Inglorious

QUEST

Then it was October, four months had passed, and she was really out on a limb. Things had followed a clear course. She was persistent and she stripped herself down. It was amazing how quickly it happened. All those years on the train, rushing in and out of the city, and before long much had changed. Once you cut a thread, the tapestry unravelled. They waved you off — no one minded at all. Sure, they were saying, laughing into their hands, go off and find yourself. Whatever, excavate that navel of yours. Delve deeply into your inner being. Try to grasp the secret of the universe, find a reason for all this perversity and violence and chaos. Oh yes, you take as long as you like! We’re sure you’ll crack it! You were free, of course, free to sink. She had a few fathoms to go; she hadn’t plunged the furthest depths. Still, she had not quite managed to float. Revelations had been withheld, yet she was still ambitious. Meanwhile she had drifted into a state of insolvency, and that had become the most pressing element of her life and a burden on her thoughts.

She was out on the street because she was going to the bank. It was early and she was walking slowly with her hands in her pockets. In the half-light of a misty morning, she saw the concrete buttresses of the Westway and the shining hides of successive cars. Beneath it she saw — at first indeterminate and then coming closer — the shape of Sandra Whitchurch. Whitchurch was walking towards her, blameless in a grey suit. She was walking with her feet turned outwards, it lent a waddle to her motions, and she still had her hunted look. It was strange she was there, on the wrong side of town, clearly late for something. She was moving steadily, looking at her watch as she walked. She looked nervous, it was something in the motion of her head. Rosa had always liked Whitchurch’s nerves. Whitchurch was the sort who trembled when she smiled. She poured you coffee, her hands shaking. If you looked at her too long, preserved a pause, she shivered. At the sight of her, Rosa tried to run. It was poor behaviour, but she couldn’t help it. Certainly it was futile, she got stranded in the middle of the road and knew immediately the game was up. She was preparing an innocent phrase as Whitchurch raised her head and saw her. It crossed her body, a spasm of fear. It was clearly ironic to think about Whitchurch’s nerves when she was trembling at the prospect of a conversation. It was an overreaction. Irrational, of course.

Whitchurch had only been kind to her. After she crept out of her office and crawled out of her flat, she spent some time on the sofa in Whitchurch’s flat, in a sliced-up house in Angel. The sofa was clearly the axis mundi, Rosa realised, as she lay there day after day with her eyes on the ceiling. She found she was nervous and excited, and in the mornings she was so tired she could hardly stand. This made her think she might have something, some explicable disease that could be treated with drugs, but after a few days she felt OK again. Then she tried to sell her possessions, putting adverts in shop windows. No one really wanted used clothes and books and CDs, unless they were antique or collectible. In the area she lived in, people gave things away, offered them out like indulgences, so she did that too, taking stuff in big black bags to Oxfam. She didn’t mind losing some of the clutter she had been dragging around. She had given away all of her books, except Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and the complete works of Shakespeare. When she wasn’t reading these, she sat in the library using the Internet, typing in web addresses. This didn’t do much, but it made her feel industrious. Before it got so cold she had spent the summer sitting in parks, and that had been much better. Really it had been like a holiday; it had lulled her into a false sense of security. She had thought she could do it for ever, passing days in Regent’s Park, watching people pushing prams and rabbits scuffling on the grass and squirrels moving along the branches. She was all for aping Rousseau, marshalling her thoughts in a series of walks. The marshalling hadn’t happened, but she had at least walked. It had been a proper summer Eden, but the autumn cast her out.

It was Whitchurch’s honesty that had done for her. Better had she lied like the others. Poor Whitchurch, blushing and talking very fast, had told her just what Liam and Grace were doing. It was the greatest revelation Rosa had so far experienced, this jangling echo from the life she had left. In August, good kind Whitchurch had spilled it all, supplied some surprising details, and then she had walked with Rosa to Tottenham Court Road asking her if she was going to be OK, apologising so sweetly and sadly for being the one to bring her the news. Liam and Grace were in love. Better still, they were getting married, in a public ceremony. No one had condemned them! Rosa was naturally surprised, and then she was incoherent and eventually silent. She knew that she had been deceived, but she was dull-witted and she couldn’t remember much. She restrained herself in Whitchurch’s presence, and this sterling repression left her spitting choler after Whitchurch had shot her a final look of compassion and gone back to the office. For a week Whitchurch’s compassion was so mighty and terrible that Rosa thought she might be crushed by the weight of it. Then she heard that Jess had a spare room, so she offered Whitchurch thanks, and moved to Kensal Rise.

