Collected Stories

The Dogs

Overnight it had been raining but to one side of the precipitous stone steps there was a rail to grip on to. With her free hand she took her son’s wrist, dragging him back when he lost his footing. It was too perilous for her to pick him up, and at five years old he was too heavy to be carried far.

Branches heavy with sticky leaves trailed across the steps, sometimes blocking their way so they had to climb over or under them. The steps themselves twisted and turned and were worn and often broken. There were more of them than she’d expected. She had never been this way, but had been told it was the only path, and that the man would be waiting for her on the other side of the area.

When they reached the bottom of the steps, her son’s mood improved, and he called ‘Chase me’. This was his favourite game and he set off quickly across the grass, which alarmed her, though she didn’t want to scare him with her fears. She pursued him through the narrow wooded area ahead, losing him for a moment. She had to call out for him several times until at last she heard his reply.

Their feet kept sinking into the lush ground but a discernible track emerged. Soon they were in the open. It was a Common rather than a park and would take about forty minutes to cross: that was what she had been told.

Though it was a long way off, only a dot in the distance, she noticed the dog right away. Almost immediately the animal seemed bigger, a short-legged compact bullet. She knew all dogs were of different breeds, Dalmatians and chihuahuas and so on, but she had never retained the names. As the dog neared her son she wondered if it wasn’t chasing a ball hidden in the grass. But there was no ball that she could see, and the little speeding dog with its studded collar had appeared from nowhere, sprinting across the horizon like a shadow, before turning in their direction. There was no owner in sight; there were no other humans she could see.

The boy saw the dog and stopped, tracking it with curiosity and then with horror. What could his mother do but cry out and begin to run? The dog had already knocked her son down and began not so much to bite him as to eat him, furiously.

She was wearing heavy, loosely laced shoes and was able to give the dog a wild blow in the side, enough to distract it, so that it looked bemused. She pulled the boy to her, but it was impossible for her to examine his wounds because she then had to hold him as high as she could while stumbling along, with the dog still beside her, barking, leaping and twisting in the air. She could not understand why she had no fascination for the dog.

She began to shout, to scream, panicking because she wouldn’t be able to carry her son far. Tiring, she stopped and kicked out at the dog again, this time hitting him in the mouth, which made him lose hope.

Immediately a big long-haired dog was moving in the bushes further away, racing towards them. As it took off to attack the child she was aware, around her, of numerous other dogs, in various colours and sizes, streaming out of the undergrowth from all directions. Who had called them? Why were they there?

She lost her footing, she was pushed over and lay huddled on the ground, trying to cover her son, as the animals noisily set upon her, in a ring. To get him they would have to tear through her but it wouldn’t take long, there were so many of them, and they were hungry too.

Long Ago Yesterday

One evening just after my fiftieth birthday, I pushed against the door of a pub not far from my childhood home. My father, on the way back from his office in London, was inside, standing at the bar. He didn’t recognise me but I was delighted, almost ecstatic, to see the old man again, particularly as he’d been dead for ten years, and my mother for five.

‘Good evening,’ I said, standing next to him. ‘Nice to see you.’

‘Good evening,’ he replied.

‘This place never changes,’ I said.

‘We like it this way,’ he said.

I ordered a drink; I needed one.

I noticed the date on a discarded newspaper and calculated that Dad was just a little older than me, nearly fifty-one. We were as close to being equals — or contemporaries — as we’d ever be.

He was talking to a man sitting on a stool next to him, and the barmaid was laughing extravagantly with them both. I knew Dad better than anyone, or thought I did, and I was tempted to embrace him or at least kiss his hands, as I used to. I refrained, but watched him looking comfortable at the bar beside the man I now realised was the father of a schoolfriend of mine. Neither of them seemed to mind when I joined in.

Like a lot of people, I have some of my best friendships with the dead. I dream frequently about both of my parents and the house where I grew up, undistinguished though it was. Of course, I never imagined that Dad and I might meet up like this, for a conversation.

Lately I had been feeling unusually foreign to myself. My fiftieth hit me like a tragedy, with a sense of wasted purpose and many wrong moves made. I could hardly complain: I was a theatre and film producer, with houses in London, New York and Brazil. But complain I did. I had become keenly aware of various mental problems that enervated but did not ruin me.

I ran into Dad on a Monday. Over the weekend I’d been staying with some friends in the country who had a fine house and pretty acquaintances, good paintings to look at and an excellent cook. The Iraq war, which had just started, had been on TV continuously. About twenty of us, old and young men, lay on deep sofas drinking champagne and giggling until the prospect of thousands of bombs smashing into donkey carts, human flesh and primitive shacks had depressed everyone in the house. We were aware that disgust was general in the country and that Tony Blair, once our hope after years in opposition, had become the most tarnished and loathed leader since Anthony Eden. We were living in a time of lies, deceit and alienation. This was heavy, and our lives seemed uncomfortably trivial in comparison.

Just after lunch, I had left my friends’ house, and the taxi had got me as far as the railway station when I realised I’d left behind a bent paper clip I’d been fiddling with. It was in my friends’ library, where I’d been reading about mesmerism in the work of Maupassant, as well as Dickens’s experiments with hypnotism, which had got him into a lot of trouble with the wife of a friend. The taxi took me back, and I hurried into the room to retrieve the paper clip, but the cleaner had just finished. Did I want to examine the contents of the vacuum? my hosts asked. They were making faces at one another. Yet I had begun to see myself as heroic in terms of what I’d achieved in spite of my obsessions. This was a line my therapist used. Luckily, I would be seeing the good doctor the next day.

Despite my devastation over the paper clip, I returned to the station and got on the train. I had come down by car, so it was only now I realised that the route of the train meant we would stop at the suburban railway station nearest to my childhood home. As we drew into the platform I found myself straining to see things I recognised, even familiar faces, though I had left the area some thirty years before. But it was raining hard and almost impossible to make anything out. Then, just as the train was about to pull away, I grabbed my bag and got off, walking out into the street with no idea what I would do.

Near the station there had been a small record shop, a bookshop and a place to buy jeans, along with several pubs that I’d been taken to as a young man by a local bedsit aesthete, the first person I came out to. Of course, he knew straight away. His hero was Jean Cocteau. We’d discuss French literature and Wilde and Pop, before taking our speed pills and applying our make-up in the station toilet, and getting the train into the city. Along with another white friend who dressed as Jimi Hendrix, we saw all the plays and shows. Eventually I got a job in a West End box office. This led to work as a stagehand, usher, dresser — even a director — before I found my ‘vocation’ as a producer.

*

Now I asked my father his name and what he did. I knew how to work Dad, of course. Soon he was more interested in me than in the other man. Yet my fear didn’t diminish: didn’t we look similar? I wasn’t sure. My clothes, as well as my sparkly new teeth, were more expensive than his, and I was heavier and taller, about a third bigger all over — I have always worked out. But my hair was going gray; I don’t dye it. Dad’s hair was still mostly black.

An accountant all his life, my father had worked in the same office for fifteen years. He was telling me that he had two sons: Dennis, who was in the Air Force, and me — Billy. A few months ago I’d gone away to university, where, apparently, I was doing well. My all-female production of Waiting for Godot — ‘a bloody depressing play’, according to Dad — had been admired. I wanted to say, ‘But I didn’t direct it, Dad, I only produced it.’

I had introduced myself to Dad as Peter, the name I sometimes adopted, along with quite a developed alternative character, during anonymous sexual encounters. Not that I needed a persona: Father would ask me where I was from and what I did, but whenever I began to answer he’d interrupt with a stream of advice and opinions.

My father said he wanted to sit down because his sciatica was playing up, and I joined him at a table. Eying the barmaid, Dad said, ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Lovely hair,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, none of her clothes fit.’

‘Who’s interested in her clothes?’

This was an aspect of my father I’d never seen; perhaps it was a departure for him. I’d never known him to go to the pub after work; he came straight home. And once Dennis had left I was able to secure Father’s evenings for myself. Every day I’d wait for him at the bus stop, ready to take his briefcase. In the house I’d make him a cup of tea while he changed.

Now the barmaid came over to remove our glasses and empty the ashtrays. As she leaned across the table, Dad put his hand behind her knee and slid it all the way up her skirt to her arse, which he caressed, squeezed and held until she reeled away and stared at him in disbelief, shouting that she hated the pub and the men in it, and would he get out before she called the landlord and he flung him out personally?

The landlord did indeed rush over. He snatched away Dad’s glass, raising his fist as Dad hurried to the door, forgetting his briefcase. I’d never known Dad to go to work without his briefcase, and I’d never known him to leave it anywhere. As my brother and I used to say, his attaché case was always attached to him.

Outside, where Dad was brushing himself down, I handed it back to him.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. But once, just once, I had to. Suppose it’s the last time I touch anyone!’ He asked, ‘Which way are you going?’

‘I’ll walk with you a bit,’ I said. ‘My bag isn’t heavy. I’m passing through. I need to get a train into London but there’s no hurry.’

He said, ‘Why don’t you come and have a drink at my house?’

My parents lived according to a strict regime, mathematical in its exactitude. Why, now, was he inviting a stranger to his house? I had always been his only friend; our involvement had kept us both busy.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Come.’

*

Noise and night and rain streaming everywhere: you couldn’t see farther than your hand. But we both knew the way, Dad moving slowly, his mouth hanging open to catch more air. He seemed happy enough, perhaps with what he’d done in the pub, or maybe my company cheered him up.

Yet when we turned the corner into the neat familiar road, a road that had, to my surprise, remained exactly where it was all the time I hadn’t been there, I felt wrapped in coldness. In my recent dreams — fading as they were like frescoes in the light — the suburban street had been darkly dismal under the yellow shadows of the streetlights, and filled with white flowers and a suffocating, deathly odor, like being buried in roses. But how could I falter now? Once inside the house, Dad threw open the door to the living room. I blinked; there she was, Mother, knitting in her huge chair with her feet up, an open box of chocolates on the small table beside her, her fingers rustling for treasure in the crinkly paper.

Dad left me while he changed into his pyjamas and dressing gown. The fact that he had a visitor, a stranger, didn’t deter him from his routine, outside of which there were no maps.

I stood in my usual position, just behind Mother’s chair. Here, where I wouldn’t impede her enjoyment with noise, complaints or the sight of my face, I explained that Dad and I had met in the pub and he’d invited me back for a drink.

Mother said, ‘I don’t think we’ve got any drink, unless there’s something left over from last Christmas. Drink doesn’t go bad, does it?’

‘It doesn’t go bad.’

‘Now shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m watching this. D’you watch the soaps?’

‘Not much.’

Maybe the ominous whiteness of my dreams had been stimulated by the whiteness of the things Mother had been knitting and crocheting — headrests, gloves, cushion covers; there wasn’t a piece of furniture in the house without a knitted thing on it. Even as a grown man, I couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without thinking I should be wearing Mother’s.

In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea for myself and Dad. Mum had left my father’s dinner in the oven: sausages, mash and peas, all dry as lime by now, and presented on a large cracked plate with space between each item. Mum had asked me if I wanted anything, but how would I have been able to eat anything here?

As I waited for the kettle to boil, I washed up the dishes at the sink overlooking the garden. Then I carried Father’s tea and dinner into his study, formerly the family dining room. With one hand I made a gap for the plate at the table, which was piled high with library books.

After I’d finished my homework, Dad always liked me to go through the radio schedules, marking programmes I might record for him. If I was lucky, he would read to me, or talk about the lives of the artists he was absorbed with — these were his companions. Their lives were exemplary, but only a fool would try to emulate them. Meanwhile I would slip my hand inside his pyjama top and tickle his back, or I’d scratch his head or rub his arms until his eyes rolled in appreciation.

Now in his bedwear, sitting down to eat, Dad told me he was embarked on a ‘five-year reading plan’. He was working on War and Peace. Next it would be Remembrance of Things Past, then Middlemarch, all of Dickens, Homer, Chaucer, and so on. He kept a separate notebook for each author he read.

‘This methodical way,’ he pointed out, ‘you get to know everything in literature. You will never run out of interest, of course, because then there is music, painting, in fact the whole of human history —’

His talk reminded me of the time I won the school essay prize for a tract on time-wasting. The piece was not about how to fritter away one’s time profitlessly, which might have made it a useful and lively work, but about how much can be achieved by filling every moment with activity! Dad was my ideal. He would read even in the bath, and as he reclined there my job was to wash his feet, back and hair with soap and a flannel. When he was done, I’d be waiting with a warm, open towel.

I interrupted him, ‘You certainly wanted to know that woman this evening.’

‘What? How quiet it is! Shall we hear some music?’

He was right. Neither the city nor the country was quiet like the suburbs, the silence of people holding their breath.

Dad was holding up a record he had borrowed from the library. ‘You will know this, but not well enough, I guarantee you.’

Beethoven’s Fifth was an odd choice of background music, but how could I sneer? Without his enthusiasm, my life would never have been filled with music. Mother had been a church pianist, and she’d taken us to the ballet, usually The Nutcracker, or the Bolshoi when they visited London. Mum and Dad sometimes went ballroom dancing; I loved it when they dressed up. Out of such minute inspirations I have found meaning sufficient for a life.

Dad said, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to go in that pub again?’

‘If you apologise.’

‘Better leave it a few weeks. I don’t know what overcame me. That woman’s not a Jewess, is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Usually she’s happy to hear about my aches and pains, and who else is, at our age?’

‘Where d’you ache?’

‘It’s the walk to and from the station — sometimes I just can’t make it. I have to stop and lean against something.’

I said, ‘I’ve been learning massage.’

‘Ah.’ He put his feet in my lap. I squeezed his feet, ankles, and calves; he wasn’t looking at me now. He said, ‘Your hands are strong. You’re not a plumber, are you?’

