternoon, which he’d hoped they would spend in bed, she unveiled her latest vast painting in the barn and asked what he thought.

‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I like it. What colour! What composition! What do you call it?’

‘“Witch Doing Widdershins Under the Great Oak”. I thought you’d have more specific comments, though.’

‘Well, you could take that head out of the tree, and put it closer to the ground.’

‘You don’t know anything, do you? It’s not a head, it’s a ball of mistletoe.’

He looked closer, hoping to make some sense of the bullshit. ‘Ah, so it is. Sorry. I do like it, though. You’re very talented, darling.’

He wasn’t being serious, but she had to talk to somebody about her work. ‘In that case, why don’t you get me a commission from the firm to do a few book jackets?’

And get his head kicked in by Norman Bakewell? ‘The head of the art department likes to choose his own people. He’s very cantankerous, and I wouldn’t like to get rid of him, he’s so good.’

He tried to make up for this festering issue by arranging her first one man (Christ! Woman, you nit!) show. At the vernissage he heard a critic say how profoundly interesting her technique and subjects were, though that may have been due to the top class champagne and food, because even while harried by someone Tom had the capacity to act generously towards them.

Half the paintings and two pieces of sculpture were thumbed with little red sales tabs, and he noted with no resentment that the money went into her piggy-bank account. She would soon have enough saved not to starve when he kicked her out for the final final time.

But how to do it? There were several ways of telling your wife you were fundamentally unsuited to putting up with her volatile moods, cosmic doubts, and too frequent manic depressions, which at the best she assumed went with the artistic temperament, and at the worst blamed on you.

Riffling all possible options deadened the guilt which he felt too delicate and privileged to tolerate in middle age. If they had been living in the sixties he could have paid a rogue psychiatrist to put her in a halfway house and shoot her full of LSD, or to lay the blame on her parents and really drive her mad.

More mercifully, he could inform her that he wanted a divorce when she was miserably out of sorts, one more hurt that would be hardly noticeable — if hurt it turned out to be.

Perhaps better would be to say he wanted out when she was feeling so good that his decision couldn’t possibly be upsetting or, gallant and kind, he could soften her up with a couple of bottles of champagne over dinner, so that she would be too fuzzed to let his announcement worry her.

Another tactic was to persuade Denise, his girlfriend, to telephone and own up to their affair. No, he would lose her as well, because Diana could be very amiable with anybody but him, and he knew what might happen if she got into a confessional mood with another woman.

He straightened his back with a laugh of self congratulation, ingenuity at last coming up with the very it of everything, his gesture almost knocking the bottle off the table. To strike free of the marriage with the maximum drama and satisfaction he would arrange to be moving his clobber into the car while a dozen guests were arriving for a dinner party that Diana had planned for weeks and sweated hard to make a success. Everybody would expect him to greet them, smiling at Diana’s side, even her crumbly old folks from Sevenoaks. Tom however would pass each person as they came in with: ‘Hello, how are you? So glad to see you,’ but adding with contemptible brightness: ‘I’m not able to shake hands because we’ve just decided to split up, and I’m taking my stuff out of the house before she burns it.’

Norman Bakewell, wearing a Greek fisherman’s sweater and a sea captain’s hat, glass in one hand and a steaming cigar in the other, swayed over from the bar. ‘Why don’t you just clear off, clandestinely, as it were, and take a flat somewhere? Don’t contact her for a few weeks so that she’ll be worried to death about the housekeeping money. I did it once. Works wonders.’

Whatever Tom decided, he had been too long in the waters of the alligator playground to let Norman influence him anymore. ‘Oh, belt up, you cherry-headed old fart.’

‘Do it, though,’ Bakewell insisted. He wanted to understand peoples’ anguish, as a writer must, and see into the heart of everyone, especially when halfway through a chapter. All the same, he existed in a fog of comprehension, his barbed advice coming from concentrated pain, which he described in such language as he hoped would be amusing to read. ‘Put my finger on it, did I? A man is only thinking of one thing if he lingers so long over his grog.’

‘Why don’t you fall down,’ Tom said, ‘and leave me alone?’

‘I can’t. Won’t, rather. And you know why? It’s because I like to see a real live publisher suffer. Most of them I can’t, because they’re just a computer stuck in an airtight underground bunker, clicking and flicking in different coloured lights, and I’m no longer strong enough to lift a sledge hammer.’ He put down a lily-white hand to support himself at the table. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I let a fart tickle its way out, as even the Devil must.’

Tom decided to laugh rather than throw up. ‘Go home to your little wifey and wash the dishes. Then she’ll let you write me a novel, you old fraud.’

Barbara Whissendine at the next table was talking to Emmy Brites about her new novel, and Norman’s blast of wind brought a glare of disgust from both.

‘I wrote one last night,’ he said, ‘and burned it this morning. I’d got as far as the third draft, but it wasn’t wicked enough.’

Tom laughed. ‘Too kind to me, was it? Tell me, though, Norman, why are you such a dreadful old sinner?’

He finished drinking, and jelly-rolled his words. ‘Don’t know, old boy. Suppose it’s I want to come across God one day and see how someone does it who’s better at it than me.’