Now Rosa felt a brief pang, thinking of how her life had thinned out, how she had whittled it down to the basics. She had lost sight of Whitchurch and so many others. For a while she had missed her, and yet now she fled when she saw her. Would it be so terrible, to meet a Whitchurch, she wondered? The woman looked benign, moving purposefully, checking her watch. She was carrying a heavy bag, leaning slightly to one side. Here she came, lugubrious with her heavy limbs. Moving to her own personal pace, in her own decelerated version of a hurry, Whitchurch walked on. She nodded to Rosa and Rosa nodded back. Then they were a foot away from each other, and someone had to speak. So Rosa said ‘Hi, Sandra’ thinking it was best to start.

‘Rosa, how are you?’ Whitchurch wasn’t sure whether to kiss her or clasp her hand, so in the end she did neither and they stood with their arms at their sides.

‘Very well, how are you?’ said Rosa. She was determined to be jovial, and so she managed a smile and stood there, quite lock-jawed with the strain of holding it. Whitchurch was equally determined, her eyes wide open, nodding vividly.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Just off to a meeting. Somewhere around here. At Westbourne Studios, is it far?’

‘No,’ said Rosa. ‘You’re very close. Just a few streets further and then cross a footbridge.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said Whitchurch. ‘I’d begun to wonder if I’d be wandering around all day.’

Rosa laughed too loudly, lifting her head and catching an observant glimmer in Whitchurch’s eyes. Indeed, as she laughed, she noticed Whitchurch looking her up and down, aiming to assess her. ‘So, what are you up to?’ said Whitchurch.

With unconvincing nonchalance, she rubbed her eye with a finger. That smudged her mascara, and Rosa wasn’t sure if she should tell her.

‘Oh, you know, looking for work.’

‘Are you still living up in Kensal Rise?’

She meant it well enough, so Rosa smiled and said, ‘Yes, still with Jess. She’s been very kind. Her boyfriend is great too, very welcoming. They seem a happy couple.’ That was flannel, superfluous to requirements. She was trying to emit bonhomie, but something wasn’t right.

‘Good,’ said Whitchurch.

She screwed up her face so it cratered like the moon. She was sweating at the collar. Whitchurch was like a beast, come out to graze in the morning light. She had the thick thighs of a venerable woman, the sort of woman who does a lot of work and never has time for the gym. Rosa appreciated the ample curves of Whitchurch, and then, aware that they had both paused, silence had slung a lasso around them, she said, ‘And how are you, Sandra? How’s work?’

Whitchurch moved towards her. Now her large, friendly face was close to Rosa’s. She had healthy red skin, freckles on her nose, and a few white blotches on her neck. Her brows had been plucked into oblivion, her follicles had been purged. Her skin was lined, but the lines were soft, quite pretty, and they bracketed her mouth and set off her eyes. She was a handsome woman, but the sight of her waggling her pruned brows, smiling urgently, unnerved Rosa and she stepped back.

‘Work is great,’ said Whitchurch.

‘Why great?’

Whitchurch shrugged her shoulders. This she did with some effort, because her bag looked heavy. Rosa thought she wouldn’t stop for long.

‘Oh, everything’s going well, as ever. Lots of big clients in town this week, so it’s very busy.’

‘I should let you go,’ said Rosa.

Whitchurch glanced at her watch. ‘Oh, well, a couple of minutes will be all right,’ she said. She licked her lips, her malleable mouth. A couple of minutes — time for what? A bus moaned past, causing Whitchurch to raise her voice. That tightened her consonants, made them sibilant. Time for a quiet confession. ‘I haven’t seen you for a while, since you moved out. I felt like the messenger who got shot,’ said Whitchurch.