‘I’ve told you what I do. I have the theatre, and now I’m helping to set up a teaching foundation, a studio for the young.’

He whispered, ‘Are you homosexual?’

‘I am, yes. Never seen a cock I didn’t like. You?’

‘Queer? It would have shown up by now, wouldn’t it? But I’ve never done much about my female interests.’

‘You’ve never been unfaithful?’

‘I’ve always liked women.’

I asked, ‘Do they like you?’

‘The local secretaries are friendly. Not that you can do anything. I can’t afford a “professional”.’

‘How often do you go to the pub?’

‘I’ve started popping in after work. My Billy has gone.’

‘For good?’

‘After university he’ll come running back to me, I can assure you of that. Around this time of night I’d always be talking to him. There’s a lot you can put in a kid, without his knowing it. My wife doesn’t have a word to say to me. She doesn’t like to do anything for me, either.’

‘Sexually?’

‘She might look large to you, but in the flesh she is even larger, and she crushes me like a gnat in bed. I can honestly say we haven’t had it off for eighteen years.’

‘Since Billy was born?’

He said, letting me caress him, ‘She never had much enthusiasm for it. Now she is indifferent … frozen … almost dead.’

I said, ‘People are more scared of their own passion than of anything else. But it’s a grim deprivation she’s made you endure.’

He nodded. ‘You dirty homos have a good time, I bet, looking at one another in toilets and that …’

‘People like to think so. But I’ve lived alone for five years.’

He said, ‘I am hoping she will die before me, then I might have a chance … We ordinary types carry on in these hateful situations for the single reason of the children and you’ll never have that.’

‘You’re right.’

He indicated photographs of me and my brother. ‘Without those babies, there is nothing for me. It is ridiculous to try to live for yourself alone.’

‘Don’t I know it? Unless one can find others to live for.’

‘I hope you do!’ he said. ‘But it can never be the same as your own.’

If the mortification of fidelity imperils love, there’s always the consolation of children. I had been Dad’s girl, his servant, his worshipper; my faith had kept him alive. It was a cult of personality he had set up, with my brother and me as his mirrors.

Now Mother opened the door — not so wide that she could see us, or us her — and announced that she was going to bed.

‘Good night,’ I called.

Dad was right about kids. But what could I do about it? I had bought an old factory at my own expense and had converted it into a theatre studio, a place where young people could work with established artists. I spent so much time in this building that I had moved my office there. It was where I would head when I left here, to sit in the café, seeing who would turn up and what they wanted from me, if anything. I was gradually divesting myself, as I aged, of all I’d accumulated. One of Father’s favourite works was Tolstoy’s ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’

I said, ‘With or without children, you are still a man. There are things you want that children cannot provide.’

He said, ‘We all, in this street, are devoted to hobbies.’

‘The women, too?’

‘They sew, or whatever. There’s never an idle moment. My son has written a beautiful essay on the use of time.’

He sipped his tea; the Beethoven, which was on repeat, boomed away. He seemed content to let me work on his legs. Since he didn’t want me to stop, I asked him to lie on the floor. With characteristic eagerness, he removed his dressing gown and then his pyjama top; I massaged every part of him, murmuring ‘Dad, Dad’ under my breath. When at last he stood up, I was ready with his warm dressing gown, which I had placed on the radiator.

*

It was late, but not too late to leave. It was never too late to leave the suburbs, but Dad invited me to stay. I agreed, though it hadn’t occurred to me that he would suggest I sleep in my old room, in my bed.

He accompanied me upstairs and in I went, stepping over record sleeves, magazines, clothes, books. My piano I was most glad to see. I can still play a little, but my passion was writing the songs that were scrawled in notebooks on top of the piano. Not that I would be able to look at them. When I began to work in the theatre, I didn’t show my songs to anyone, and eventually I came to believe they were a waste of time.

Standing there shivering, I had to tell myself the truth: my secret wasn’t that I hadn’t propagated but that I’d wanted to be an artist, not just a producer. If I chose, I could blame my parents for this: they had seen themselves as spectators, in the background of life. But I was the one who’d lacked the guts — to fail, to succeed, to engage with the whole undignified, insane attempt at originality. I had only ever been a handmaiden, first to Dad and then to others — the artists I’d supported — and how could I have imagined that that would be sufficient?

My bed was narrow. Through the thin wall, I could hear my father snoring; I knew whenever he turned over in bed. It was true that I had never heard them making love. Somehow, between them, they had transformed the notion of physical love into a ridiculous idea. Why would people want to do something so awkward with their limbs?

I couldn’t hear Mother. She didn’t snore, but she could sigh for England. I got up and went to the top of the stairs. By the kitchen light I could see her in her dressing gown, stockings around her ankles, trudging along the hall and into each room, wringing her hands as she went, muttering back to the ghosts clamouring within her skull.

She stood still to scratch and tear at her exploded arms. During the day, she kept them covered because of her ‘eczema’. Now I watched while flakes of skin fell onto the carpet, as though she were converting herself into dust. She dispersed the shreds of her body with her delicately pointed dancer’s foot.

As a child — even as a young man — I would never have approached Mother in this state. She had always made it clear that the uproar and demands of two boys were too much for her. Naturally, she couldn’t wish for us to die, so she died herself, inside.

One time, my therapist asked whether Dad and I were able to be silent together. More relevant, I should have said, was whether Mother and I could be together without my chattering on about whatever occurred to me, in order to distract her from herself. Now I made up my mind and walked down the stairs, watching her all the while. She was like difficult music, and you wouldn’t want to get too close. But, as with such music, I wouldn’t advise trying to make it out — you have to sit with it, wait for it to address you.

I was standing beside her, and with her head down she looked at me sideways.

‘I’ll make you some tea,’ I said, and she even nodded.

Before, during one of her late-night wanderings, she had found me masturbating in front of some late-night TV programme. It must have been some boy group, or Bowie. ‘I know what you are,’ she said. She was not disapproving. She was just a lost ally.

I made a cup of lemon tea and gave it to her. As she stood sipping it, I took up a position beside her, my head bent also, attempting to see — as she appeared to vibrate with inner electricity — what she saw and felt. It was clear that there was no chance of my ever being able to cure her. I could only become less afraid of her madness.

In his bed, Father was still snoring. He wouldn’t have liked me to be with her. He had taken her sons for himself, charmed them away, and he wasn’t a sharer.

She was almost through with the tea and getting impatient. Wandering, muttering, scratching: she had important work to do and time was passing. I couldn’t detain her any more.

I slept in her chair in the front room.

When I got up, my parents were having breakfast. My father was back in his suit and my mother was in the uniform she wore to work in the supermarket. I dressed rapidly in order to join Dad as he walked to the station. It had stopped raining.

I asked him about his day, but couldn’t stop thinking about mine. I was living, as my therapist enjoyed reminding me, under the aegis of the clock. I wanted to go to the studio and talk; I wanted to eat well and make love well, go to a show and then dance, and make love again. I could not be the same as them.

At the station in London, Father and I parted. I said I’d always look out for him when I was in the area, but couldn’t be sure when I’d be coming his way again.

Weddings and Beheadings

I have gathered the equipment together and now I am waiting for them to arrive. They will not be long; they never are.

You don’t know me personally. My existence has never crossed your mind. But I would bet you’ve seen my work: it has been broadcast everywhere, on most of the news channels worldwide. Or at least parts of it have. You could find it on the net, right now, if you really wanted to. If you could bear to look.

Not that you’d notice my style, my artistic signature or anything like that.

I film beheadings, which are common in this war-broken city, my childhood home.

It was never my ambition, as a young man who loved cinema, to film such things. Nor was it my wish to do weddings either, though there are less of those these days. Ditto graduations and parties. My friends and I have always wanted to make real films, with living actors and dialogue and jokes and music, as we began to as students. Nothing like that is possible here.

Every day we are ageing, we feel shabby, the stories are there, waiting to be told, we’re artists. But this stuff, the death work, it has taken over.

Naturally we didn’t seek out this kind of employment. We were ‘recommended’ and we can’t not do it; we can’t say we’re visiting relatives or working in the cutting room. They call us up with little notice at odd hours, usually at night, and minutes later they are outside with their guns. They put us in the car and cover our heads. Because there’s only one of us working at a time, the thugs help with carrying the gear. But we have to do the sound as well as the picture, and load the camera and work out how to light the scene. I’ve asked to use an assistant, but they only offer their rough accomplices and they know nothing, they can’t even wipe a lens without making a mess of it.

I know three other guys who do this work; we discuss it amongst ourselves, but we’d never talk to anyone else about it or we’d end up in front of the camera.

My closest friend filmed a beheading recently, but he’s not a director, only a writer really. I wouldn’t say anything, but I wouldn’t trust him with a camera. He was the one who had the idea of getting calling cards made with ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ inscribed on them. If the power’s on, we meet in his flat to watch great movies on video. He’s jokey: ‘Don’t bury your head in the sand, my friend,’ he says when we part. ‘Don’t go losing your head now. Chin up!’

He isn’t too sure about the technical stuff, how to set up the camera, and then how to get the material through the computer and onto the internet.

It’s a skill, obviously.

A couple of weeks ago he messed up badly. The cameras are good-quality, they’re taken from foreign journalists, but a bulb blew in the one light he was using, and he couldn’t replace it. By then they had brought the victim in. My friend tried to tell the men, it’s too dark, it’s not going to come out and you can’t do another take. But they were in a hurry, he couldn’t persuade them to wait, they were already hacking through the neck and he was in such a panic he fainted. Luckily the camera was running. It came out underlit of course, what did they expect? I liked it — ‘Lynchian’ I called it — but they hit him around the head, and never used him again.

He was lucky. But I wonder if he’s going mad. Secretly he kept copies of his beheadings and now he plays around with them on his computer, cutting and re-cutting them, and putting on music, swing stuff, opera, jazz, comic songs. Perhaps it’s the only freedom he has.

It might surprise you, but we do get paid, they always give us something ‘for the trouble’, and they even make jokes: ‘You’ll get a prize for the next one. Don’t you guys love prizes and statuettes and stuff?’

But it’s hellish, the long drive there with the camera and tripod on your lap, the smell of the sack, the guns, and you wonder if this time you might be the victim. Usually you’re sick, and then you’re in the building and in the room, setting up, and you hear things, from other rooms, that make you wonder if life on earth is a good idea.

I know you don’t want too much detail, but it’s serious work taking off someone’s head if you’re not a butcher, and these guys aren’t qualified, they’re just enthusiastic, it’s what they like to do. To make it work on television, it helps to get a clear view of the victim’s eyes just before they cover them. At the end they hold up the head streaming with blood and you might need to use some hand-held here, to catch everything. It has to be framed carefully. It wouldn’t be good if you missed something. (That means that ideally you need a quick-release tripod head, something I have and would never lend to anyone.)

They cheer and fire off rounds while you’re checking the tape and playing it back. After, they put the body in a bag and dump it somewhere, before they drive you to another place, where you transfer the material to the computer and send it out.

Often I wonder what this is doing to me. I try to think of war photographers, who, they say, use the lens to distance themselves from the reality of suffering and death. But those guys have elected to do that work, they believe in it. We are innocent.

One day I’d like to make a proper film, maybe beginning with a beheading, telling the story that leads up to it. It’s the living I’m interested in, but the way things are going I’ll be doing this for a while. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to go mad, or whether even this escape is denied me.

I better go now. Someone is at the door.

The Assault

It is winter, an ordinary day, no worse than any other. I drop my son at school. A few minutes after nine I am leaving the playground, along with the Muslim women, the Africans, the Czechs and the middle-class executives in their suits, already tapping into their Blackberries. I always enjoy the walk home, the relief and freedom of solitude, and will think over everything I have to do, errands, shopping, a lunch, before picking up the boy again.

Outside the school a woman catches my eye. We mothers see each other twice a day, often for years. She looks nice, the sort I might get along with. We smile, but have never spoken or gone for coffee.

‘Want a lift?’ she asks. It is beginning to rain. We introduce ourselves and get in her car. ‘Don’t you live by the park? I’ll drop you on the corner,’ she says. ‘I hope that’s okay. I have a little time, but I have to get to work.’

I wonder why she offered to give me a lift, if she’s not really going my way. Wearing black, she has a slightly frantic look, as though she didn’t have time to finish getting ready. But which of us mothers doesn’t look like that?

As I am pulling on my seat belt, she begins to tell me about her son, who is a year younger than mine. He has ‘behavioural problems’, odd and difficult moods. He is being tested for several illnesses, attention deficit, autism and something else, I forget. She describes their visits to the numerous specialists, experts and doctors he sees a lot of now. It is a moving story, and not an uninteresting or uncommon one.

A few moments later she stops the car where the streets diverge, and I open the car door, about to get out. I know this street, and today, on the pavement, there is a local madman, very tall, hair askew, talking furiously to himself, and with a strange gait, taking huge exaggerated steps, like a giant striding across continents. At the end of the street he stops and returns.

The woman continues to speak, and I nod and listen, as she describes a doctor. In my right hand is my phone and my bag; the other hand is still holding the door. Because of the madman, I close it again and lock it.

When I turn to her and mouth some comforting words, I begin to see that the woman has no interest in my response, that there is nothing she wants from me. I only have to be here, a person, that’s all.

I look at her face, her clothes, her rings, her shoes, and she watches me reach for the metal door handle again. I see the madman has passed and it would be a good opportunity to get on with my day. I open the door. I appear to gather myself and my possessions up again, but she keeps going.

As I sit there, I become aware, amazed even, that nothing I might do, or attempt to say, will make any difference to this woman. I was brought up to be polite. In fact I believe that if I am rude, I will be hated. My husband is different: he is not afraid of being offensive, he even enjoys it. He would open the car door, say goodbye, and be gone. ‘What does it matter?’ he’d say. ‘They’ll survive.’