‘Got to go, anyhow.’ Tom didn’t want to strike a match for his cigarette in case he and his most profitable author blew up in a composite explosion that destroyed the club. He just hoped he would have the necessary sleight of hand to get his key in the car door.

‘Marriage is the best system yet devised that halfway works,’ Norman went on, as if he had been wound up and still had some distance to go. ‘It’s a factory for suffering, the only heavy industry left in the country after Thatcher. The alternative would be too frequent visits to St Onan’s Well. So don’t despair. Just remember that the first forty years are the worst.’

A shadow crossed. Thought it was a man, poor chap — or a cow from the field. Corned beef for breakfast. If a meal was waiting (make me laugh again) he would thumbs it down because the chops from lunch were still heavy in his stomach. The wash of booze in his system had fogged the difficulties of his drive, so he would relish an argument about that. On the other hand he dreaded it, but dread was the emotion that brought them on. Stamping on the brakes sent him into a fifty-mile skid along gravel into a flowerbed. She won’t like that, either. Planted them herself, playing Mummy in the garden.

The porch was illuminated by an automatic alarm system against predators, and Diana, stout and desirable under the floodlight, stood with a levelled twin-barrel twelve bore as if to confirm that he hadn’t exaggerated the extent of their marital difficulties.

He weaved towards her. ‘I’m Captain Skylight on the nightshift.’ She should be so lucky. ‘So go on, do me a favour.’

Was it loaded and primed? It was. She had found the keys to the filing cabinet where the shells were stored, but he was too head in the air from drink to be alarmed. If a woman couldn’t scare her husband with a gunful of death what love was left between them?

She took the cartridges out and put them in her smock pocket — His and Hers.

His gestures towards her were always abrupt, as if to intimidate and keep her on edge, but among other people he moved with ease and rhythm. In the beamed dining-kitchen he flipped a pair of free-range eggs from their slots in the fridge. Not hungry, but he needed her to feel guilty — or at least remiss — and jerked up the lid of the Aga. ‘A fry-up for you as well?’ Recalling the loaded firearm he added: ‘My love?’

If she didn’t say what was on her mind the words were wasted, and though on this occasion (as on most, these days) there was much to be said for saying as little as possible, she knew that if she didn’t hear the sound of her own voice she would be dead. ‘I’m not hungry.’

For two years he had been doing his best to drive her mad, while she had tried to make him sane and responsible. Could anyone get more cross-purposed than that? He had turned her into a mouse by tormenting her with the malice of a cat, knowing that to send someone loopy all you had to do was push them into a state they had never imagined living in.

The innards of the eggshells slopped onto the hotplate instead of into the pan, causing a necrophiliac stench. She regretted not having squeezed both triggers.

‘Sorry, darling.’ He hoped she would respond, with venom or without. Either would be soothing, any words preferable to silence but, when none seemed in the offing, he closed the lid.

Looking at her with a resentment he couldn’t seriously admit to feeling he ran across the hall and up the stairs, darting from side to side as if, should the malignant part of her stand like magic and point the gun from the landing, he would have a chance of avoiding the lethal spray.

Seconds after getting into the spare room he was launched down the slipway into an uneasy oblivion.

Malice was his hunchbacked playmate, and jingle bells his music. He had planned his theatrical set piece all the way back from town, but how much longer could she let the two of them curdle her life? To blame others signified something flawed in oneself, so it was time to pull the chocks clear and run.

She lit a cigarette and flicked on the kettle to coffee herself up for a couple of precious hours alone. No use trying to sleep. She had loved him from the moment they had crossed glances at Charlotte’s lunch party, but had never imagined that, of the two people he had become, the worst would one day stay in the ascendant. He was on top form as an unkillable romantic whose aim in life was to stifle all that was human in everyone else, and as the closest person to him as far as she knew, she was most in danger from the knives of his Scythian chariot.

The coffee was good in being bitter, and strong enough to keep her alert. Nothing could wake him, not even the television yackering away, two newsreaders mouthing instead of one because she had worried her way through three large whiskies waiting for him to come home, or waiting to hear from the police that he had spiralled the car and himself round a tree. How otherwise could she have been so insane as to load the gun, when she’d had no intention of turning it on herself?

You can work when I’m not here, he often said, but it was impossible because she didn’t know where he was when he wasn’t. His fanciful existence stopped her painting, which was why she’d been tempted to squeeze both triggers. Let someone else do him the favour. Maybe he craved it to avoid turning into an object of pity or hilarity when he took to groping young girls at bus stops in his old age.

He no longer tried to hide his affairs, the ultimate contempt of the bachelor-husband who lacked the finesse to do as he liked, and at the same time show he cared for whoever he lived with. He needed an absolute dictator to bring him to order, which would mean giving up all her waking and sleeping minutes, and becoming someone else entirely.

Soil and trees gave off a healthy smell, clean and refreshing in the drizzle. She crossed to the barn — he’d be dead for eight hours so wouldn’t hear the double doors squeak open. She backed in the big old Peugeot, and put down the midway division so as to load all that was hidden under a heap of canvases. He would enjoy the victory of waking up and finding her gone like a thief in the night, but she had come by day and would go by day, not shred the place while he was at the office, like that bitch Angela, or poor pathetic Debbie.