Well, it was true. ‘No, no, Sandra, not at all,’ said Rosa, trying to smile. ‘I’m glad you told me. At first I was surprised, but now I’m well on the way to understanding.’ Quite en route to something like acceptance, though her hands bled sweat as she talked. She understood that Grace had merely been a purgative. She had forced the issue. That was the best way to think of it, and, in her finer moments, Rosa did. There was something about it that concerned her, all the same. It was a sense of coincidence, the curious chances of their meeting, that if Rosa’s mother had never died then Rosa would never have talked drunkenly to Grace and embarked upon such an intense friendship with her, and Grace would never have come round to the flat all the time and Liam would never have fallen in love with her. It was a shocking run of coincidences, as if the fates had been conspiring. But Rosa, unsure if there were fates anyway, couldn’t unearth it, and this was what perplexed her. There were days when she thought that Liam must have been looking for a way out, to fall so deeply in love with the first new friend who came to their flat. She couldn’t work it out, though undoubtedly it lent another layer of significance to those evenings when Grace sat in their flat, telling them they were ‘fatally stuck’, that they needed a ‘swift transition, a mutual release’. Grace with her legs curled up, toying with her food, because Grace was so full of ideas that she hardly ever ate. Rosa had believed it all. She wanted Grace to tell her what she was. And Liam was just a sucker for a beautiful woman who spoke in whirling subordinate clauses.

Whitchurch was waiting, and Rosa said, ‘I’ve just been hiding out from everyone. I set myself some ambitious targets. Initially I was whipping through them, but recently I’ve had to focus on work, jobs, you know. My money ran out. The rest is ignominious.’

That made Whitchurch nod in a distracted way.

‘Good, good,’ she said. ‘Because I wouldn’t want to think you blamed me for anything.’

‘No, no, I only blame myself.’ And Liam, Grace, my parents dead and alive, Yabalon and the laws of the universe. But mostly myself. ‘Really, I’m sorting things out. Perhaps we could meet up, when everything’s less chaotic. I can explain it all in tedious detail.’

Whitchurch nodded again, and scrutinised her watch.

‘Same numbers, you know how to reach me. Are you — perhaps you aren’t — are you going to their wedding?’

‘Their wedding,’ said Rosa, aware of her voice rising, tightening, for all her efforts to suppress the signs. Shrilly, squawking like an exotic bird, she said, ‘No no, I won’t be going. They did invite me. But I have to go away on Friday. It is this Friday, isn’t it?’ she added, wanting to sound uncertain. Whitchurch nodded. ‘Well, other things to do. You know, send them my best. I have already, but you know, never hurts.’ And she laughed. She laughed as if she might be about to choke.

‘OK, of course,’ said Whitchurch. Now she was turning to leave. Whither Whitchurch, thought Rosa, and then she thought hwaer cwom Whitchurch. She had treated Whitchurch badly. It would be impossible to reignite that friendship. For death, people made allowances. But only for so long. And for the rest, the rest was chaff. Rosa’s crustacean mores hadn’t impressed them at all. She had kept herself under a rock and now they had stopped trying to prise her out.

‘You know, everyone misses you,’ said Whitchurch.

‘I miss them,’ said Rosa.

‘They feel awkward, of course.’ That was because of Liam, she thought. Really he had made the whole thing like a gladiatorial contest. She had been preoccupied and she hadn’t bothered to state her case. Meanwhile, he had conducted a briefing campaign against her. He was guilty, or angry she had wasted so many years of his life, anyway he had been telling everyone she was crazy and sad. It made them reluctant to see her. And if by chance they did see her, it made them look holy, which was what Whitchurch was doing now. Whitchurch was a font of holy-watered concern. ‘I’ve been useless, I know,’ said Rosa. ‘I’ve been out of touch with everyone.’

‘Well, they’re still around,’ said Whitchurch. ‘You could go and see them sometime.’

Rosa said, ‘Oh yes, that. I see,’ and smiled faintly. ‘Yep, I’ll go round and see them sometime.’ The conversation was fading fast and she let it fade.

‘Anyway, in the interim, tell them I said hi,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Liam and Grace, when you see them. And anyone else who … you know, you’d like to tell I said hi,’ she said.

‘That’s confusing,’ said Whitchurch, smiling. ‘But I’ll try my best. Now I really have to go.’

‘Yes, of course. Oh, and, Sandra,’ she said, urgently, as Whitchurch turned away.

But Whitchurch was glancing at her watch. ‘Yes?’