More than anything I want him to phone me now, to interrupt this, to help me understand. The woman is speaking quickly but every detail is clear; it is not the wild jumble of a psychotic, nor the monotonous tone of the depressive.

‘The doctor was nice, he wore a suit, he asked my son many questions. He asked to talk to him privately. Well, I said …’ You would think there’d be a pause here, but she has clearly developed her gift for making her sentences run on. ‘We tried another doctor, recommended by someone else … Now, of course, my husband and I are having our difficulties …’

I can see her eyes taking in my hand on the door handle; this is a look from her, not a glance, but my obvious desire to escape has no effect.

She begins to do this terrible thing. To prove to myself that I don’t lack courage, I attempt to interrupt, opening my mouth to take a breath, but with hardly the first word out of my throat she raises her finger at me and says, ‘Just let me finish.’

This must have been going on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Is there something about me which invites such abuse? What would it be? How could she have picked it up when I have never spoken to her before?

After an hour — yes, an hour — I am becoming claustrophobic; I cannot speak, cannot make myself heard. Unsaid words are throttling me. Something in my right eye is vibrating. My breathing is shallow, my legs feel crushed. Surely she can hear that I am angry, and see that she is assaulting me, that I am being crushed under an injustice. But I am mesmerised. My husband would say that this must have happened to me before, yes with mother, in the kitchen, or on the phone, and sometimes with friends, but does it follow that I want this all the time?

Soon an hour and a quarter has passed: more, even; I have lost my bearings. She has forgotten me, and I have forgotten myself, as if she has planted a virus in my mind which slowly wiped away my memory, my volition, my entire identity.

I watch the madman passing, and then I look at her again, the woman whose eyes have not left my face. A terrible thought occurs to me, not one I could bear to say to anyone. I know why her son has withdrawn inside himself, and why he cannot speak, if this is what she does to him. She has forced him into a compact ball, the only protection he has. But who will say this to her?

She is looking at her watch. She must have measured out exactly how much time she had to talk. ‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Sorry, I don’t want to be late. We got distracted. Lovely to see you. Let’s do it again.’

I get out of the car and take a few steps. I am weak; I need to lie down.

The woman waves and drives off, leaving me on the pavement in the rain with a madman striding towards me.

Maggie

It was late morning when the door bell rang. Max was tramping on an exercise bicycle in his new gym, flicking idly between Indian, Chinese and Arab TV channels. As he did with everything now — recently he had begun to practise, actively, a new creed of ‘slowness’ — he took his time showering and dressing. Then he sat on the bed, staring out of the window, considering scenes from the past. There was no rush: Marta, the new girl, would let Maggie in, and provide her with coffee, biscuits and the newspapers.

About three times a year Maggie came to London to stay with friends for a few days. Informing Max that she needed to see him, she added that their usual lunch, welcome though it was, wouldn’t be enough. She had a serious request she couldn’t talk about on the phone.

He and Maggie had met at a campus university in the mid-seventies and stayed together for around ten years, depending on how it was added up, or by whom. It had been his longest relationship, apart from that with his wife. But there were other reasons he wanted to think about what he now called the ‘experiment’. After it, Maggie had moved to the country with her partner Joe — called Jesus the Carpenter by Max — and brought up two children. Max had remained in the city, taking advantage of the Thatcherite expansion of the media, where he became successful and now had four children.

‘Hello, my dear,’ Max said, when he appeared in the kitchen in shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt which he now realised only just covered his stomach when he stood up. ‘Let’s go onto the terrace. I’d like you to see it.’

It was unusual now for him to invite Maggie to the house because she irritated Max’s wife with, as Lucy put it, her ‘soppy self-righteousness and earnestness’. Lucy might well go on to say more maddening things like, ‘And as for that weird thing the three of you seemed to have had together, can you explain what in God’s name that was about?’

What indeed? However, Lucy was away filming; Max, she and the rest of the family would meet up tomorrow at the place they’d bought in Suffolk.

Max led Maggie up the stairs and onto the terrace, which stretched out across the top of the kitchen. There was a view of the garden, with a shed at the end, where the boys rehearsed their band and watched movies with their friends. Beyond that was the bowling green and the local park. It was spring, the blossom was out; so far it was the nicest day of the year.

They sat at the table and Marta, a young woman with dyed red hair, appeared again with a tray on which there was coffee and two glasses of grappa.

He said, ‘This is where I’m intending to spend the summer months.’

Maggie put her head back, attempting to catch the sun on her face. ‘What doing?’

‘Writing poetry, drawing, learning to paint. Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve got nothing better to do. But for years I was too tangled up to be creative.’

‘You were? How?’

He indicated the house and terrace. ‘It’s all nearly finished. I did it myself.’

‘The building?’

‘Of course not. The organisation of it.’

‘You seem to have a horde of people working here.’

‘It takes two girls to keep the house and kids in order, and the Polish builders are installing a sauna.’

‘Where are those naughty boys?’

He had briefly seen two of his sons — aged fourteen and fifteen — that morning in the kitchen with a bunch of their friends, who’d slept over.

‘The younger ones are with their grandparents, and the big ones seem to have disappeared to Niketown to spend my money,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back later. We’re going up the road to watch Chelsea at home tonight.’

Maggie asked, ‘Why? Are you a Chelsea supporter?’

He hummed a Chelsea song. ‘We all are. Season ticket.’

‘But you used to be Fulham.’

‘I was Fulham, sort of,’ he admitted. ‘Mainly because of what I read about Johnny Haynes as a kid.’

He had intended to ask Maggie how she was, knowing she would complain about the hours, the wages, the clients, the government and the local council. She’d been a social worker since they’d been together, when he was beginning to make documentaries, and her work was demanding and difficult. He’d always said that she didn’t appear to be quite cut out for it, becoming over-involved and allowing it to exhaust and infuriate her, but she called it ‘passion’.

He just said, ‘What was it you wanted to ask me?’

‘Max, for a while I’ve thought I should change my life.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I knew you’d be delighted.’

‘Change it in what way?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

‘Now I’m intrigued.’

‘Good.’ She said, ‘What’s really up with you?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m still happily bored.’

‘Depressed?’

‘A man who is tired of suffering is tired of life. But you won’t hear me complain.’

Five years ago Max sold his television company to a big media conglomerate. Having set it up during the time he was with Maggie to promote investigative journalism on television, he and his colleagues had made programmes about political and business corruption, ‘covering shadiness of all shades’. Later, after the company made a satirical political comedy series which achieved big ratings, they made other clever funnies. As he became more of an executive than artist, he sold the company well at a good time. For a while he’d loved having his pockets full of money, buying whatever he wanted, shopping with the kids. Apart from watching football, it was the thing they most liked doing as a family.

He’d done little paying work since, but had ‘run the house’ and attended to the children while his wife established herself as a producer. ‘I’m a feminist house-husband,’ he liked to boast. ‘All I do is support women, and has the sisterhood been grateful?’

‘Right-ho!’ he said now. He and Maggie touched glasses and downed the grappa.

‘Do you always drink at this time?’

‘Marta seems to think so.’

As they left the house, Maggie asked to see the rooms where he worked, smiling when she saw the birchwood ladder-backed chair Joe had restored as a present for Max when they first met.

She reached into her bag and said, ‘Joe sent this.’ It was a flat wooden paperknife decorated with carved symbols.

‘It’s lovely, thanks,’ he said, putting it on his desk. ‘I must find something to give him too.’

He pointed at the long white wall, against which leaned numerous frames covered in brown paper. ‘Like everyone else, I’ve begun to collect art and photographs,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t until recently that materialism made any sense to me. Now I think, this is mine, mine, and I’ve earned it.’

He and Maggie strolled up the road to where his new black Volkswagen convertible was parked. The restaurant was ten minutes’ walk away but Max was keen to show off the car.

He regarded her: like him, she was in her mid-fifties, and usually wore walking or what he considered ‘climbing’ and wet-weather clothes, with boots. She spent more time outside than him, and was tanned and lined, with greying hair that she might have cut herself, and no make-up. In his view, with this Patti Smith look, she appeared older than him now, but as Lucy said, if you think someone your age seems worn out, take it for granted you look twice as bad.

She said, ‘My God, it’s so wealthy here. But the foreigners I’ve noticed — they’re all employees and cheap labour, aren’t they?’

‘At this time of day they would be,’ he said. ‘Nannies, au pairs, cleaners, builders. What did you expect? Amazing to think, Maggie, of how London’s cleaned up since we were students. Can you remember how filthy it was then, graffiti, squats, and the tube an even more filthy pit than now, and no one paying for anything?’

‘Today it’s all control,’ she said.

‘It would be pretty to think so. But my kids are nervous on the street. Up the road there’s an estate where the wild boys see us as rich pickings.’

‘Only the very obedient survive, isn’t that right?’

‘How is it where you are?’

She and Joe still lived in a village in Somerset. When the commune had failed, they’d moved into a low-rent collapsing cottage which they had renovated.

‘You wouldn’t believe the poverty down there. It’s another country, which means it’s dull, and my work is repetitive, mostly with old women,’ she said. ‘That’s part of what I want to talk about.’

They sat in the car and Max put on a Clash CD. ‘Did we ever see them?’ he asked as ‘London Calling’ started. ‘I’m not sure we did, though we saw most of the other bands then.’ He went on, ‘Now, when I think about it, what a little paradise it was when we were together. The Health Service, unemployment benefit, cheap housing, the BBC, subsidised theatre. Mum and Dad didn’t pay a penny for my education, and if you came from a respectable but ordinary background, you believed you could get out and live differently to your parents. All that went when Thatcher came to power.’

For years he and Maggie were ‘political’ all the time; even their record collection had aided the revolution. He was proud of the anti-racist work they did, and the street stand-offs with the National Front. Much of the rest of their life together puzzled him, and he had begun to think it might be important to discuss it with Maggie later, after a few more drinks. She was argumentative, but he had begun to enjoy disputing, if not goading her, and liked to believe he was less scared of her than before.

‘That reminds me,’ he said, as the roof of the car slid open and the sound boomed into the street. ‘I didn’t show you the pictures of me receiving my OBE from the Queen.’

She was laughing. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Naturally the medal wasn’t for me, but for the work everyone did for the company. I have a picture you can put on the mantelpiece. Joe will enjoy it.’

‘You’re going to be in a provocative mood today.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But how can you not be fascinated by this funny little country? You go inside Buckingham Palace and there are Beefeaters, Chelsea Pensioners, Gurkhas, men in silver armour standing completely still, with like, you know, fur piled on their heads. There are other men walking across the Palace carpets wearing spurs on their shiny boots, a host of queens, and everyone else in badly fitting borrowed or hired suits. It’s like being sober at a fancy dress party.’

‘Do you really believe you’ve made a contribution?’

He said, ‘If you ever watch Spanish or Italian TV you’ll get some idea of the quality of what we do over here.’

‘I won’t have a TV in the house. Joe has to go to the pub to watch football.’

‘What is it, in your view, that people should be doing?’

‘Why can’t they talk?’

‘Watching the telly is more fun, I would have thought.’

Entering their usual restaurant in Hammersmith Grove, he said, ‘The service is terrible here, particularly since the Poles have sensed the downturn and have started to desert. But there’s no rush is there?’

As it was warm, they could sit outside, separated from the public by a neat hedge. The place was rarely crowded at lunchtime: there were only a few businessmen, a table of women who looked like footballers’ wives, and a couple of media executives who Max nodded at.

After they sat down she said, ‘I want to leave my job and home and come down here to live. Obviously I’ve got no money, but I’ll get a job.’

‘It’s too expensive, Maggie,’ he said, studying the menu. ‘We’re only just ahead. Four kids at private school — can you imagine? And capitalism’s having a breakdown, as Marx told us it would, every few years. Not a good time at all to try anything new, thank God. Can I order the wine?’

‘Max, I can’t wait for capitalism to sort itself out. You know how stubborn and bloody-minded I am — it’s one of those things I have to do.’

He asked, ‘Are you leaving Joe? Is that what it is?’

‘Neither of us is seeing anyone at the moment, but you know we don’t make a big deal about sharing. We can’t be everything to each other.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s such a peculiar and difficult thing.’

Joe had become part of their circle after they’d left university. A tall, long-bearded, lefty ex-public schoolboy with eyes which appealed to girls, he had started out as a furniture restorer to the rich, but wanted to be an honest worker, doing useful everyday toil. People liked to say his hands spoke for him, which Max considered to be a mercy, for otherwise he was almost completely silent. He would visit the flat Max and Maggie shared, and would smile, nod and shake his head, but rarely open his mouth. Later, when Max and Maggie split up and she began to go out with Joe, she would warn her friends that he’d say nothing. More annoyingly, because of Joe’s imperturbable silence, great wisdom was often attributed to him, as well as virtue: he was a committed activist. If you were poor and needed someone to work on your house for more or less nothing, he’d be there. Because he hated money and ‘breadheads’, if you wanted to pay him, better give him something useful, a bicycle, some potatoes, weed, a piano that needed mending.

Maggie didn’t believe in giving anyone up. When she started with Joe — and Max, too, was seeing someone — it became the beginning of something else. For about two years they were a threesome. It was an experiment in living. From their point of view, it would have been ‘conventional’ or ‘selfish’ to exclude one of them. Joe moved into their flat, indeed into their bed — and Max, who sometimes stayed with a girlfriend, lived in the front room. What was the need for people to disappear into different families?

Apparently Joe never suffered from jealousy: his girlfriend was free and independent; they both were. They could love whoever they wanted, and there was no price to pay. It didn’t bother Joe if Maggie spent the night with anyone else, and when she and Max went to the seaside for a couple of days he’d wave them off. Prohibiting was prohibited, saying no was an unacceptable violence. Nor did Joe appear to have wild fantasies about others’ pleasures which excluded him. How did someone learn to be like that?