Back in the kitchen, she swallowed some pills to make sure of a few hours sleep.

Curtains rattled along the rail, lightening the room enough for her to set a tray by his bed. ‘Darling! It’s nine o’clock, and time to get up.’

She had checked everything: oranges freshly juiced, a pot of coffee just ground, the last two croissants warm from the bottom oven, a plate of wholemeal toast, home-made apricot jam from the Women’s Institute bazaar, and a block of his favourite Danish unsalted butter. All the way upstairs she had imagined crashing back down with the tray.

Of course he was suspicious. He was no fool. ‘I was horribly drunk last night. I don’t think my legs stopped till they reached Australia.’

Her laugh was familiar and friendly, so life was good. ‘I was rather sloshed as well, come to that.’

He looked all of his late forties, and gaunt while guzzling the juice at one go. ‘I hope we didn’t do or say anything too bad.’

He was always at his best when recovering from a frightful binge. ‘Not that I remember.’

‘That’s good, then.’ Crumbs of toast sprayed the duvet. ‘What day is it?’

‘Saturday,’ as he was well aware. His bile continually drip-fed towards another bout of spite. ‘We must do the provisioning this morning,’ she said. ‘We’ve eaten ourselves to the bone.’

The one human activity he allowed himself was an occasional call at the supermarket. ‘Keeps me in touch with reality,’ he smiled, ‘to see what the poor have to pay for food.’ He enjoyed doing something halfway companionable, such as pushing the trolley, choosing goodies to eat and, of course, eyeing the women shopping on their own. Dashing back for a few overlooked items she once saw him talking to one at the checkout, though he generally behaved while helping Mummy.

‘Ready in half an hour, then.’ He chopped a corner off the butter and laid it on the toast. ‘Is that all right?’

‘Yes, darling. See you downstairs.’

He had shaved, and looked his best in jeans, dark blue shirt and cowboy boots, lithe and fit as he walked to the Volvo. Better to leave a bastard, she supposed, than a grovelling wimp who whined every minute about how much he loved you. He sweated out his debaucheries twice a week at the gym, or played squash at the Lansdowne. ‘When I kick the bucket,’ he said, ‘I hope it’ll be sudden. That’s how I want it. A massive no nonsense cardiac arrest in the middle of nowhere, such as a wood, wearing a camouflage jacket so that no one will find me and rush me off to hospital for a quintuple bypass, and give me another six months of miserable life in a wheelchair.’

Whether he felt such an end in his guts, or was weaving another fantasy, she couldn’t care less. She agreed with the sentiments, but didn’t want to hang around for the big day, preferring to let someone else get kitted out in black.

Sitting beside her in the car, and fastening the safety belt with care, he wished he hadn’t talked about dying. Last night’s dreams, of serpentine horrors in blood-dripping caverns — not unusual after so much indulgence — swamped over him in spite of the delicious breakfast and Diana’s surprisingly good temper.

As the cow-speckled fields sleeved by he wondered for the first time in his life whether he ought to make a genuine effort to keep his marriage going, and grow up like she had often implored him to do. They knew each other so well it ought to be easy, and it would certainly be worthwhile. He remembered that after two or three watered whiskies at Christmas her pompous old daddy would maunder with moist eyes about the frugality of wartime living. Well, maybe he was right, and that by comparison she and Tom had everything to eat and drink they could want.

The house was a monument to ease and convenience, and they had two cars to trundle around in, so should be able to exist without the torment he continually hatched for his apparent amusement, and without all that she brewed up out of a mistaken idea that he didn’t love her. What was the use of being on earth if two people couldn’t make each other happy? ‘You drive, my sweet,’ he said, as if his thoughts had turned into reality, and their new life had already started.

He was enjoying her affection only by planning to steep her in misery when he found out it was a sham. Perhaps she was wrong, but his behaviour of the last months had reduced her to living his conclusions even before he rammed in the daggers.

He let her out at the automatic doors and went to top up at the filling station. She hummed a tune and pulled a trolley from the pack. Tom at the pumps felt top of the world enough to let a woman slot in before him. The black attendant smiled when he went to pay. Back at main base, he parked as near the exit as possible. Inside it was easy to pick Diana from the weekend crowds: ultra white shirt, black skirt, cropped hair. The beacon of compatibility beamed him onto her with no problem.

She had got beyond the veg section for the basics of spuds, and the silage of salad stuff, greens and fruit before he arrived. When the trolley was heaped almost full Tom rearranged it pathologically to order, though it still overflowed. ‘Go and get another from the entrance, darling.’

‘I’ve often wondered how many weeks we’d last in a siege,’ he said, ‘or a white-out, after one of these mammoth provisionings.’

‘More than most, I expect, with the freezer full.’

He manoeuvered both trolleys to the fish counter. ‘That’s what I like to think.’ He kissed her on the cheek as if, she thought, knowing what she intended doing, and hoping she wouldn’t. ‘I’d be glad if we got snowed up together this winter,’ he said, ‘with no possibility of me getting to the office. We’d have nothing to do but make love, eat our fill, and drink.’ He scampered forward. ‘Oh, let’s have some of these fat prawns. They look delicious.’