And she wondered what she wanted to say. I’m sorry? Thank you? Or perhaps she really did have a message to give her, something to tell Liam and Grace as they walked down the aisle to the altar. I wish you all the luck in the world. I love you both, in an eternal and profound sense. I forgive everything. I hope you forgive me. Unlikely, she thought. Highly unlikely. I damn you to hell! The pair of you! Cowards and traitors! Unlikely she would say that either. So she stopped and wheezed gently for a moment. Instead she said, vaguely, ‘Good to see you. Hope your meeting goes well.’

‘Of course, Rosa.’

And Whitchurch walked slowly onwards. Still, the sight of Whitchurch had summoned the lot of them. Liam and Grace and the rest. Liam and Grace, those servants of Cupid, kept occurring to her as she went along the road. She moved quickly to avoid an oncoming rush of people, recent fugitives from a commuter train. They seeped along the streets, towards the maze of their working lives. A man tripped her and she stumbled and stretched out her hands. That made her collide with a boy wearing headphones who slurred something she didn’t hear. And he didn’t hear her when she asked him what he meant, so they both dropped their eyes and walked on.

*

She had found in recent months that her thoughts were undisciplined, and tended to swirl towards the things that pained her — unless she kept her mind on practicalities and trivia. So she was thinking of that pair of beauties, Liam and Grace in the back of a mini cab, sitting very close to each other, while Rosa argued with the driver and smirked at them. She raised her eyebrows at them and they smiled back. They were all tired, coming home from a party. It was almost light, the stars were fading in the sky. Perhaps the birds were already singing. She couldn’t remember, but there they were — legs touching? hands? — with Rosa in the front, drunk and even happy! She was oblivious to nuance. Grace was staying the night, because she lived in Tulse Hill and it was too far to go. She had stayed a few times, sleeping in their living room on the sofa bed. Really Rosa had no idea how long it had been going on for. She didn’t care to think. Still, when she remembered Grace in the living room with her hair in plaits and her lovely head on a borrowed pillow she wondered whether Liam had left their bed that night, and crept in to see Grace? She imagined their efforts to be quiet, their nerves, their excitement. They were a fine pair, physically; she had seen them both naked many times. Liam more, of course. But she knew the contours of Grace’s body too. Once their friendship flourished, they swam together a few times a week. Grace had small thighs, long arms, an elegant back. Her skin was tanned. She had a tiny, beautiful body and delightful breasts. All the right curves and shadows. She was definitely in her prime. She was a little short for some, but people admired her. Even with all of this, even with her fully realised sense of their bodies, Rosa couldn’t quite summon the vision, the final — my eyes! my eyes! — image of them in the living room, passionate and entwined. They had officially announced themselves a few weeks after she left. That left two plausible interpretations — unfaithfulness or a rebound so spectacular that it was surprising Liam hadn’t cracked his skull. Either way she had been a fool. She had noticed nothing at the time; she was preoccupied. Grace dropping round, bringing her bread and bottles of wine, had seemed like simple kindness. The suddenness of their friendship had seemed part of the bizarre pattern of events after her mother’s death. She hadn’t thought it through; her mind wasn’t clear at the time. Still, Liam’s anger and frustration suggested he had been eager for the next stage. He was tired out, perhaps bored. And Grace was waiting there, beautiful, courageous, full of vitality.

*

The wedding was close now, only days away. She had received an invitation a few weeks ago, an impressive gold-embossed piece of luxury card, ‘Mr and Mrs Bosworth would like to invite you to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Grace Maria to Liam Robert Peters.’ Mr and Mrs Bosworth would like to invite you to celebrate the triumph of their conniving offspring Grace Maria misnamed for holiness by optimistic parents to Liam Lothario Peters. She never liked it when the parents invited you along. It was plain tacky. All that conspicuous bumf and litter came with a set of directions to the church and some friendly suggestions for hotels in London which began ‘London, as most of you will know, is a very expensive city!’ There was even a note about presents. ‘If you would like to buy Grace and Liam a present …’ She thought she wouldn’t like to. Not really at all. Later Liam wrote her a letter. ‘Rosa, I know you are hurt. But I would really like you to be there. It’s of course up to you. Whatever you feel able to do.’ Able to do! The scandal of his lazy prose! Raging and trying to conceal it, she sent him a short email. ‘Will think about it — R.’ He wrote back with an email gush, the sort of disposable rubbish people pound out between one meeting and the next. ‘I’m so glad to hear you will. We can hardly wait to see you there. With love, as always, Liam.’ He sounded like a parody, as if he had entered a competition to sound as plastic and inanimate as he could, like a replicant pretending to be a human, but that was ages ago anyway. It had been weakness to write anything at all. At least she had pared it down, from a letter eloquent with rage. Dear Liam, You write to me as if I am an invalid, recovering from an unfortunate ailment. Perhaps my belief in your steadfastness was my sickness, from which I am mercifully cured. It went on, a violent torrent, and if Liam was a replicant she was a failed nineteenth-century novelist, spilling out melodrama for thruppence a volume. I condemn you! I anticipate your doom! You are the anti-Christ! On the day of Judgement you will be ravaged by devils! She threw away the letter. Later she threw away the invitation. Still, the date and time were scored into her memory.