Max had become reluctantly intrigued by this man who was so secure and convinced of his desirability that he knew the woman would return to him. Not only that, there were plenty of others who would want him. Joe appeared to lack nothing; in his turn, Max was considered a ‘control freak’ by the other two for suffering from jealousy. But, as Max wondered, did Joe have a better life because he didn’t experience jealousy? Or did he feel it so painfully that he successfully hid it from himself? Was he really as self-sufficient as he made out? Could people really be as interchangeable as he liked to believe?

Joe and Max worked together on various local gardens as they prepared for the birth of Maggie’s son by Joe. (Max had begun to see what an important part of the political struggle gardening was.) The three of them took the child home from the hospital, and he was brought up by all of them, with Max doing most of the childcare as the other two were working, while Max was around, trying to get his projects set up. When Max admitted that it was painful being complimented on ‘his’ son by strangers, when he had to face the fact that the child he had begun to love wasn’t his, the three of them decided that the men should take it in turns to father Maggie’s children.

When Maggie and Joe began to insist that this had to proceed soon, that he had to make up his mind about it, Max finished with it all. He had to, before he got deeper in. He fled alone to a seaside hotel to try to get over his love for the child, his hatred of Joe’s self-sufficiency and his own self-contempt. How had he allowed such a situation to develop? Max’s mother was an ordinary woman who would have considered such a parenting arrangement mad. Anyway, Maggie and Joe were moving to Devon to live and work on a commune, taking it for granted that Max would accompany them. But his work was in London, where he was making a documentary about a violent attack by the police on a black man, produced by the glamorous Lucy.

One night after filming she made some banal remarks which were subversive in their effect on him. The ideology he, Maggie and their friends followed was like a religion, almost cult-like; hadn’t he noticed it was closing him down, limiting his intelligence and imagination? He thought of those interminable democratic evenings, with everyone smoking, where everything was discussed in infinitesimal detail and, at the end, you had to do what someone else wanted because it had become ‘the will of the group’ and, probably, even the will of the proletariat.

He was able to pull away from Maggie and Joe, but only at the cost of wishing for death — his own and theirs — when they left London with the child. He and Maggie had believed they’d never stop loving one another, but that hadn’t been the case at all, fortunately. He had recovered, as everyone knew he would, and what remained?

Now Maggie and Max were eating. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, ‘hasn’t it occurred to you lately, what a conventional age we are living in now? I mean, of coercive ideals, the tyranny of the closed?’

‘I thought the biggest change in our time is the huge progress in social freedom. Can’t people be whoever they want? Lesbianism, transvestism, domination, bipolar — isn’t it all just lifestyle?’

She said, ‘The other day I was reading something on Sartre and De Beauvoir. About what a stupid emotional mess they’d made, fucking around with others’ lives. The suggestion was that if they’d been nice clean obedient workers maybe they would have been worth listening to. Couldn’t you say the same about Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ginsberg or scores of other artists? “The deadly grip of the commonplace”, we used to call it. All the experiments have failed and we must return to the norm.’

He said, ‘You still want to experiment with your own life?’

‘I try to live as I need to.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Between you and me, don’t you have your … interests?’

‘I’m well done with that. It’s too costly a pleasure.’

‘Is that permanent now — the glasses?’ she said, looking at his reading glasses which were on a gold chain around his neck.

‘Yes. Does it lead you to believe I’ve become a man without self-respect? I love middle age, when you no longer care how you look or how you might appear to others. Men take it less hard than women, don’t you think?’

Maggie had been beautiful as a girl of twenty, gentle, generous and scholarship-clever, from a square and functional family. Feminism and the ‘assertiveness’ workshops made her less of a pushover, and after a while she lost her charm to ideology, becoming opinionated, angry. Almost everyone let her down, not wanting sufficiently to alter everything, to make the sacrifice which guaranteed sincerity. She excised all flirtatiousness and play from her character, implying that her mood wouldn’t improve until the world did. She was the only person he knew who lamented the collapse of the Berlin Wall, believing communism hadn’t been given enough time. ‘Think of capitalism, it’s been around for centuries!’

‘You look better at the moment,’ she said now. ‘Your eyes are clearer, you’re less of a smug little fatty.’

‘I’ve lost a stone. It’s my greatest achievement. All I want now is to get the kids through school without any of us disintegrating. Nothing need be more complicated than that.’

‘It does,’ she said. ‘You might have noticed, it’s terrible when the kids turn ten and they have to push away from you. You learn they don’t actually want your company, that it’s a long hard divorce and you’ll need to make other arrangements for yourself.’

‘For me realism is the true thing.’

‘Is it really? Then what I’m going to ask will make you even more irritable,’ she said.

‘I’m pretty chilled now.’

‘I could tell you were in therapy when you started taking an interest in my dreams.’

He said, ‘I was too angry all the time so I had that part excised from my personality.’

‘It was the attractive bit.’

‘Mags, please, lately I’ve been having these horrifying dreams, a series of them. My uncle’s dying in bed.’

‘Which uncle?’

‘You know, the lively, intelligent, funny one. He’s long dead of course.’

‘That’s part of you,’ she said. ‘It’s going. You’re letting it go. You’re driving it out.’

‘I’m not sure that’s exactly it,’ he said.

They were finishing the bottle. He was becoming tired and would have made an excuse, returned home and napped — which was how he liked to spend the afternoon — if he hadn’t been curious about her request. But they drank coffee and drove to Richmond Park, about half an hour away.

He had parked the car and they had begun to walk when she said, ‘Max I want you to loan me ten thousand pounds to help me start up in London. I know it won’t last me long, but it’ll be better than nothing. When — or whether — I’ll ever be able to pay it back is another matter.’

He sighed. ‘That’s a big whack. Will it be enough for you?’

‘I’m hoping to last five years in London. Despite the stupid expense there are still cheap cultural activities, aren’t there?’

‘They’ll pass an afternoon.’

‘Joe thinks it’s all stupidity, consumerism and self-hatred down here, but he will visit me and I’ll go home when I need to. Otherwise I’ll explore — places and people.’

‘Is Joe all right about that? Or is he still as indifferent to everyone as he used to be?’

‘As always, he’ll be happy for me to live as I wish. I drive him mad with my frustration and he’s never wanted to be my jailer. The kids will come down too. My son has already climbed the front of the Houses of Parliament in that recent protest. They’re at the right age for the city.’

Max said, ‘It’s always seemed odd to me that you live with someone who lacks the ability to make conversation.’

‘Why do we have to communicate verbally when we are already in tune?’

‘What was the communication when you said you were going to ask me for money?’ He was looking at her. ‘Didn’t you tell him?’

‘I will tell him when I know what’s going on.’

‘I wouldn’t risk the relationship,’ he said. ‘Lucy and I know a lot of middle-aged women trying to hunt down men on the net and it’s a pathetic business.’

‘Don’t lecture me. But I do often think, why the hell didn’t I choose more solvent men?’ They walked past some people who were planting trees. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘Go on, please say.’

‘I was thinking, what if I took that shovel and smashed it over your head?’

She was laughing. ‘I knew that. See, we still have the same thoughts.’

He stopped and said, ‘Can I hold you?’

‘Here, why?’

‘Just to see. Or to try to remember.’ He took her in his arms and put his face in her hair and neck. He kissed her face, ran his hands across her back, up her thighs, and he looked at her hands.

‘Anything else you want to touch or see?’ she asked. ‘My breasts, genitals?’

‘No, no.’ He went on, ‘Ten grand’s a lot of money. You’ll never pay it back. I’ll have to give it to you.’

‘You won’t even notice.’ She went on, ‘I’m so bored by everything. I even prefer America. At least they can vote for Obama or Hillary. A black or a woman. What do we have? Boris Johnson. A character from P. G. Wodehouse.’

‘No better man to run London, then. I’m thinking of voting for him. Anything for a change.’

‘Oh God. Have you changed so much?’

‘I like to think I’m capable of revising my views. It would be as daft to believe the same things over the years as it would be to wear the same clothes.’

‘For instance?’

‘The Falklands. Thatcher was right there, fighting the fascist Galtieri. And then taking on the trade unions, the whole country held to ransom by a few fundamentalist Lefties who wouldn’t grow up.’

She stiffened. ‘Oh Jesus, Max, all those years of struggle to end up recanting, and for what? Just to look like a turncoat?’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘It didn’t work, socialism, communism, the whole idea was fucked. It’s the biggest disappointment of our lives, but don’t we have to take it like men?’

She said, ‘By the way, you carrying your chequebook?’

‘You want the money now?’

‘Once it’s done you won’t think about it again. Then we can talk about less painful things.’

‘But I haven’t thought it through. What would Lucy say?’

‘Lucy?’

‘What if I discovered she’d donated ten grand to some indigent ex?’

‘Is that what I am to you?’

‘The wife’s not going to be working long hours on a film set for you to take a free dab because you fancy a change of location. She’s the breadwinner in our family.’

‘This is doing my head in,’ she said. ‘Let me sit down.’ They sat on the grass, leaning against a tree. ‘Max, I never asked for her money.’

‘She and I are together. We don’t just go with any stranger who takes our fancy for five minutes. Sex is easy but love is difficult. It’s very serious.’ He went on, ‘And it’s not as though the money is for something essential like a cancer operation or plastic surgery.’

‘No, it’s more important than that. What happened to play, to wildness and experiment?’ She got up and he followed her; they walked to the tea-house and ate scones.

She said, ‘Do you think you’re envious?’

‘Of what?’

‘All you’ve done is criticise everything I believe in. But I’m not an old woman yet, Max. I haven’t given up, as you appear to have, or become complacent. Feminism taught me that women are capable of deep passion, aliveness and exploration. We can burn on until the end of the night whether we win or lose.’

‘How could I not envy you that spirit, though it sounds forced?’ Then he said, ‘Freud recommends efficient sublimation as the only way forward. You divert yourself, usefully, for life. There’s a bit of passion left over, which is tragic, but you have to live with the frustration. It’s character-building.’

‘What pompous cobblers,’ she said. ‘Are you saying no?’

‘I don’t fucking know, Maggie,’ he said. ‘Why is it that most of one’s middle age is spent arguing? I wanted to enjoy a pleasant lunch and all you’ve done is ruin my bloody day and probably my night. You know I suffer from anxiety. I’m going to have to take a pill.’

‘Oh, shut the fuck up and stop being so evasive as usual.’

‘But I really can’t answer you, my dear. I have to think about it. There are so many other priorities than your self-fulfilment.’

She said, ‘I don’t like to mention it, but didn’t I support you while you developed your career?’

‘I walked and fed and changed and paid for your wonderful son every day,’ he replied.

‘But why shouldn’t you have? Whose job is it to bring up the children?’

Max drove them back to the house, where he made tea in the kitchen. There were four boys in the garden, wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops, lifting weights, kicking a ball, pushing one another around.

‘A bunch of chavs and pikeys chased us down the road,’ one of the boys said. ‘That’s why we’re sweating.’ He said to Maggie, ‘There’s a council estate across the street.’

Max said, ‘What did you do to provoke them?’

‘The lowlifes threatened us with a shank. They said, “We know where you live”, and Jack said, “We know where you live, in a disgusting council flat with a pit bull eating the sofa and your mother a crack whore.”’

Max said, ‘Maggie will sort them out. She’s a social worker.’

‘Chavs and pikeys,’ she said. ‘Are those the latest descriptions?’

He got up and said suddenly, ‘You not only wanted feminism, which was an excellent thing, but you attacked all authority, particularly that of fathers, preferring equality. You made sure that authority died, but there was no equality, only chaos, and that’s why we’re in a mess. Take responsibility for something at last, Maggie. Not everything is capitalism’s fault.’

‘Isn’t it? This society has become more and more unequal under Blair, the rich taking it all, buying art up and everything else. And the authority you so idealise, Max, was usually corrupt, exploitative and cruel. Why can’t each individual have authority? We’re not all children.’

The children watched the adults pointing and yelling at one another, and, before they’d stopped, asked for money to go out and buy a video game and pizza. Max handed over some cash.

‘How fortunate and spoiled they are,’ he said to her. ‘With none of the worry we had about the future.’

‘Is that good for them?’ she asked.

He shrugged. His eldest son patted him on the stomach. ‘When’s it due, Dad?’ he said.

‘You see, a dad is a derided thing,’ Max said to Maggie.

‘Joe isn’t.’

‘I think I’ll fetch some nice wine from the cellar. But have a look at this. It’s for Joe.’

He handed her a tiny oil painting, about the size of a packet of cigarettes: a nude woman.

‘That’s nice.’

He was in the cellar for a while, looking for a wine which might please her. On the way back he passed his jacket, hanging over the back of a chair. He took his chequebook from the pocket and located a pen. When he returned to the kitchen she wasn’t there, but had taken her things and gone.

As he opened the wine he wondered whether they’d be able to forgive one another, and whether they’d see one another again.

Phillip

Until at last he was able to identify himself clearly, I couldn’t recognise the voice on the phone.

‘Who?’ I said again. ‘I’m afraid I can’t hear you. My children are rehearsing their group upstairs.’

‘It’s Phillip,’ he whispered. ‘For God’s sake! Your old friend, Phillip Heath.’

‘Ah.’

‘Fred, are you shocked?’

‘It’s good to hear your voice,’ I said cautiously. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘I am still abroad.’

Abroad: it had been a long time since I’d heard that word which was how, when I was a kid, the English referred to the rest of the world.

Over the past fifteen years Phillip had dropped me a postcard every couple of years or so to say he was working in this or that school, or moving apartments. But I couldn’t recall the last time we had actually spoken.

On his last postcard, however, a couple of months ago, he had added, ‘have been a bit under the weather, old boy’. Then Fiona, my university girlfriend, who had remained in closer touch with him, rang to say Phillip had been operated on for throat cancer.