‘Be lovely, wouldn’t it?’ A seductive situation, to be snowed in, but she walked on, reaching for rice, farinacery, tins of beans and tomatoes. ‘Don’t make a list,’ he always said. ‘Just get everything.’ But she had come with two or three sheets in her small neat writing, leading as if at the head of a convoy and ticking items off through preserves and cereals, butters and yoghurts and creams, then on to cheeses and bacons, sardines and pickles, Tom following dutifully with both trolleys almost too laden to manage. ‘Station yourself here, love,’ she said, ‘while I go and get soap powders and bleach.’

He hardened his grip on both handlebars, and positioned himself at the top of an aisle by the cake and bread counter. Alone a few moments, though Diana was still quite close, he found it hard not to take pleasure in looking over the woman in a tight mauve skirt, and a red blouse buttoned over a bosom which moved sublimely (albeit subtly) as she reached up for two packets of brown rolls. He wondered whether they would fall in love and be happy if she were the last woman on earth. She caught his interest and smiled as he put back the fruit scones which Diana would say they didn’t need if only because he had chosen them.

She saw from a distance what they wouldn’t have to quarrel about anymore. Imagine finding her attractive, in such garish clothes. He had no colour sense at all. At parties his flirtations brought out stabs of rejection and jealousy, she envying the women, as well as him. She once lied that she was having an affair, hoping he would be stricken, but he smiled and wished her luck. Even a letter on the hall table, as if from a boyfriend, didn’t rile him, and only after three months did he taunt her with having read it.

Jinking through the crowd made her thighs ache, but she was soon several alleys away. A coagulation of trolleys at all checkouts blocked her escape, till she found one that was closed, and stepped over the chain.

Since he was still smiling and gesturing to the youngish woman, who was now holding a loaf, she wanted to go back and stay for as long as it took to torment him into the grave. On the other hand it wouldn’t be worthwhile if she had to be with him to make sure he got there.

The Volvo, easy to pick out by length and luggage rack, started up with the spare key, and she threaded a way to the road between cars still coming in.

Oh what a beautiful morning to be leaving the valley of salt. No more rain, she yanked the visor down to stop the dazzle on the five miles home. An aunt in Cornwall would give her a room while she found a cottage to rent. Winter was about to begin, with plenty of cheap places for the next six months, and then she would buy a house for herself. Today she’d do the three hundred miles, since tomorrow the inanity of shorter days began, and she didn’t relish the fatigue and peril of driving in the dark.

A future of living alone glowed like paradise, no longer listening to his sneers about her painting, which he had encouraged her to work at full time so as to take the pressure off himself, though he had always denied it. Tyres crunched gently into a layby, and she switched off the engine to lower her head to the wheel.

The scene of going back brought hot tears that were cold when they hit her wrist. Nobody deserved leaving more than Tom, and the picture of him searching the aisles would be one to smile about while getting used to living without the pall of his closeness. Not that the vision would do anything for her self-esteem if he was still so much in her thoughts.

She checked for money, passport and address book, fingers shaking through her satchel, the uncertainty another step towards strengthening of the will. He had given her a small photo in case she forgot to whom she was shackled and, pulling it from the wallet, her fingers couldn’t rip beyond four pieces. They skimmed satisfactorily out of the window, caught up by the wind, a large crow chasing in case they were food. Poor thing would choke.

A surge of energy drove her on, short-cutting along lanes where speed, and she used one of his favourite clichés, was of the essence.

No need to go into the wonderful house, the best she’d ever lived in. She set the Volvo by the barn, couldn’t say whether the phone was tinkling from the kitchen, or a bird family in the great elm was arguing about what to pack for the migration.

In minutes she was out of the gate and up the track in her faithful Peugeot paid for by money from her paintings, wipers dealing with a flush of rain, no tears anymore, not even a thumping heart, only a childish lightness of spirit that set her singing. If he came towards her in a taxi, ‘I’d ram the bastard,’ she shouted, winding down the window to see the way clear.

A cigarette tasted fine and was good for a meal. When he found the house empty he wouldn’t know which way she had gone, and even if guessing he would only sit with a bottle of booze waiting for her to come back. Nothing is forever, he had often said, but now it was. Hard to know why she hadn’t flitted months ago, but she had made up her mind in a dark mood when unable to put any life into one of her paintings, and had asked herself what was the point of being on earth and at the same time miserable. She’d never know, but could now ponder the matter without him distorting her reason.

Take time, drive well, don’t bump the verge — she forked by a pub towards the main road, the punch-button radio playing ‘The Dead March From Saul’. Gloomy music and she soon knew why. The newsreader said that the death had occurred of, due to. My God! A loss to the literary world because. Electricity pylons snaffled the reception. Had he gone into a despairing spin on finding that Mummy had left him without a bucket and spade? Luck was fickle. He hadn’t had time.

‘The death has occurred of Mr Norman Bakewell, the eminent novelist, who collapsed last night at his club, and died in hospital this morning.’