Liam and Grace, she had written a while back, I won’t be coming to your wedding. It’s not that I don’t wish you well. I hope you’ll be happy together. Really, it doesn’t matter much. I could come along, smile and nod, wearing a hat, but I think it would be unseemly. Frankly, I would become part of the spectacle. They would call me ‘the ex’ and stare at me! They would await a scene. They would expect me to cry, and whatever I did they would say I had been crabbed and furious as you went up the aisle. Bent-backed with rage. But you know, I’m not angry at all. Yours, Rosa. Grace had called her up a few times, after it all came out. Someone must have told her — perhaps it was even Whitchurch who spilled the truth — that Rosa knew. Rosa knew! Cue for thunder and lightning! Or, in Rosa’s case, because the epic was hardly available to her, slight drizzle. Grace left messages of great pertinence, pert little messages which made Rosa bite her lip. When Rosa picked up the phone — thinking it might be someone else entirely — she heard Grace saying, ‘Rosa, now, don’t hang up, can we talk? I want you to know I understand your position.’ Grace wasn’t penitent, exactly. She wasn’t nervous at all. She fundamentally believed that Rosa was suppressing her emotions. She explained this, briskly but with sympathy, as if she understood that Rosa was having trouble understanding the irrefutable truth of it all and she was trying to help her get on board. ‘I understand your position, but I am hoping you will understand mine,’ she said. Her position — it was one more piece of Gracean Ur-babble.

‘I understand you are sated with turmoil. You have run the gamut. Your spirit is almost dead. And you were clinging to something that had died a long time ago,’ Grace said. ‘You were shattered, mourning your mother. You weren’t in a state to be courageous. You still aren’t. But your relationship was dead. You knew that. I could see it, as soon as I saw you and Liam together. And I know you want Liam to be happy. He is, he really is happy. He suffered for so long, living with you.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Rosa. ‘That’s fine. Vade in Pace.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Grace.

‘Enjoy yourselves. Why not?’

‘We have to meet and talk this through.’

‘Ughghu?’ said Rosa.

‘By the end he was a counsellor for you, not a lover,’ said Grace. ‘And he’s a young, beautiful man. You wouldn’t want him to imprison himself in a moribund relationship?’

‘Dear Grace, we are all in a moribund relationship with something.’

‘Well, that’s precisely the sort of remark which makes me understand what Liam means.’

‘Means about what?’

As a concession, Grace pretended to stutter. That was a feint; she was so far from being awkward that it was a holiday humour for her. ‘Say what you like now, I understand it’s hard for you,’ said Grace. ‘But you must keep articulating. We must keep the lines of communication open.’

That made Rosa flush with a renewed sense of humiliation, and then she said, ‘Shugugug’, and put down the phone. Unplugged the phone, ripped out the cord, and explained it to Jess later.

Things to do, Monday

Get a job

Wash your clothes

Clean the kitchen

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Go to the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without

Qualities

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard,

Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Distinguish the various philosophies of the way

Clean the bath

Now she stirred and walked along again. Rosa, a handsome woman, if thinner of late and a little pale, was turning the corner, heading for the bank. Still she heard the sounds of the street. She was thinking, as she always tried to, about the day ahead. It was clear to her that she had to be more dynamic. Action was required to scoop herself up, avert the slough. She had a list in her head of things to do. She was telling herself there was a lot to be cheerful about. This was a positive thinking exercise someone had told her to do, one of those benevolent quacks she had been seeing. She was thinking how good it was that the sun might shine and how lucky she was that she was still fit, though she had been dizzy recently and suffered from headaches. Stress, she assumed. The decline of her faculties, the clash of warring theories eroding at her cortex, the human condition! Yet even now, she wasn’t down and out, not destitute at all. There was no reason to cave in yet. The earth hadn’t yet exploded in a ball of plasma. There had been no catastrophes, no meteorite showers, nothing that immediately threatened the existence of the species. She had not been productive recently, but she was sure the dam would burst. It was late in the day, but not too late. She still had a bed to sleep in, though Jess had recently stopped talking to her. That was a shame, but she was sure she could claw it all back.