He sounded croaky and weak on the phone, but said he was recovering. He had been ‘thinking things over’ and was keen for me to visit him where he was living alone in Italy, near Lake Como. We could walk together. There were no Muslims, he joked, only hordes of elderly locals walking their dogs. It was old white Europe, where money and glamour had long been replaced by decay and dullness, but not, unfortunately, by decadence. Why didn’t I stay in his spare room?

‘That’s a kind offer,’ I said.

‘But when exactly can you pop over? I beg you to be definite. Who else can I talk to about things?’

‘Things?’

‘One’s life, I mean, such as it is.’

I promised to look at my diary and phone him in a few days. ‘This is sudden for me,’ I explained. ‘I have teenage children. I teach too — you were my example there, friend.’

‘I’m far too weak for that, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Fred, I will wait to hear from you. Please, though, if you want to see my smiling face again better not leave it too long. Dying’s an awful trouble and nuisance.’

I wasn’t sure when I’d last seen Phillip, but it had been towards the end of the eighties, though the substance of the relationship had been in the middle of that decade, which was when my ‘success’ began and our friendship — the friendship of him, Fiona and me — had been at its most intense.

The phone call had upset and disturbed me, and I was torn.

How might one turn down the request of a man so sick, perhaps dying unhappily and more or less alone, someone who’d been such a close friend? I’d liked him; I’d loved him, I suppose, and he me. It had been a passionate friendship which had ended badly, indeed violently. Was an inexplicable outbreak any reason to forget the good, wonderful part of it?

As I considered the trip to Como, I became aware of how angry I still was over what had gone on between Phillip and me. Why exactly had I so taken to heart Phillip’s attacks on me? Why did I still puzzle over them and continue to hear his voice in my mind, as I argued with him over and over?

*

Although the three of us had been at university together, Phillip was ten years older than Fiona and me and, unusually for that punky dissenting period — the mid-seventies — Phillip had worn ironed shirts, a jacket and leather shoes. At the school where later he became a history master, he wore a tie and carried a briefcase. He had a moustache and glasses. He was not hip and didn’t attempt to dress young but looked, according to us, like someone’s father, giggling when we called him ‘Mr Chips’ and, later, Mr Lips.

For us he was knowledgeable and, above all, experienced, seeming to know his way around the world. He’d been married briefly; he wasn’t middle-class; his parents had been ‘in service’ — his mother a cook and his father a gardener — and he had moved far beyond them. After starting as an actor in ‘rep’, he had run theatres, worked as a stage manager, and even been an actors’ agent for a while, before trying to become a journalist. When none of it had seemed to work out, he had returned to university to do a PhD on the British army in the Second World War.

Phillip was the only actively bisexual person I’d known. When Fiona first met him, about a year before I did, he lived with a pretty young male lover with whom he listened to Wagner and went to gay bars like the Black Cap in Camden. But by our third year, when Fiona and I were installed together — and Phillip, having left university, was living alone a few doors down from us — he had had decided life was ‘easier’ as a heterosexual. He was working as a schoolteacher in the local comprehensive school, while supposedly completing his doctorate.

After university I set out as an actor in children’s theatre, but quickly realised that I disliked both children and being on stage. For real money I worked as a typist for an employment agency which sent me to a different office each week.

I had never felt more alienated than I did on that train with the other commuters and in those offices with the other drones. (Of course my father worked in an office, as an accountant.) It was such a fright that I was forced to take myself seriously and become motivated, as they say. At work I began to scribble down plays which were eventually performed on ‘the fringe’, in small venues and lunchtime theatres. Then I wrote a more ambitious work about a group of students — including characters who resembled Phillip, Fiona and me — visiting a Greek island, the first half of which was comic and the second farcical, nihilistic and vicious.

After starting out at a fringe venue, the play had become a success in the West End. It was produced in nine other countries and made a lot of money for others and some for me. For a few months, I was considered, at least by a couple of newspapers, to be the ‘voice of the young’ as well as one of Britain’s ‘most promising’ young writers. As Fiona said, if that wouldn’t spook your life, what would?

Soon I was working on the script of the film version. The producers had agreed to let me have a go at writing it, with the proviso that if I didn’t succeed a proper screenwriter would be brought on. I was keen to do it. The more successful I had become, the more self-doubt I seemed to be prone to.

Phillip had given me the key to his place. My own flat was noisy and Fiona often slept during the day: she was working with young offenders, and had overnight duties. So I’d stroll down to Phillip’s in the morning after he’d left for work.

If it was warm, I’d sit on the roof, a flat area with an iron fence looking out over Earls Court, my typewriter on a crate, a beer and an ashtray next to it, trying to write this movie. I’d stride about, saying the dialogue, attempting to see the different scenes crashing together. It wasn’t long before I learned that a movie uses up a lot of imagination quickly.

I was anxious all the time, with, I believed, much to be anxious about. During the high success of the play, I had travelled whenever I was invited, meeting journalists, giving talks, as well as doing some reviewing and article writing. My directness was considered amusing and mischievous, and I had appeared on a couple of TV quiz shows. I wasn’t optimistic that any of this would last. Indeed, convinced it was a fluke, success induced a plague of symptoms in me, twitches, compulsions, huge anxiety and, on some days, agoraphobia.

Like some of the untalented and talented people I’ve known, I was preoccupied by the idea that eventually people would understand that I was a fraud and a fool. After all, if you were a professional musician or even a footballer, you had already achieved a high level of competence. In my line of work, I could still feel as useless as a drunk, even as I won a short-story competition for a couple of pages about a woman being devoured by dogs, and my agent rang me with the figures from my latest opening. An older writer whose advice I sought sometimes had said to me, ‘It’s nothing to write one good or successful piece. Unless you choose to die young, you have to repeat it your whole life. Good luck.’

This wasn’t my only doubt and conflict. Fiona and I had been living together for four years, but were separating. She was waiting for a flat she would rent to become available, and soon I would buy my own place. Both of us had been seeing other people, but most nights we slept in the same bed. As a child adored by his parents, I discovered it took an axe to your identity to live with someone who despised you, who looked at you with loathing, refusing to let you give them anything.

Around five o’clock each day it was a relief when Phillip came home, thus signalling the end of my work. If I’d been on the roof, I went down into the flat to greet him, and would bring him a gin and tonic and a cigar. The effort of writing, and the paranoia which solitude engendered, had destabilised me by the afternoon. I believed there could be no luckier man than someone like Phillip who had spent the day working fruitfully, having exhausted his guilt.

*

While Phillip read the paper, I’d cook for him. If I’d been sunbathing, as I often had, I’d continue to walk about naked as he looked on. I’d been doing yoga in the mornings, I ran and cycled by the river, swam, and lifted weights in our small flat in front of the mirror. I had sculpted this chunky little hot body and was keen for it to be admired.

I’ve become aware that I have always liked to have a best friend, someone older than me to be brother, guide, accomplice. Phillip was the person with whom I laughed the hardest, and whom I most wanted to hear my thoughts and know me. I could crack him up doing the voices, having always been able to pick up accents and attitudes, mimicking them in a minute. I did resent being an entertainer, but he’d beg me to do them: sturdy lefties in the party, friends, TV personalities. In those days of grave and serious political struggle, frivolity was not only at a premium, it was subversion.

I’d always been an indifferent student, but having a tolerance for others I now recognise as unusual in a writer, I was smart enough to see that if I made intelligent friends, there was much I could pick up with minimal concentration or study. Phillip was also the most fun of anyone around at the time, his conversation being a mixture of personal anecdote — detailed and hilarious accounts of his romantic and sexual misfortunes with both men and women — and literary reference and political gossip: he was a busy member of the Labour Party, and ran the local CND branch. The one-bedroom flat, with a large living room, was stuffed with books. He and I and Fiona spent weekends putting up new shelves while drinking and holding parties on his roof.

I guess Fiona and I were a desirable couple then, both of us good-looking. She’d briefly been a model, and we were bright, keen on the latest clothes and with a touching ignorance of what effect our vanity and self-assurance might have on others, of how it might infuriate them.

With me Fiona had become bored and stifled, and had made up her mind to become daring. She went to bars and stayed out all night. Once, while I waited at home — and no one envies another their masturbation — she slept with two men at the same time. In a hurry, and more under the influence of Joe Orton than I would be again, I decided Phillip could touch me a little.

If it gave him pleasure, and it seemed to when I offered myself to him, he could kiss my hands, shoulders, neck. Then he would caress my head and back, and play with my arse. Several times he sucked me, while I rested on the sofa, somewhat awkwardly I suspect, like a child being felt, as he messed with me until he came. He didn’t excite me; I had no desire to touch him and never did. I just liked being desirable, and fancied the idea, for a time, of being in what I considered to be the ‘feminine’ position. It was the first time I’d had such power over anyone, the ability to make them crazy.

When Fiona was with us Phillip and I didn’t do this. Nor was she informed, though I considered her to have been the touch paper since, being more alert than I to subterranean feeling, she’d said one night, ‘Which of us do you think Phillip wants? Or could it be both of us? Would anyone have the balls to be that greedy?’

The next time we went round, both of us sat on Phillip’s knees giggling. She winked at me and said, ‘Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.’

He was fun to tease, but I respected Phillip. Not that he always respected himself. I’d sat in on some of his school classes, being invited to speak to his pupils about ‘my career’, where I saw he was capable of arousing enthusiasm in the young, of explaining why a certain figure or period should be paid attention to. As I myself had learned from him, I couldn’t grasp why his profession would make him feel inadequate or ashamed of himself.

My blithe view infuriated him. He began to say he was wasted at the school. He needed me to know he was more talented than most people were able to see. He said he needed to ‘shut himself away’. It turned out that rather than working on his thesis at the weekend, he had been producing plays and stories. It must have occurred to him that if I could do it, so could he. When he gave them to me to read I was kind, merely pointing out there were more pages than necessary.

Now, at least, I have understood that the longer you know a person, far from getting to know them, as you close in on their unconscious the unsettling delirium and violence of the human system will appear bewildering. So, while I returned Phillip’s literary efforts somewhat casually, their general effect didn’t quickly dissipate. Though of no aesthetic value, the work could only be a depiction of his mind, and the state he appeared to inhabit I recognised from my alarming but exhilarating experiences smoking dope. His inner self, unlike his outer, was disconnected, incoherent and peopled by many policemen, merchants of attempted order, presumably. Inside, I was shocked to learn, he was not at all like me. The nearly mad are among us everywhere, many of them disguised. Like blondes, they appear to have more fun, as well as more misery. But who, as an artist of some kind, would not welcome the weird as the truth? And who ever gets a straight look at the world?

Since my success I had begun to be invited to numerous openings, closings and publication parties, which appeared to go on most nights of most weeks of the year. We went to places where, outside, there were groups of photographers waiting for film stars and famous writers. I hadn’t bought a drink in two years, and if you wanted to pick up strangers and meet bores, you were made. Soho was still rough but money and glamour, eventually to ruin it, was on its way. The Groucho Club had opened and in those days you could blag your way in.

I liked to take Phillip out with me. Being more committed to his pleasure than I — and convinced he could make an instant connection with people — he was always more successful. I was a dedicated cheerleader and witness, but one night, in a pub after a party, he flew into a rage, suddenly grabbed me by the throat and shook me. ‘For fuck’s fucking fuck sake, stop telling people all the time that I’m a teacher!’

‘Should I say you captain submarines?’

‘These supercilious, overprivileged people want to hear I’m an actor. I’m a model. I’m a hooker. I’m a movie director. “Teacher” makes them struggle with the death instinct. I can see their eyes trying to contact someone — anyone — across the room.’

Then a girl said to me, another time, ‘Will your wonderful play become a film?’

‘But yes,’ I said. ‘It is about to be made.’

‘What do you mean?’ Phillip asked.

‘Looks like I’ve been lucky again,’ I said.

Within a few weeks of my delivering the script, the movie had gone into pre-production. As the director wanted the actors to spend time together before shooting, it was cast early, with a group of attractive young potential stars.

Phillip and I went to a Soho restaurant to meet ‘the supernatural two’, the boy and girl playing the leads, both of whom had recently appeared in hit feature films, as the stream of ecstatic strangers who approached them attested. The next day, the four of us went to a movie together.

After, I walked Phillip back to his flat. He’d been sullen for a while but now began to berate me. I lacked principle and inner strength; I was a liar, doing or saying anything to gain an advantage. I was losing contact with the actual — working people, money and its absence. In fact I was a total pretence. ‘How do you justify your life!’ he shouted.

‘At least I’ve made something of myself,’ I said.

He grabbed me around the neck. Why would he want to have one of our mock fights now? He was only a little taller than me at around five feet eleven, but at university he’d been a keen rower. His arms were thick and capable; his stomach was hard.

He pulled me backwards until I was on the ground looking up at him as he kicked me in the side. I wanted to get to my feet and lash out at him with schoolkid punches. But not only did this feel unnatural and stupid, I’d get hurt, and I would forfeit our friendship at the moment of my greatest fear.

‘That’s shown you,’ he said.

‘Shown me what?’ I asked, brushing myself down.

Now I phoned Phillip again, late at night.

‘My dear, good evening,’ he said sleepily. ‘What a treat to hear from you. Have you been drinking?’

‘It’s worse. I have reached the age when I’ve begun to survey my wretched life, doing the addiction — sorry, I mean addition, and subtraction.’

Why did I say ‘wretched’? Did I really see it like that? Was there justification? Perhaps tonight. My four children were home for the holidays. They were kicking away from us. Soon they would be gone for good, returning only with complaints. I was beginning to wonder that if I wasn’t a father, what in fact was I?

Earlier that evening I’d been to an AA meeting. Back at home I’d held out as long as possible before pulling out the vodka bottle I kept behind my study sofa and taking a couple of long swigs.