The titles of bestsellers were trotted out, and she pictured Tom, sombre and handsome in his black at the graveside, annoyed by the clayey soil on his shoes as he glanced around to see what writers he could poach into the place of slimy old Bakewell who, she now knew, had put a curse on them at Charlotte’s lunch party all those years ago.

FIVE

NEVER WITHOUT A credit card, Tom paid for his loaded trolleys and laughed at the idea of pushing them the whole way home. He parked them by the toilets, hoping they wouldn’t get looted while he went searching for Diana, and made a phone call to the house telling her to come and collect him or he would go on a berserker’s spin with a knife through her studio.

He got her prim voice on the ansaphone, and gave it a good talking to in case she picked it up in the next few minutes. He could only assume that, seeing him once too often trying to get acquainted with a personable woman, she had thrown a spectacular nervous breakdown and gone home to sulk, or to put more splashes on her trashy therapeutic paintings. All the same, he was nagged with distrust at this explanation, thinking that maybe the tension of treating him like a normal human being at breakfast had brought on a heart attack by the bleach and soap shelves, and she’d been stretchered away in an ambulance. But when he looked around there was no sign of piss or vomit, and business seemed normal.

The woman he’d chatted up laughed at his story of an au pair from Eastern Europe, whose morbid fit at seeing such masses of varied and marvellous goods had driven her from the supermarket. Once started, his tale spun on. In panic and despair she had driven off in the car he had taught her so patiently to drive. ‘I suppose she’ll turn up later, probably this evening when her suicidal misery has worn off. Meanwhile, she’s left me to get all these groceries home, so I’d better call a taxi.’

Tina said she would give him a lift. It wasn’t far out of her way.

‘That’s wonderfully kind.’ He smiled at the thought of landing once more with his bum in butter, as Norman Bakewell put it in one of his books. ‘My name’s Tom.’

If Diana was there to see him come home with his new friend it would serve her right, and certainly make him happy. It occurred to him that when he was married to a dark-haired woman his affairs were with blondes, and that when hitched to someone with fairish hair he went for lovely dark-haired women like Tina. ‘Are you sure, though?’

‘If I stow my lot in the boot, you can put yours on the back seats.’

‘What sort of a car do you have?’

‘It’s that BMW over there.’

Life was good, just when you felt a tremor that it might not be. Diana could go to hell, playing a trick like that. Tina joked about his predicament on the way back to the house, especially after he admitted, angling for more advantage out of the situation: ‘It’s my wife, really, who left me in the lurch. We’ve been on about splitting for months, and this is the way she chose to do it.’

‘I suspected it,’ Tina said. ‘My husband does that sort of thing a bit better, though, and it suits us both. He’s an aeronautical engineer, and he’s away most of the time in Saudi Arabia. He fixes up planes, and writes off as many as he can so that they’ll go on buying more from us.’

‘Very patriotic,’ Tom said.

She touched his wrist. ‘Isn’t it?’

Unloading the stuff, after noting that the Peugeot had gone, he called Tina into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, jet-grinding the beans to give her the best. He kept up an amusing spate of talk as if to show that any wife who abandoned someone of his quality could only be a wayward spoiler.

Saying goodbye, they clung to each other at the door like the positive ends of two magnets. The first kiss with a new woman was always the best ever. ‘Sure you can’t stay a while?’

‘I’d love to, but it’s not possible. Must get back and feed my two children. They’re home from boarding school this weekend.’

‘Pity.’

Her brown eyes sparkled. ‘They go back on Monday.’

‘Can I have your phone number?’

She wrote it on a bit of card from her wallet.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

‘Do.’

Another kiss, as well as one blown from the car window. He danced around the kitchen in expectation, so randy after pulling the lubricious encounter out of the future that he called for Diana, and realised she wasn’t there.

His spirit slumped further when the one o’clock news gave out that Norman Bakewell had been topped by the grim reaper. The way he lived should have set Tom waiting for it, but the evidence against Norman living forever — more or less — never had much weight. His death was also a bang to the system because, though sales of his books would be good for a while, they would drain out to zilch within a year, which made it the worst of news.

He spread an island of cornflakes over the table and shaped a narrow bay on the south side while thinking of Tina: ‘She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not,’ then stopped because he didn’t know whether he meant Tina or Diana.

At three o’clock he brushed uneaten cornflakes onto the floor with his sleeve and, crunching over them, walked out and into each room, downstairs and up, over to the barn and storehouses, truffling for indications as to why she had bolted and where she had gone. The beams of the long two-roomed lounge were a bit low for a rope, but he was too spongy in the brain to be serious, and by the time his curiosity had been swamped with the truth he wouldn’t care to hang himself. In any case, hanging could be a slow business. The shotgun might be quicker, but that was strictly for the rabbits. There had never been a clearer case for giving Norman a bell and talking about the matter, but the crazy piss artist had kicked the bucket.

If she had really gone — and maybe she had, not denying a flicker of relief at the thought — it was unforgivable that she hadn’t left him the consolation of a fiery anathema in red ink on the back of their marriage certificate. And yet, where could she go? Probably to that batty old aunt who lived in clotted cream and pasty land, and made shit-coloured pots. Maybe Diana expected him to go after her so as to give proof of his love. Fat chance of that, as well.