She was moving through the furtive morning of the city, saturated clouds hanging over the high-rise buildings, human currents coursing along the streets. It was winter and dawn came later by the day. She was outside a burger bar, chrome seats housed in an art deco building. She noticed bricks and fluting; at her side she found a row of shops — a jewellers, an Indian Fusion shop, a Chinese medicine shop, Middle Eastern restaurants, a Plant Essences House, whatever that was, a shop advertising BIG BIG SAVINGS! She stamped her feet as she walked and kicked up dust. The pavement was spotted with litter. The post office had been closed down, said a sign. It was being turned into luxury flats. She nodded and passed under a red canopy which was fluttering in the wind. Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it bottomless? and then she thought, That hardly helps. She had been living in untruth, that much was true. Yes, yes, elegant as anything, your thoughts. The untruth of the true. The truth of the untrue, discuss, with reference to some philosophers you have been taught to trust! She was one of those that can bear no grief and desire but to bathe in bliss. That was a quote, though she couldn’t remember the source. She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, said to herself, One who has no god, as they walk along the street headache envelops them like a garment. Did it have to be so melancholy? Since sadness had got such purchase on her, how could she bash it away without developing her illusions again? To live free from illusions, but content. Impossible! she said, aloud. Insane! Now a shop grill rattled up behind her. A man passed her, with a dog at his side. Then there was an early morning pensioner, dragging a bag on wheels. She passed a renovated church, sandblasted, and in a garden she saw a forest of miniature trees. A line of cars crept past her and she stood at a crossing, wondering whether she should walk or wait for the lights to change.

She saw spray-painted letters spelling TEMP — she had been seeing this around for months. A lonely word, splashed on bridges; she had once seen it on the side of a train, blurred by speed. TEMP — a cry from the secretarial classes, or those who worked in the constant peril of a short-term contract, she thought, passing it by. Or an unfinished word: Tempo, Tempus fugit, like a warning, or an elegy, temps perdu. It seemed to be important, but she wasn’t sure. She felt it was a hint, something she should try to follow. She saw the trains snorting towards Paddington, their noses on the tracks. She understood that everything was accelerating. She had thought that diving out of the office would make the days go slower, but it seemed like they were speeding up, racing towards a conclusion she couldn’t anticipate. She saw things in quick-step, like an old-fashioned film played on modern equipment. Quick march Rosa went, along the street, as if there was a prize for getting to the bank first. She skirted round the news-stand and started running under the bridge. The cars pounded above her. A car honked and she crossed and waved a hand.

As she walked she thought that she must definitely wash her clothes. And clean the kitchen. She should certainly — today, having failed to do so yesterday — call up Liam and ask about the furniture. It would help if he sold it, or gave her the money. She should call Kersti — though Kersti was sometimes frosty, if you caught her at the wrong time. But before, Kersti had offered to help; Kersti who was a lawyer had said she would write a legal-sounding letter to Liam. Dear Mr Peters, Our client Rosa Lane expects the return of her furniture or a financial agreement. Failure to comply will result in another such letter, phrased in a more baroque dialect. Then we will whirl you into the abyss of legalese. As well as that she should really get a job. That was clearly a priority. Reading History of Western Philosophy was not immediately necessary, but it might help her with the basics. There was much she had to read, but she also had to buy some tuna and spaghetti. Sit down with Jess. The bank — she had been putting that off for days, but a quick personal appearance might still win them round. Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and sundry others — if she had time. Hoover the living room and most important of all — clean the bath and toilet. And now she really had to write to Whitchurch. She felt bad now, that she hadn’t apologised. She should have thanked her. Though for what, precisely? The beer, the consolatory shandy? That had been kind, the carrion hunting vulture. She thought of calling her up. Hi, Sandra, sorry to bother you at work. How are you? I wanted to call to say I’m very grateful for all your kindness. Let’s meet again soon. She thought of Whitchurch in her office, biting her pencil, totting up accounts. Truly, she was blameless. Dear Sandra. Great to see you. Thanks so much. Thanks so very much. Soon you’ll be ashes, or bones. Yours, Rosa. If she had an hour before bedtime she could consider the lilies, sort through her papers and phone her father. Now she could hear the sound of birds singing. They were perched on the branches of the trees, and for a moment she thought how beautiful. The colours were pristine in the morning — the cold white sky, the white buildings dappled with sunshine. Everything was scrubbed and pure, the streets were clean.