Phillip said, ‘That does happen at your age, my dear boy.’

‘Do you remember much about our friendship?’

‘Enough of it to say it is characteristic of you to ask such a direct question. As I can hardly sit here and consider the future, since we last spoke more of our shared past has come back, providing considerable amusement.’ He went on, ‘You were one of my best friends. I still think of you that way.’

‘But you hurt me — physically, I mean — several times.’

‘Did I do that?’ he said. ‘Have you been brooding? If that is why you called, I can remember us wrestling a bit. Didn’t we like to mess about together like kids?’

‘I hated it.’

‘I can’t recall you saying much at the time,’ he said. ‘You’re certainly not one to refrain from complaint, and you always loved any kind of attention. But I am prepared to apologise,’ he said. There was a pause and, I thought, a little giggle. ‘Are you still attractive?’

‘To some people, I hope. Why does it matter?’

He laughed. ‘What else matters except pleasure or at least being cheered up? If only you would come and see me we could clear everything up. And Fred, my dear, if I send you some of my plays and short fiction would you be sweet enough to show them to someone who might help me? I know you have influence and time is shutting me in.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘By the way, do you still wake up with an erection?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘It is also true that I hadn’t even noticed.’

I should have seen that our conversation wouldn’t provide any of the clarity I’d hoped for. I drank some more, lay down, and reran the spools of memory.

I did like to tease and provoke and I could be, as Fiona liked to point out, an irritating person with a vibe of stubborn negativity. She had moved out of our flat by the time the film started to be made, and I was both bereft and elated, with time on my hands, a lot of which I liked to spend with my friend.

For a few weeks it was just Phillip and I, more or less living together in his flat, though I never slept there. Sometimes I’d walk through the door and he’d cuff me straight off. ‘You behave today,’ he’d say. ‘I’m tired. Don’t mess me around.’ Or he’d encircle my neck from behind and pull me down, leaving me on the floor, or grab my arm and twist it up behind my back. If he was particularly mad, he’d just throw me to the ground and kick me.

Most days he punched me on one or other of my arms, in a slightly different place, so I had continuous bruises above my elbows, like smeared love-bites. One time I dropped a glass and fetched the vacuum cleaner to clear it up. He took the flex and lashed me about the legs as I stood in a corner, attempting to protect myself. ‘This is fun,’ he declared. At other times we’d watch TV together, read newspapers aloud or discuss the Labour Party.

Phillip had begun to see a teacher at the school with whom he had a zealous sexual relationship. He flashed me a photograph of her, saying, ‘I wouldn’t want her meeting you! She nearly tore my cock off.’ He withdrew his key and his physical attention. I could not visit him without phoning. One time I walked past him and the teacher on the street and he only nodded at me as a friendly neighbour. I was his shame. I had collaborated, of course. I didn’t have to see him. I could even have spoken out.

Soon he married the teacher. When I asked why he hadn’t invited me to the wedding he just laughed. The wife lived with him while they waited to move to Rome, where they’d got jobs in an international school.

We spoke on the phone, but I didn’t see him until he called and we had a drink together three months later. He explained he’d be going to Rome alone as the marriage had failed. That was all he would tell me.

His leaving for good without any acknowledgement made me aware that this had been the most anomalous episode of my life. The simple explanation was that at the time when I was most successful, I had requested a smack and received it. But really knowing why, isn’t that the thing?

Still brooding now, I phoned Fiona and asked, ‘Do you remember Phillip knocking me down a few times? Did he hurt me?’

‘I hope so,’ she said.

‘If I’d been a woman in a violent relationship you’d have wanted to make a revolution.’

‘You’re so serious now — someone said to me the other day that you even have gravitas! It’s easy to forget what a flirty and naughty thing you could be,’ was all she said. ‘I’ve been going through my photographs. How young and attractive we were. Why don’t you take me for lunch? You know the new places, don’t you?’

She was the wrong person to ask. Perhaps I would have to visit Phillip. While I vacillated, studying my diaries and making these notes, a niece of his called to say he’d died.

I had been keen to take a boat across that lake, but now, at the funeral hour, I strolled around my old neighbourhood.

The last time I saw Phillip I had invited him to my new loft in a converted industrial building, the first of many places I would buy. I’d got it fresh from a developer, it was more or less empty and at night I liked strolling up and down the wide spaces listening to music, books in piles on the floor, and, from the jacuzzi, looking at the distracting view of the new London skyline of cranes and unfinished buildings. Having decided to acquire an indulgence, I’d begun to collect rock posters, and they, along with a sexy poster for the French production of my play, leaned against the wall. My movie would soon play at festivals before opening all over, which was how I got to buy the flat.

I’d gone to the market in the morning, and made Phillip lunch. I bought new tumblers, plates and napkins, and set them out on my new glass-topped table from the Conran shop. But he wouldn’t even sit down, he was in a hurry, he seemed embarrassed, as if he’d get into trouble for being here, though his wife had gone. He was still going to leave the country, and was in the middle of packing.

‘If you had any balls you’d have a lot of fun here,’ he said. ‘But you’re afraid of women, aren’t you? Of your feeling for them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Still, you’ve been a fortunate little shit.’

I agreed. ‘All this for almost nothing. I should have made less of myself, I know.’ I had been unbuttoning the front of my shirt. Now I tried to take his hand, attempting to stir some sentimentality in him. ‘Why do you have to go? Why can’t we eat and then lie on the bed and watch telly all afternoon?’

‘We never did that.’

‘It was almost all we did.’

He reached for my hand and I thought he was going to kiss my fingers. Instead he grabbed at me and twisted my arm, giving me no choice but to turn as he inched it up my back. Had I teased him too much? I had offered him a glass of wine, saying, ‘This is to celebrate you becoming Doctor Phillip at last,’ perhaps with a little sarcasm, but also with pleasure and pride in his effort.

He continued to bend my arm until I was forced to my knees. From this position I attempted to turn and attack him; however, he pushed me to the ground and I fell awkwardly. When I tried to get up I found my right arm had become useless.

We agreed we had to call an ambulance. Phillip and I sat in casualty for four hours, until a doctor returned my arm to its socket. For a week I walked round with my arm in a sling. The next time I went swimming it popped out again and I had to be carried out of the pool. It was permanently weakened, I was told.

For a while I had to type left-handed. That can’t have been the only reason my next play closed quickly, as did its follow-up. The cruelty and delight which accompanied these failures in the press wasn’t something I needed to experience again. I rented my flat and moved to Los Angeles, writing several unmade American movies, one involving a chipmunk. My agent commented, ‘Your screenwriting reputation will increase until you actually have a movie made. If it tanks, you can kiss your backside, as well as your American career, goodbye.’

At that I came home. It was easy to fail, I found, and for a couple of months I felt I’d been thrown out of my bed and onto the street in the middle of the night. But it didn’t get in my way. I succeeded at property. With the aid of my wife, who was an estate agent in an office around the corner when I met her, but a ‘property investor’ a moment later — and despite the vicissitudes of the capitalism whose end my pals and I had wished for — we kept moving house and buying flats, which we either rented or sold. Within five years I had achieved easily my father’s ambition, never to have to do another honest day’s work.

I’d never been particularly compelled by money before, and I’d never met anyone whose ambition was only to accumulate wealth. While a teenager I had imagined that being an artist was the most desirable occupation there could be. I found, though, that for a while money and its gathering was as interesting as anything else, until I stopped noticing that I had it. Showing off embarrassed me, and on those occasions when I was forced to see what a struggle life is for most people, the wealth we had skimmed from the world began to curdle, and the temptation to become a human rights activist was almost overwhelming.

Because there was a necessity for a considerable amount of socialising with the most materialistic people on earth, and I am, I’ve been told, something of a weak-willed if not masochistic man, I saw that it was simpler for me to co-operate rather than whine. My wife liked everything about property — views, gardens, locations, carpets, lampshades. To her it was like collecting art, except that she was a kind of artist too, remoulding everything she bought and not encouraging dissent. I enjoyed her passion and, later, her devotion, concentration and absence. For the conventional amount of time, almost five years, I liked almost everything about her.

We seemed to acquire houses wherever they built them, particularly in the South of France and Italy, staying there with the children and their friends and parents. There were outings, barbecues, dinners and all manner of parties and jubilation, including visits to water parks, with nothing much for me to do except talk.

After a time I found myself taken aback and most likely depressed by the inevitable decline into coolness which appeared to accompany most marriages, requiring acceptance, secrecy or insurgency. What had once satisfied was gone; how then should you live?

Being heroic, I came more or less to allow the situation, having considered bolting. I had little inclination to rebel. I admired subversion in others, but it would seem unnatural to me not to live with my children, visiting them from time to time like a kindly preoccupied uncle. My ambition has gone into the four of them. When I wonder now what I’ve done, I can only say I’ve been with the kids, eating, talking, arguing, going to the movies, listening to music, drifting around the streets, playing tennis; that’s where years of my time went, and you can’t measure, count or discount it.

Naturally the ironies of the period could be a torment. How could I be unaware that we now lived in a rabidly sexual time? My life had spanned what was known as the sexual revolution: from repression to — unrepression, until we reached the prohibition of shame, the prohibition of prohibition. And there was I, in an age of sexual envy, only a curious onlooker. What a beautiful rack it was. I’d say that after fifty, you have to be cunning about your pleasures if you’re to have any, and why would you want to?

I saw it was the women in Tolstoy, Zola, Colette and Jean Rhys that I had liked when I could be bothered to read, as a teenager, a way of being close, but not too close, to women. Why not make a vocation of it? I allowed myself to become fond of the wives of rich peripatetic businessmen, of which there always seemed to be a multitude nearby. Restless and bewildered, they had everything but a man to be curious about them, and to tease them with possibility. The modern illusion that women can have ‘everything’ is a monumentally misleading platitude, leading to despair if you ask me. As is the idea that love is sufficient for a marriage. It is institutions, not affection, which tie people together in the long run.

In the short run I was a double-agent, pretending to be interested in financial increase but actually with a rage for closeness. Where possible I didn’t sleep with the women, not wanting to provide my wife with an excuse for more indifference, claiming, when necessary, tightness in the chest, gout or high blood pressure.

It is true I am stout, have sciatica and cannot walk far, though the doctors encourage exercise for those recovering from heart attacks. Lengthy strolls with the girls around various country estates were sufficient to evoke longing, intimacy and fantasy in all concerned. It was their vulnerability I liked. Maybe I was playing Phillip’s role, being inaccessible, the one who never delivered, believing he had nothing to give.

I had been editing a book of ghost stories and desultorily writing episodes of TV dramas, to keep my hand in; work-in-regress you might call it. The other day a kind woman said to me, you artists are the lucky ones, knowing what you want to do and why you live, productive, praised and pursued by women. This struck through my indolent complacency, and I thought I might go back to serious scribbling, to see if there was something I might need to say that I couldn’t keep to myself.

Meanwhile, once a week, I work in a women’s prison. These are asylums by another name, and the unhappy women — ‘my murderesses’, I call them — raving, silent, gurning and drugged, sometimes like to report their misfortunes to me, occasionally writing them down. I can hardly think of a darker or more miserable business. Although each of us builds our own prison and then complains about the confinement and the food, I know I’ll never become accustomed to hearing those heavy keys turn in their locks. Thank God, even now I am capable still of rebelling against myself.

The Decline of the West

The tube journey had been one of the most desolate Mike had endured, and he’d been looking forward to opening the door into the warm hall, hearing the voices of his wife and children, and seeing the cat come down the stairs to rub itself against him.

Mike rarely worked less than twelve-hour days and it had been weeks since he’d got home this early. The au pair saw more of his house and family than he did.

He thought he should give his wife the news straight away, but Imogen passed him in the hall carrying a gin and tonic, saying she was going upstairs to have a bath. Mike pulled a frozen meal from the freezer and put it in the microwave. Waiting for it to heat up, he poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the long windows which overlooked the garden.

He had been intending to start reading about and collecting wine. Imogen had insisted a hobby would make him less restless; having recently given up smoking, wine would be some compensation.

He believed he was good at giving things up. Unlike some of his friends and colleagues, he could control himself, he wasn’t any sort of addict. But now that the financial system was out of control and today he had been fired, forsaking almost everything — including his idea of the future — was a different matter.

He switched on the garden lights and, looking out at the new deck where last summer they’d held barbecues, thought, ‘I paid for this with my time, intelligence, and the education the state provided me with.’ At the far end of the garden was a shed he’d had built for the boys to play music in, fitted with a TV, drum-kit and sound system. The kids had stopped using it before he’d hardly begun paying for it. Beyond that he could see into the bathrooms and bedrooms of other families much like theirs.

Situated on the comfortable outskirts of London, their house was narrow with five floors and off-street parking, overlooking a green. As the boys liked to point out, other children at their schools lived in bigger places; their fathers were the bosses of record companies or financial advisers to famous footballers. Mike, in corporate finance, was relatively small-time.

Still, he and Imogen had been seriously planning more work on the garden as well as the rest of the house. It was something they enjoyed doing together and, until recently, in this prosperous part of London, scores of skilled Polish labourers had been available. Most of Mike and Imogen’s friends had been continuously improving their properties. It had been a natural law: you never lost money on a house. Maybe Mike should have been more attentive to the fact that the shrewd Poles had begun to return home a year ago.

Mike put his plate on the hyper-shiny elegant dining-room table where he liked to have supper and talk with friends. Imogen, who for years had never knowingly ingested anything non-organic, would have already eaten with the children. From where he sat Mike had a good view of the two boys playing a violent video game on the family television.

His food wasn’t really edible: the rice was dried up, the prawns rubbery. The boys’ dirty plates were still on the table, which was otherwise covered in school books, pencil cases, a rucksack out of which a football kit was tumbling, and three £20 notes Imogen had left for the cleaner. Mike picked one of them up and looked at it closely. How had he never noticed what a sardonic little Mona Lisa smile the blinged-up monarch wore, mocking even, as if she pitied the vanity and greed the note inspired?