He stretched his long legs from an armchair, troubled to realise, at long last, that in personal relationships his mind wasn’t subtle or wary enough to detect in advance the schemes being laid for his downfall, while those he wove himself were useless because they were only for his amusement and never led to action.

The central heating was at full crack, but he shuddered in the chill gloom. He put on another sweater, hoping he wasn’t marked for the flu. The temperature seemed ten degrees lower with a single body in the house, but the thermometer read normal. He couldn’t understand why Diana’s absence made the house feel so different. How would he be able to work the washing machine, and figure out the time clock for the central heating system, not to mention the various burglar alarms?

Sleep was getting the better of him, as it never had during the day. To stay awake he dialled Denise. Her ansaphone came on, and he had no real message to leave. Saturday afternoon wasn’t their time, and whose it was he couldn’t know. Where was she, anyway? Was the world suddenly without women? He should have been more forceful with Tina and got her to stay, or at least to come back in the evening.

When he reached Denise on her mobile she sounded as if just back from a bout of tennis — or love.

‘Diana’s gone,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Gone where?’

‘Not to the bathroom, that’s for sure.’

‘To see a boyfriend, I should hope.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Oh well, if she comes to my place I’ll let you know. But thanks for telling me. She might try the same as one of your ex’s did to her.’

‘She’s not that sort, so relax.’

‘Even so, you’d better not show up at my flat.’

‘I know. I’ll hang on here, in case she comes back.’

He didn’t like her way of avoiding trouble: ‘Yes, that’s best.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Not up your way, if that’s what you mean.’

He hadn’t expected her to be any help, but why was it that the women he took up with, so compliant at first, soon became too hard to handle? He put the phone down and lay on his bed, the question putting him to sleep.

Waking, something had shifted and he didn’t know what. His chin was smooth but he felt in need of a shave. There was too much on his tectonic plate, though nothing around him seemed solid or real. Having a wife run out on you was one thing, but to be left high and dry in the middle of a supermarket with two trolleys of provisions was so original an idea as to be unforgivable. Of all the ways he had mulled on to leave her, his well-dug imagination had never thought of that, and the sense of gall was destabilising. Devilishly planned and done, it showed she wouldn’t come back, which made it futile to chew on the miseries he would put her through when she did.

All lights on, no curtains drawn, he set Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’ to play full blast on the Bang & Olufsen, performed by a block-and-tackle band from a bleak industrial ruin in the Black Country. Halfway through his second bottle of Bordeaux red, blue lights began revolving outside the window. Drink had never done that before. Closing his eyes and opening them didn’t get rid of the notion that someone had come for him from Mars, or even Jupiter. They had travelled all that way especially for him, an experience he could well do without.

The hall also was lit by flashing space stations. Or were they navigation aids? The doorbell was so loud it almost killed the music. Back for reassurance in the kitchen, he pulled up the lid of the Aga to check that it was hot, but the signalling continued, as if someone had wedged a matchstick in the bell and run away.

He remembered that every December he went into the local cop shop and put a tenner in the orphans’ box. Perhaps they had figured who he was through the two-way mirror, and noted the plate of his car as he drove away, and had come to say thank you. Or maybe a burglar was outlined on the roof and they wanted to save his collection of incunabula. Having unloaded a multiple-barrelled battering ram from the car, they now set to work on the main door.

‘Yes?’

‘It’d be best if we came in, sir.’

Unmannerly to make them stand in the drizzle, though the porch was dryish. On the other hand there were no neighbours to hear what they would take him away in irons for. He’d at least had the sense to get drunk enough not to worry about something like that.

What a fullsized wicked thing to do, though. Was there no end to her vengeance? She had called at Reading and phoned a rent-a-cop firm, giving her credit card number (no, his, to rub in the salt) and told these two costumed berks to put him through this pathetic practical joke. They must have served their time at RADA because they were so good at it.

He recalled a colleague at work being sent a policewoman. She had gone into his office with a clipboard as if to reprimand him for all the parking fines he’d flipped into the gutter, then started to get her kit off, a lovely full breasted young woman, who kissed him on the mouth and wished him a happy birthday, to Force Nine laughter from friends outside.

‘Quarrelled, did you?’ was the first question registered out of the confusion.

Neither would sit, and Tom stood so as to be on the same level. Say as little as possible when the cops start talking to you. ‘We always do, there’s nothing unusual in that.’

‘Did you note the time when she left?’

‘I’ll need to call my lawyer.’

‘I’m sorry to say it’s nothing like that.’

She had sprung something big on him here, by forcing him to tell the whole sorry yarn, the deadliest mantrap on the shelf, except it seemed she had driven into it herself. Or so they said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this.’

Killed by an old age pensioner. Well, he was sixty-five, the ancient fart. He was driving the wrong way down the M4, in a hurry to meet his Maker, and not too worried who he took with him, except that: ‘Oh, he’s not dead. Not a scratch. Got out and walked away. Ran down a bank when our car got close. God knows where he thought he was going.’

The other laughed himself purple. ‘He walked away from two write-offs! Would you believe it?’