In the bank there was a low sound like the sifting of envelopes and a mechanical whir. Machines beeped and gave out money. There was a long line of people, receiving cash. She had once seen a sci-fi film about a lottery. Each week you bought a ticket and entered into a draw. There were two prizes: one was 50 million dollars, the other was public execution. The chances of either were equally slim. Yet people entered, bought their tickets and waited. She had waited with her hand out at a million cash machines. Part of the cycle, taking and giving money. Now her own personal supply had dried up. She had a small segment left of her debt, a tiny pile of remaining slosh, and then even her borrowing would be stopped. This had caused her to question her assumptions. She had thought they let you pile up debt indefinitely, but that wasn’t true. They let you pile it up while they thought you could pay. When they realised you really couldn’t pay, they stopped the flow. They dammed up everything and told you to come in and talk about a repayment plan. They sent you tactless requests for money. They left messages on the answer machine. It was nice of them to call, but it didn’t make things better. She had to tell them that it wasn’t a lack of concern for her place in the international system of debit and credit, she was fantastically concerned about it, but she had been prioritising other things, and she had lost her sense of financial basics. She had ignored the rules of supply and demand, and her supply had simply vanished.

Therefore, she waited patiently while the clerks talked to each other and then she asked if she could see the manager. Of course he was busy, this moneysmith, and they told her to come back later. Better still, she could ring in for an appointment, said a brusque woman with a face like a piano. ‘Just a minute or so?’ said Rosa. ‘I’d be very brief. Just a question or two really, simple questions, requiring simple answers.’ Can you give me more? More time to pay off my debt, or more debt? She knew the answer anyway. But the heel-clicking woman didn’t want to help her. She didn’t even want to talk to her. Perhaps she looked unkempt, or maybe it was her unstudied air of desperation. ‘I’m sorry, but Mr Rivers is very busy. We can do you an appointment for Thursday,’ she said, this zipper-mouthed woman. Do me? thought Rosa. Do me an appointment? Thursday was three days away. ‘Perhaps tomorrow?’ said Rosa. ‘Tomorrow morning, first thing?’

‘Why not leave your number,’ said the woman.

‘Mr Rivers has my number.’ That old Sharkbreath knew everything about her. He had been patient for a while, but now he was getting sterner by the hour. ‘I’m sure he would like to see me,’ she said. ‘Please could you at least ask?’

Thus conjoined, Mandy clipped off. She vanished into another part of the bank and Rosa waited. She was too nervous to sit, so she stalked along the banks of machines and watched people taking money from them. We can do you an eviction on Tuesday, she thought. We can do you a spell in a reform centre for the fiscally incontinent on Wednesday. She edged around posters of perfect people with mortgages and TESSAs, smiling broadly because their mortgages made them so very happy. Whatever they might all say, she had really been trying to get a job. She knew money was an illusion, but she also knew that she needed food in her hardly illusory belly. It gave her something to aim for, and in recent weeks, she had tried a teeming array of things. Her terms were vague enough. She had to find a way to make money without being required to lie, to feign a certainty she didn’t possess. She thought that was broad enough. So she had tried to become a gardener. For a week she sat in the local library reading books about botany. The supply was patchy, but she learnt some definitions, tallied words with pictures. She pushed flyers through letterboxes and had a few calls. She went round to the house of a Mr Lewis, and they were getting on fine until she dug up a sunflower and he sent her away again. She had been applying for a variety of things, writing letters.