‘Mike, you’ve been stalked by good fortune your whole life,’ his father enjoyed saying to him — the father who only finished paying off his mortgage when he retired, but otherwise considered debt a moral failure. ‘In Kent where I lived as a child there were German bombs every night. You have suffered no such catastrophes, and no murders in the family. You’re one who escaped the twentieth century!’

But not the twenty-first. The word of the post-9/11 era, used interminably by politicians and psychologists, was ‘security’, and the more the country had appeared to be policed by men in fluorescent jackets with ‘Security’ stamped on the back, the more afraid Mike felt — with good reason, as it turned out. Having progressed to running a department of forty people, Mike’s current job was to execute the employees he had engaged and, in two weeks’ time, pack up and remove himself.

‘Take out your plate and wash it up,’ he called across to the fifteen-year-old, who was playing the game.

‘I did it yesterday,’ Tom replied.

‘It is your plate,’ said Mike. The boy ignored him. ‘And please turn that game off. Let’s watch the football or a comedy. I need to be cheered up tonight.’

‘Leave me alone,’ said the kid. ‘I’ve just started. When you’re here you never let me do anything. You’re so controlling.’

‘Ten minutes and it’s going off.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Go and waste your life in your own room.’

‘My television’s broken,’ said Tom. ‘Why don’t you get it fixed like you promised? What have you ever done for me?’

‘I’ve given you all I’ve got and always will do so.’

‘Are you joking? You’ve done nothing for me.’

The smaller boy, four years his brother’s junior, and who claimed to have hurt his foot, hopped across to Mike and rested his head on his shoulder. Mike put his arm around Billy and kissed him. The older boy would never let Mike or even his mother kiss him now.

Mike had found it entertaining that some of his colleagues had stated their intention of becoming gardeners until the recession lifted; apparently the only requirements were an empty head and a desire to develop your muscles. Others had said they might be forced into teaching. Mike, at forty-five, had no idea what he would do. First he had to lose everything.

Billy patted Mike on the back, saying, not without an element of patronisation, ‘I like you sometimes, Daddy. But I want guitar lessons. So first I’ll need the guitar and the amp, like Tom has.’

Family life could appear chaotic, but theirs was finely organised, with every hour accounted for. As well as attending private schools, his sons had, as far as Mike could recall, tennis, Spanish, piano, swimming, singing and karate lessons, and they frequently attended the cinema, the theatre and football matches. Like most of his friends and acquaintances, Mike’s debts were huge, worth almost two years’ income. But he had always considered them — when he did consider them — to be only another outgoing. Somehow, sometime in the mid-1980s debt stopped being shameful and after 1989 there appeared to be general agreement: capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, singing and spending.

Mike pushed his plate away. After supper he liked to retire to his room where he was studying Stravinsky, listening to his work piece by piece in the order of its composition while reading about the composer’s life. Once a fortnight he and his pals held a record group, playing music to one another. Recently an irksome sculptor in this gang had looked straight at Mike and mockingly referred to ‘the cult of money’, calling his profession and its office ethic ‘fundamentalist’, because ardent belief was paramount and doubt discouraged.

The sculptor held the condescending and false view that the imagination was only active in art. Mike had been furious but unable to dismiss from his mind the damned man’s remark with regard to how he lived his life. He wondered whether he’d become hard and, like the sculptor, incapable of thinking his way into others’ lives.

But he did reckon that the desire of the public to see bankers as thuggish, voracious philistines was simply the wish to separate the banking system from the rest of society, as people would prefer not to think of abattoirs while they were eating. Nonetheless, like many people, Mike had also worried whether the present catastrophe was punishment for years of extravagance and self-indulgence; that that was the debt which had to be paid back in suffering. Yet how could his family be considered despicable or guilty of this, when all they’d asked for was continuous material improvement?

Mike wandered across to the dishwasher, dropped in the lump of detergent, shut the door, tapped the start button and the world went black. The clock on the cooker stopped, its bright digits stuck on four round zeros; the microwave halted in mid-turn. All sound was suddenly suspended, apart from a dog barking in a nearby garden.

Out of that moment’s nothing the little boy’s voice called, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad — do something!’

Mike fumbled in a drawer for a torch, crossed the house and was eventually able to follow the beam down the rackety wooden steps into the basement. But in his stockinged feet on the slippery stair, he slipped and lost his footing. For a second he believed he was crashing onto his back and would break his neck. How easy it was to fall, and how tempting it was — suddenly would be best — to die!

Grabbing the rail, he steadied himself, took some breaths — smelling gas and rotting cardboard — and padded down to the concrete floor where he stood surrounded by paint cans, broken children’s toys, a decade’s worth of discarded purchases and bags of credit card receipts.

There in the semi-darkness, gripping and ungripping his fists, he wondered whether he might go mad with fury. He knew he would be shut out now from the company of those he knew and liked, becoming a sort of ‘disappeared’. He fantasised about informing the national newspapers of the idiocy and corruption in his office, betraying those narrow-minded fools as he had been betrayed. Failing lack of universal interest in that, he’d buy petrol, break in, burn the place down and see how the bastards liked it. But how long would he hate them for, and what effect would such extended hating have on him? Would he die of cancer? Like others he had actually believed he was an exception and would be spared!

Finding at last the little lever which made everything work again, he pulled it. There was a surge and their awful world started up once more with its humming and vibrating.

On his return to the light he couldn’t believe Tom had resumed murdering dark-skinned people in some sort of Third World landscape.

‘Turn it off right now!’ he shouted. ‘That’s enough!’

‘Bugger off.’

‘Tom please, I beg you. Go and do your homework. The world’s a filthy rough place run by jackals and murderers. You need to be prepared, if such a thing is possible!’

‘Leave me alone! Don’t ever talk to me again!’

Mike grabbed the boy and pulled him up out of the chair by his blue school shirt. ‘Do what I say sometimes!’

‘Fuck off, evil old man, just die! I’ve been wanting to do this all day!’

‘I never spoke to my father like that.’

‘Mum says you did.’

Tom was taller, stronger and fitter than Mike; for fun he sometimes put his father in a headlock and pulled him round the room.

‘Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!’ Mike yelled at the boy. He ripped the controller from Tom’s hand and threw it down. Tom lurched from his chair and made as to head-butt his father; Mike pushed him back in the chest and Tom stumbled and fell onto his backside. Mike swore again and then switched off the TV.

‘What’s going on? Is this good parenting?’ His wife, who appeared to dress in diamonds and gold when at lunch with her friends, came in wearing tracksuit bottoms, an old T-shirt and thick glasses, with white slippers she’d taken from a hotel. ‘Are you all right? What’s he done now?’ she said to Tom.

‘I think he’s broken my arm,’ said Tom, rubbing his elbow.

‘Your father’s mad,’ said Imogen.

‘He refused to turn off the game,’ said Mike. ‘He shows me neither love nor respect.’

‘How could he?’ she said. ‘It’s too late! You’ve spoiled and neglected him, you ridiculous, foolish man. And now you expect him to obey you!’

‘He tore my button right off,’ said Tom.

‘And who will sew it back on?’ said Imogen, staring at Mike.

She worked for a charity three days a week. Inevitably it was poorly paid, but she was the family conscience and Mike knew it was important to appear generous. Unlike some of his friends, he didn’t want a woman who worked as hard as him, a woman who was never at home.

Billy, who Mike wished wouldn’t grow up, but wanted to suspend at this age for ever, reiterated, ‘Stop arguing and tell me whether we’re definitely going to get my guitar on Saturday!’

‘I know I did say we would,’ said Mike. ‘But I’ll have to think about it.’

‘You were in a band. What were they called?’

‘The Strange Trousers.’

‘What a stupid name for a band,’ called Tom, who was now texting furiously.

Mike said, ‘So is the name of your group, Sixty-Nine, when you don’t even know what that is.’

‘I do. And you haven’t had a sixty-nine for years, old man, and never will again.’

‘Wait until you get married.’

Imogen said, ‘You promised Billy a guitar, an amp and a microphone, so now you have to deliver.’

‘Just call me the Delivery Man,’ said Mike. ‘That’s my name. But even you might have noticed there’s a financial crash taking place.’

‘Ha! Any excuse to let people down.’

‘Indeed — that’s all I’ve ever done. But what about you?’ he said to her. ‘What do you want to get next?’

‘Thank you for asking. I’ve been telling you for weeks I need a new computer,’ she said.

‘I’ll get you the latest desktop Apple,’ he said. ‘With a printer, and maybe the newest iPod. Everyone should have what they want whenever they want it. Why don’t I make a list so I don’t forget anyone?’

She poured herself another drink. ‘At last — some sense! Things are moving forward here!’

Having begun to feel ‘unfulfilled’, she was planning to train as a therapist; it would take at least three years, and he had agreed not only to pay her fees but to support her while she studied. ‘Once I’m earning,’ she argued, ‘this whole family will be much better off.’ Everything he spent on her was an investment. This would have to be rethought. And to think, before this collapse, he had been hoping to earn enough in the next few years to keep them secure for life.

As he got up she said, ‘You washed the other dishes but you forgot to take these plates out.’ Mike collected all the plates and took them to the sink. She continued, ‘You know, with your habits you should have married someone less house-proud, someone with lower standards all round.’

She wouldn’t see he liked scrupulousness and order more as he got older. They employed their Bulgarian cleaner three times a week; the woman was pregnant but sweated furiously as she scrubbed and carried, afraid of losing her job to someone else.

Mike and his wife considered themselves to be equals and there was no way Imogen would now wash the kitchen floor, clean their four toilets or vacuum the house. Since capitalism was cracking under the weight of its contradictions as the Marxists had predicted — neither the communists or Islamists being responsible for its collapse — the family would have to find a smaller place, sharing the household duties like everyone else. If there was no comfort, what then were the consolations of capitalism? If there was no moral accretion, nor any next life, why would anyone support it?

‘Come on,’ Imogen said to Tom. ‘We’ll do your French homework in your room.’

‘I’ll read to Billy,’ Mike said. ‘Are you ready, little boy?’

Once Billy had cleaned his teeth and got into his pyjamas, they would lie on the big bed and chat, with the boy’s head in Mike’s chest; or they’d mock-fight, sing or read until the kid, and usually Mike, fell asleep. It was the part of the day Mike enjoyed most.

Imogen stroked Mike’s head before picking up Tom’s rucksack and French text book. Mike said, ‘Darling, a shitty thing happened at work.’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘We should talk later.’

‘Is it attention you’re after?’ she said.

She and Tom were going up the stairs, Tom giggling at a funny incident at school.

‘Please, Imogen,’ Mike called.

‘Later, if I’m still awake,’ she said. ‘Or tomorrow.’

‘Tonight, I think.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Anyway, when I’m less worn out by everything.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready let me know.’

A Terrible Story

When Eric slammed the front door it was cold outside and raining hard. With winter already coming, he was reluctant to go out. But he’d said he’d meet Jake at seven and he couldn’t let him down. Not that he had far to go; it took Eric five minutes to get to his local place.

He hurried into the bright, warm and almost-empty café, hung up his coat and sat down. The waiters knew him and brought him the wine he liked without his having to ask. Eric went there most days, to read the paper, make phone calls and work on his computer.

He drank half a glass of wine straight off, to calm himself down after arguing with his wife a few minutes earlier. She and their nine-year-old son had been at the kitchen table doing the boy’s homework, but, having had a glass of wine, Eric had felt inspired to expatiate on the current political situation. His wife told him to shut up, and he hadn’t wanted to; he had something pressing to say. His wife asserted he always had something important to say at the wrong time. Didn’t he want his son to succeed or would the boy be a cretin like his father? The spat accelerated. ‘You don’t listen to me!’ ‘You don’t speak at the right time, when we want to hear you!’ ‘You’re never receptive!’ ‘You’re a fool!’

Eric shuddered and giggled, as he thought of the two of them freely insulting one another, and the boy looking on.

He missed them and, in truth, wasn’t excited about seeing Jake, whom he didn’t know well. They had met through a mutual acquaintance three years before at the Jazz Café in Camden, and found they both liked Miles Davis’s ‘electric’ period, as well as Norwegian jazz of the last decade. They always discussed this with some pleasure, along with Liverpool football club, their enthusiasm for jukeboxes, stand-up comedians, and their families, and went home relatively contented. Jake had been generous; he worked in IT and although he travelled a lot, he still found time to ‘burn’ obscure CDs for Eric and post them to him. Eric worked in film publicity and did what he could to obtain DVDs of the latest movies for Jake and his family.

As both their wives were interested in psychology, they had planned, last Christmas, to go to Jake’s flat for lunch to meet his wife and girls, but it fell through.

Now Eric glimpsed Jake scurrying towards the café. They shook hands and Jake sat down.

‘How are you, sir? It’s been too long,’ Jake said. ‘Was the last time at the beginning of the year? It was probably February. I remember I had the prawns. I need a beer badly. Will you join me or are you all right with that?’

‘Yes, I’m on white wine now,’ said Eric. ‘I consider it part of my new diet, which I’ve been enduring for three months.’

‘Congratulations!’

‘I haven’t lost one ounce. I was always a thin kid. I took myself for granted.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I’m complacent.’

Jake said, ‘It’s not going well?’

‘Last night the wife and I had an orgy involving a packet of chocolate biscuits, so I’ve had a terrible day, the guilt like a dagger. But I have started exercising. I run, or amble, rather, by the canal, listening to that great music you send me. And you? What’s your news?’