‘You’ll have to come and identify her, sir.’

He didn’t want them to see his legs shaking, and sat down. ‘I can’t believe this. I’m not alive.’

They performed this social service all day and every day, probably their only duty, with so many sudden calamities. A smile like mag-gots under the skin was close to their professional concern, which led him to wonder again whether they were dropouts from RADA, or old lags who’d been to acting classes given in jail by a super-annuated thespian. Why hadn’t she sent him a busty young policewoman instead? Well, she wouldn’t have done that, would she? The ginger-bearded copper gave him a poor sod look. ‘Do you think you’re going to want some counselling?’

It had to be your birthday to get a policewoman. ‘Counselling? Certainly not.’

Tom liked the edge of contempt in his voice at such a need. ‘Just thought I’d ask.’

‘Most do, these days,’ the other said sadly. ‘But I would keep off the bottle, sir. There’s lots to do.’

A hangover had never gone so quickly, though the full drill of his willpower was called on to stop the shakes. Poor old Bakewell had missed this, just. He rubbed his face, but the picture of metal and gore remained, a way out he had never wanted or thought about. All his malice had been in the mind, and he had never considered this as a possible end to any of his marriages.

The sun at the funeral was weak but welcome. People stood in groups, and you had to know which you belonged to in case you got nudged in with the coffin. Diana’s parents, who had always regarded him as wicked and unfeeling, stayed well clear. Only Jo Hesborn came to him. ‘Of all the people from the past, I loved her the most.’

Bakewell would have struck that line out, but Tom felt like Blondin going on his high wire over Niagara Falls, and held Jo’s hot dry hand in his to steady himself. ‘I could say the same.’

Her handkerchief was wet, tears falling through onto her leather three-quarter length coat. ‘She was marvellous. We had such good times together.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ll never forget her. It’s too bad.’

‘How do you suppose I feel?’

‘I can imagine, believe you me.’

He couldn’t think why he experienced such a rich fondness for this near forty-year-old lesbian by his side. No wine glass close for her to hurl at him, he would kiss her even if only to enrage the others. His lips at hers, staying too long for seemliness, but to which hers with suddenly more shape in them responded, sent a wave of the purest erotic feeling through him. He felt momentarily shamed and threatened, as if Diana had entered sufficiently for him to act in this way, but the emotion was erased by happiness when Jo held his hand again on their way to the car.

After the wake, when everyone had gone but Jo, their farewell kisses turned into an embrace, passion increasing as mutual tears wetted both shirts. Words were ripped from him. ‘I love you, darling, I love you.’ Then he thought: but I don’t, I don’t. Then: I do, I do, so what the hell? Could be I’m doing something right for a change.

What burned in him came, he was sure by now, from the familiarities with Diana that flowed in them both. For Jo it was a weird log-blazing fire she had never known with a woman. Well, it was different, anyway, telling her amazed self that such fervour couldn’t possibly mean anything with someone like Tom, and a man, too, though she cried out, smiling with head back and eyes full of tears: ‘You’re lovely, it’s wonderful!’

Comforting one another in their agony of grief, unable to separate because of it, they kissed their way upstairs to the spare bedroom, neither having much say in the matter, awed but happy at the responsibility they hardly recognised.

Jo also wondered whether it would have been the same if they hadn’t both been intimate with Diana. She hoped not, though in another way didn’t. She tried to make out what Diana would think, if she was anywhere where she could think at all. It really didn’t bear consideration, since the attraction between her and Tom was too mysterious to fathom. Questions would come later, she told herself during her first days at the house, but foreseeing they might be too hard to answer, thought she would ignore them when they did.

She must have got pregnant on the night of the funeral. Lust was insidious and sly, though she supposed that if you put a philanderer like Tom in bed with a hamster there’d be a lot of little ones scampering around in the morning. Laughing and crying at the same time, she felt like a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who knew knock-all, the Pill something she’d never had to think about.

‘We’ll order in ten minutes,’ Tom said to the waiter, stroking Jo’s hand across the table and filling their glasses with the other. Angela’s pregnancy had ended in disaster, and Debbie, thank God, had taken precautions because she hadn’t trusted him to behave like a sensible grown-up, while Diana had been so long on the Pill before they met that she was afraid to come off it in case of side effects, and didn’t want to have a kid because it would rob her of time painting her marvellous pictures.

‘You can always have a DNA test after it’s born,’ Jo laughed, in case his joyful astonishment was a show of mistrust. ‘Can’t be anybody else’s, though, let me tell you. I was a virgin.’ His jump rattled knives and forks. ‘A what?’ ‘I’ve been a lesbian since before I started my periods.’ Had he been waiting all his life for this? No, it was too kooky. ‘I’m absolutely delighted.’

His jump rattled knives and forks. ‘A what?’

‘I’ve been a lesbian since before Istarted my periods.’

Had he been waiting all his life for this? No, it was too kooky. ‘I’m absolutely delighted.’

‘Yes, I can see you are.’ She took off her tie, leaned across the table and kissed him on the lips, to the arch look of a passing plate-girl who took them, he supposed, for father and daughter. ‘You look really chuffed.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am.’

‘Me, too.’

He never thought he would live long enough to see Jo Hesborn blush. ‘Let’s drink to it, then.’

She was slenderly pregnant, with an elegant belly, and didn’t leave her job till six months gone. One Saturday afternoon she drove her battery of modems and Internet technology in a hired truck from the flat in St John’s Wood to Tom’s place.

She jumped from the cab. ‘I can do most of my work in the top room,’ then unlatched the doors to get things out.

He set his coffee mug on the garden table. ‘Don’t! Let me do it.’

She had heard it said that every country got the ruler it deserved (or some such thing) and surmised that every man ended up with the woman he deserved, sooner or later, the same obviously for a woman. So she surrendered to the extent of taking the wires and plugs, and then laughed at him heaving the heavy stuff upstairs into her new office like any removal man.

After supper she lay on the couch scanning the latest issue of Net User magazine. ‘We should have got together years ago.’

‘I know, darling.’ Maybe they hadn’t because of her hurling that glass at Norman, while she wondered if it hadn’t been his fault for taking Diana away from her at Charlotte’s party. ‘I can only suppose,’ he said, ‘that there’s a time for everything.’

Three-month-old Diana frothed and gurgled as if fully supporting the idea of her parents being married. ‘We’re spoiling her rotten by doing this,’ Jo said.

Tom stood portly and upright in suit and tie, and had only half a smile on his lined face. The small gold ring in his left ear glittered, and a short ponytail was neatly tied. He had lived ten years in one, and what was previously thought of as love hadn’t been close to this by a million light years, since it had never included the potent ingredient of understanding. As unregenerate as ever, he even so liked to foresee a treaty by which he and Jo could live in mutual tolerance, she to take over the girlfriends he discarded, and he to comfort the rejects from her. What firmer union could there be than that?

Jo acceded to all the creepy notions of the marriage book, and so did Tom, but then he would, wouldn’t he? During the ceremony she held up her left foot and moved it in a circle. She turned her head from side to side half a dozen times. She swayed backwards and forwards with a goitrous smile. The registrar broke off to ask if she was feeling all right.

‘Just,’ she said. Tom hoped she’d stop larking around, but she jigged a little more to make her point, only wanting to get the farce over with. Such fatuous platitudes about love and obedience were meaningless, since she and Tom would stay together because of Diana, and that was that.

Tom was so besotted with his newborn daughter that even if his fantasy of an exchange deal with lovers never came about he would be satisfied with this one area of happiness. He and Jo seemed so mated that getting married for the last time for him and the first time for her had been the obvious step.

His drinking and driving days were finished, and after the wedding he went with Charlotte and Henry by taxi to the Park Lane Hotel. Jo followed with Emmy Brites the novelist, and Barbara Whissen-dine her agent. The six made up a table for lunch, Tom at one end and Jo at the other.

Henry, looking up from his brandy, ineptly quoted the remark of Doctor Johnson’s that, ‘A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, and married immediately after his wife died, showed a triumph of hope over expectation.’

Tom reflected during the watery silence that he couldn’t recall Henry ever having talked before, and if he had it had only been to ask Charlotte if he could, and she’d said no, unless he’d asked for the salt, which he got grudgingly because she’d read it was bad for the heart. Henry muttered something about being sorry, the soft brown glow of rebellion in his eyes dimming as he reached for his milky coffee.

Nothing could trample Tom’s jubilant mood; he had always known that silence meant unhappiness. ‘It might do you some good, Henry, if you started to live, by having another crack at wedlock, for instance.’

Charlotte smoothed her Mao-blue gymslip. ‘That was uncalled for.’

‘I know,’ Tom smiled, ‘but a little working-class fecklessness now and again can’t be bad.’

‘Pack it in.’ Jo knew that for a marriage feast to end in a fusillade of bottles wasn’t unusual, so wanted the gathering to be friendly. ‘Johnson’s sexist quip was like something that windbag Norman Bakewell used to belch up out of his sour stomach.’

Emmy Brites also spoke little, but her cornflower blue eyes and pink shell-like ears recorded every nuance and comment of the occasion. Tom’s notable coup had been to get her into his Augean stable, on the assumption that she would become more popular — and perhaps more deadly — than Norman Bakewell. Her pretty lips had taken in nothing but fizzy water to drink during the meal. ‘He wasn’t a bad novelist,’ she said.

Tom watched his cigar smoke drift across the table as after the last cannon shot at Waterloo. It was as well that Norman had popped his clogs, and wasn’t here to witness the conclusion of a story which he had followed with the pertinacity of an entomologist. To come in at such a time would have fused his whole being. The notion of any situation having a conventional end, especially among those who were so far under his creative thumb as to be regarded as his friends, would have brought out all his cantankerous self-indulgence, and reduced their wedding feast to a shambles. Tom wondered what publisher would have been able to afford the advance of the novel he made out of that. Instead, having done them the favour of dying, he had pulled the plug from the waters of the alligator playground, leaving them high, dry, and blinking their eyelids at the prospect of living on dry land.

Drinking a toast to him was the least they could do, Tom thought, standing to raise his glass.