Jake had put on the glasses which hung around his neck from a string, and was looking eagerly at the menu. Eric guessed that Jake was a little older than him, about forty-five probably. Jake had seemed stolid, large, but now looked somewhat scrawny, with the collar of his shirt too big for his neck. Had he shrunk in some way? Resembling an ageing professor, he had always been more earnest than Eric, with a more literal character. You’d have to be such a type to adore so much the icy longing and melancholy of Norwegian jazz.

‘You have lost weight,’ said Eric. ‘Much more than me. I envy you.’

‘I’m glad. That’s good news at last.’

‘What about you? What have you been listening to? Anything new?’

‘I haven’t had any concentration recently,’ said Jake. ‘It’s been crazy, tragic. I promise I’ll get some new stuff to you next month.’

‘I’d love that. I get so bored, don’t you?’

‘Do you want the menu?’

‘I already know what I want,’ said Eric.

‘Okay. Can we order? I’m starving.’

Eric called the waiter over; they ordered a beer for Jake and food for both of them.

‘Eric, why did you ask me if I get bored?’

‘Perhaps because the last time we met you mentioned that things were not good between you and your wife, though they sounded normal to me. She refused to come across and you’d decided to become celibate for a while. A harsh deprivation, but not the most unusual suffering.’

‘Yes, I remember telling you I was prepared to endure it until she recovered. She’d begun therapy with a Jungian, I think I said. Eccentric but not too weird.’

‘It amuses me,’ said Eric. ‘He slept with his patients.’

‘What?’ said Jake. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘Jung, if I remember rightly, was different in that respect to Freud, who didn’t mess around. Yet Freud said sexuality was the main thing, and Jung insisted it wasn’t.’

Jake said, ‘My wife had always wanted to study so I agreed to support her while she had therapy and trained to be a psychologist — though such a wish is said to be in most cases a sure sign of mental instability —’

‘Of course.’

‘But not always?’

‘Oh it is, always,’ said Eric, calling for another glass of wine.

Jake went on, ‘My wife sneers at Scandinavian jazz music, in particular the Lord of the Rings names — Frode, Arve, Arild, Siguard. But her weakness is for dresses, like my sweet girls. She claims what she wears makes her mood, so she has filled the flat with them.’

‘With her moods?’

Jake laughed. ‘Unlike your wife, she is expensive.’

‘Tell me,’ said Eric. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask this. Do you organise your music in terms of the artist, the year, the country, or something else? Personally I like to keep my artists together, it almost sexually excites me.’

Jake laughed. ‘I organise by artist, but in special cases by label. But there’s no doubt these are demanding and sometimes terrible decisions.’ He went on, ‘Not that I’ve had time to do any filing.’

‘Why is that — too much work?’

‘My mother died.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Eric. ‘That’s tough.’

‘Thanks. And a few days before she passed on, Julie decided to tell me she liked the therapist, she loved him. He was wise, intelligent and he understood everything about her.’

Their food came and they began to eat.

‘Why is it I like the food so much in this mediocre place?’ said Jake.

‘Next time,’ said Eric, ‘as you always come all the way to me, we should eat at your local.’

‘Yes, we must do that,’ Jake said. ‘Eric, I know little about therapy, but I had heard that affection for the quack was part of the process. It was natural, if not normal. It was the cure.’

‘Amazing,’ said Eric. ‘I have always fancied being hypnotised. Have you tried it?’

‘Are you saying you think I need it?’

‘I have no idea if you do. I think I do!’

Jake said, ‘Julie was becoming impatient with my Jung jokes. She knew about the theory of idealising the therapist. She said it wasn’t just that. She was, in fact, actually sleeping with him.’

‘You’re kidding? With the actual Jungian?’

‘She said she wanted to be with him. He wanted to be with her. She said we all have an ideal, and at last she had found him.’

‘Jake, are you only having a starter?’ said Eric with concern. ‘Will it be enough for you?’

‘I haven’t had an appetite lately, so this is welcome. I’m going to scoff all the bread too.’ Jake went on, ‘I told Julie this was madness. I would have to report the therapist to the authorities for the sake of other patients. But the main thing was the cohesion of our family. The well-being of the girls at home with us. They’re young — nine and seven.’

‘That was tolerant if not noble of you,’ said Eric. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told me I had to find my own place as soon as possible. Well, I was quite sick after hearing this.’

‘Oh God, Jake.’

‘The day after I had to leave town to be with mother for the last week of her life. While I was down there with her, doing this awful duty at her bedside, I spoke to Julie and the girls on the phone. They were concerned about me. It was as if nothing had happened. I hoped nothing had happened. But it had, Eric. It had definitely happened. “Did you find somewhere to live?” asked my wife. “You’re kidding, how can I right now,” I said, “when Mother is taking her last breath?”

‘Almost the moment Mother died I came back straight away. I had a feeling, you know. When I got home my wife had left, with the girls. She had gone to the small town in France where her mother and family lived.’

Eric said, ‘I think women often prefer their mothers to their children.’

Jake pushed his plate away and said, ‘I need another drink. You?’

‘Please.’

‘When I dashed to this beautiful country place — where I’ve been often and which I like very much — Julie was hostile, almost insane with hatred. I said the children barely speak French, they must come home, they need their school, their friends. This is all too sudden.’

‘Of course.’

‘Has this ever happened to you — that someone you think you know intimately has changed beyond recognition? She was cold and formal, as if talking to someone she didn’t know. I’d always liked her, though she had her problems. I liked her voice. She was curious, and interested in gardens. I wanted to make one with her, helping her. But I realised she’d gone somewhere else. Her eyes were dead now, Eric.

‘She said she wasn’t sure what they were going to do, but she thought she’d return to London with the girls as the grandparents were becoming irritable. I was relieved until she said she was intending to set up home with the therapist. He was waiting for her — making his arrangements. I hated to think of it, Eric, this stranger making “arrangements” to replace me in my family.’

‘Christ, Jake, this is heavy. This is bad news, a punch in the gut. Don’t talk so fast, you’ll give yourself indigestion.’

‘That’s the least of it,’ he said. ‘Julie reassured me by saying this man got on well with children. But they couldn’t move in together until the house was sold, as the therapist didn’t have any money. His practice was small. He’s younger than her, just starting out.’

‘You were going to be forced out of your own house?’

‘Yes, can you believe it? Where would I put everything?’

‘This conversation took place in France?’

‘Didn’t I say? In an old house, a couple of hundred years at least. I was there to ask if the girls would be able to attend their grandmother’s funeral, but Julie refused, saying I might abduct them. She said she’d already informed the French and British police that I might attempt something with them! I was forbidden to be alone in their company as if I had suddenly become a monster. How did I become evil overnight? The girls kept asking when they were going home. But I couldn’t tell them the truth.

‘And then there, with the bewildered maternal grandparents looking on, my previously silent youngest daughter took her violin from its little case and sawed out a squeaky tune for us. By the end tears were pouring down my face. When I left they watched me from the window, crying out “Daddy, Daddy!”

‘I returned to England, saw mother into her grave, and went back to work. I sold the Audi A5 and bought a second-hand Astra, hired lawyers and, to help pay them, took a lodger, a girl who would also clean the place because I had fears about neglect — of the place, and of myself. My wife had also emptied our joint bank account. Do you have one?’

‘Now you mention it, I do. Thanks for bringing it up.’

‘Julie came back to London — and to the house — to pick up some of her clothes. When she arrived she discovered the lodger, a young Czech girl.

‘I said Julie’s personality has become strange and unnatural. That is madness, I guess. But to give you an illustration, in the house she begins to abuse this poor girl when she discovers a bed in her former study. She starts to cry out that I’m a scum and an alcoholic and a paedophile — as well as a thief and the rest of it. She was loud. The girl is horrified and also looks at me with a very nervous curiosity.

‘But what do you say — “I’m not a paedophile alcoholic”? It’s nuts for me to have to hear this, I can’t begin to defend myself except to say, “Please, please try to control yourself.”’

Jake was looking at Eric. ‘Are you thinking there must be something crazy about that Jake, he must have chosen badly? Are you? Are you? How come he didn’t notice he’d married a mad woman? How could anyone miss such a thing? But she has never behaved like this before! Perhaps it’s called regression. Anyway, she had hidden it well.

‘Julie was horrified that the girl was in her room. I could tell she was going to spit on her! I asked the girl to get out, I would deal with it. Julie picked up handfuls of things at random and flew out of the house. I could see her from the window, scattering clothes in the street, trying to carry too much at once.’

There was a silence. ‘Well, thank God,’ said Eric. ‘You needed time to think.’ Jake sighed. Eric said, ‘Those prawns looked good. But I enjoyed my salad, oddly enough, and I’ve always considered eating salad to be a form of failure.’

‘I know what you mean.’

Eric said, ‘What happened after, Jake?’

‘Come.’

Jake wanted to smoke, so the two men put on their coats and stood outside under the café awning, watching people rush through the rain.

Jake said, ‘Obviously there was information I needed to have, so I sought out as many of her friends as I could find. It shook me, as some were violently rude. One said, “I hope the girls hate you when they’re older.” What had she been telling them about me?

‘But there was one friend of hers I was able to get through to. Let me add that having been made crazy and almost violent and suicidal, I had to make a huge effort to pretend to be sane. If I gave anyone the idea that circumstances had made me totally crazy, the whole catastrophe would appear to be down to my craziness. Crazy, eh?

‘Julie’s friend admitted Julie was in London, spending time with the therapist, working out what to do. Apparently it had been going on for some time. Julie had said to me on a couple of occasions, “You’re having an affair,” and wouldn’t tolerate my denials. The deeper truth became obvious.

‘I rang Julie, hoping to contact the reasonable side of her, and delivered a monologue to the answering machine saying we should meet and talk honestly.

‘That evening I came home and she was there, Julie, asleep in my — our — bed, can you believe it? My heart pounded. I thought, she’s back, her old self, the past eradicated.

‘When I got closer I saw she was not asleep, but drugged, perhaps on tranqs or painkillers, I don’t know what, with an untreated cut on her forehead. She didn’t take illegal drugs. Did she want to kill herself, or did she want to sleep?

‘I carried her to the toilet, made her sick and put her back to bed. I lay next to her. I took her in my arms and kissed and caressed her. I looked at her breasts and touched them, remembering how I loved them. The aureoles, is that how you say it? The aureoles were smiling at me.’

‘Were they really?’

‘I thought of how I had nursed Mum as she shrank to her bald head and bones in that hospital bed.

‘I thought of the fine and funny times Julie and I and the girls had had as a family.

‘When Julie woke up she tried to speak. Her voice was cracked, frail. “Things are not good, Jake,” she said.

“‘Why aren’t you with your darling lover?”’ I asked her.

‘She turned her head away and wept. All I could do was guess the lover had kind of backed out. Who wouldn’t have been delighted? Who wants a filthy corrupt therapist around his children? A man who can fuck his own patient can fuck anyone!’

‘Yes.’

‘But I kept my mouth shut while she cried, the woman I still love and have wanted more than any other.’

Eric said, ‘Didn’t you think of asking her to go back to you?’

‘I love and hate her, but I don’t know if she wants any more of me now. At last she confirmed the therapist had left her. But there was something else. She said that the therapist’s wife, who was pregnant —’

‘Did Julie know that?’

‘I’m not sure. I tend to doubt it. Anyway, when the pregnant Jungian’s wife was told about the affair, she went to the balcony, threw herself over head first, and died.’

‘Oh God,’ said Eric, rubbing his eyes and forehead. ‘This is getting too much. I can hardly believe it.’

‘You’re telling me. Yes, he had lost his child after depriving me of mine.’ Jake began to laugh. ‘People keep telling me to have therapy,’ he said. ‘That’s surely a joke!’ Then he said, ‘After this the man refused to see Julie so she went and waited outside his door.

She slept there all night on the step like a dog until she almost froze. In the morning, when he came out, she pursued him, he pushed her over and she tripped and hit her poor head. He tried to run away. She started to shout and he called the police.

‘Before they came he said he would never see her again. It was her fault. He was inexperienced and she had seduced him when he was most vulnerable and open to female flattery. He had been a fool — he was human too — but she had been ruthlessly malevolent, evil even, having destroyed his life and ruined the lives of several people.’

‘Indeed.’

‘She was broken by the accusation, having done nothing, she said, but fall passionately and irrevocably in love for the first time in her life. How could that be a crime?’

Jake and Eric returned to their table and Eric asked for the bill. ‘I’ll get this,’ he said.

Jake said, ‘In the morning Julie got on the train back to France.’

‘Jake, what will you do now?’

‘The lawyers have smelled blood, so I made the decision to write to my friends and ask them, outright, for money,’ he said. ‘I’m still working, but I need funds for the train fare to France some weekends where I can stay in a little hotel and spend a few hours with my daughters, in order that they don’t forget me. While I try to get custody I have to survive, otherwise I will be on the street.’

Eric paid the bill and they went outside. They shook hands, Eric put up his umbrella and Jake said, ‘Can we meet again next week, or if that’s too soon for you, the week after? Would that be okay? If I don’t talk there’ll be another death.’

‘Yes, yes, call me any time,’ said Eric.

‘How is your family?’ Jake said.

‘All fine, thanks. My son is becoming rather a good footballer.’

‘You are lucky. You are blessed.’

Eric noticed it was only around ten o’clock when he got back to the house. He locked the door behind him, something he never usually did, and crept in, certain his wife and son would be asleep.He took off his shoes and went upstairs. His wife was indeed asleep, wearing his new pullover, on the edge of the bed, with his son sprawled across the middle. The little space left was occupied by their two cats.

Eric perched on the edge of the bed, looking at them both. Then he opened the curtains so there was sufficient moonlight for him to see to kiss them.

He wondered what Eric would do when he got home — look at photographs of his lost family?

The boy was nine, and he was heavy, but Eric picked him up and carried him to his bed. Then he got into his own bed and stayed awake for as long as he could, listening to his wife’s breathing and waiting for the morning light.