Dear Sir, I would like a job. Actually that’s not true. Without wanting to trouble you with my ambivalence, a job is what I need. Sheer bloody debt has forced me back. I am quite free of many of the more fashionable varieties of hypocrisy, though I suffer from many unfashionable varieties of my own. I have many strengths, most of which I seem for the moment to have forgotten. However, I am a goal-oriented person and so on, und so weiter … Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Dear Madam, I am a person of inconstant aims and mild destitution. I find this combination of qualities excludes me from many jobs. But working together, I’m sure we can exploit my talents successfully. I still have a cream suit, a relic from a former life. I am unexceptional in every way, and eager to serve. You can find me in a borrowed room, in west London. Yours faithfully, Rosa Lane.

More recently, she had written to landlords and restaurateurs.

*

Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to be considered for the post of barmaid. I have no experience at all, but I have an abiding interest in bars. I like a nice glass of beer, from time to time. Some of my most memorable moments have occurred in bars, some of my most desperate humiliations and fleeting patches of pure claritas. So far she had been dismissed by every barman she met. Kindly, politely, but dismissed all the same.

A week ago — her finest hour — she had signed up for temping and gone along to a place where alcoholics rang to ask for help. She was put in reception and told to type letters. For the first day she was productive, working steadily through her in-tray, enjoying the flick of her fingers and her downright efficiency. She powered through a load of letters and cast them into her out-tray. By the next day, the novelty had worn off. Then she found the office air was stale and on the third day she was bothered by the conversations of the people to her left. It wasn’t fair, they were nice enough, friendly and clearly sane, but they did keep spilling out words. While she was typing up letters … Dear Sir, On July 21st we made an application for 20 purple box files with interior clips. These have as yet not arrived … they were pouring forth. Perhaps it was unkind to hate them by the end of the day. She knew it was. The following morning she realised they hated her. That hurt her feelings; she always preferred her hatred to be unreciprocated. They blanked her at lunch as she sat there with a plastic fork in her hand and a takeaway salad in a plastic box. Later she saw them queuing in the café, and it was hard not to feel sorry for them all, Rosa too, standing in their cheap clothes, waiting for a cup of coffee. When she got back to her desk her mood had darkened. She typed a few last letters … Dear Sir, On July 24th we ordered 504 brown envelopes and 10 million pencils and 30 trillion stamps and yet you have sent us 304 envelopes and only seven million pencils and only three trillion stamps please rectify this appalling oversight immediately before something terrible happens some unfathomable doom … and then she went home. The next morning she phoned to say she was ill. Her father called it lassitude. ‘You have to be able to get up in the morning,’ he said.

‘And I do,’ said his daughter, who was sitting in bed at the time with a cold compress on her head.

‘No one likes their job that much,’ said her father.

‘You liked yours. Mother liked hers,’ said Rosa.

‘Well, find something you like.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. She still hadn’t found a way to resolve it all. ‘It’s ridiculous. You think, would the knights on their grail quest, would they have been able to do it, find the grail and the rest, if the bank had been constantly telling them about their overdraft and how they weren’t getting any more money when they finished the hunt? Would Jesus have done so well, had he had Mr Sharkbreath ringing him up and asking him to discuss a debt repayment plan?’

‘Rosa,’ said her father. ‘Please don’t add a Messiah complex to your list of woes.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘If you don’t like the office, then do something else.’

‘I mean, there’s so little time, and how are you meant to consider anything at all, when there’s this constant thing at your back — not even time’s winged chariot, I mean that’s there too, but the imperative — the imperative to earn money. And for that you have to adopt a mask. Dress up. Mark time. Squander days.’

‘It’s a basic,’ he said. ‘There’s no escaping it.’

Successive nights like rolling waves convey them quickly who are bound for death, she quoted, whenever anyone would listen. ‘Melodrama,’ said Grace, when Rosa said this to Grace in July when she had been ignorant and they had still been friends. ‘Plain melodrama! Get a grip, Rosa! You’re acting like a child!’

‘But a child doesn’t know the horror! The horror!’ said Rosa.

‘Don’t try to quote your way out of it,’ said Grace. ‘Don’t drag literature into it. You’ve had a terrible time. But we have to work. We all have to work. You just have to grow up!’

With her back against the wall (and on the wall was a poster saying ARE YOU MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR SAVINGS?) Rosa knew they were right. All of them: Grace, her father, the Grail Knights, the whole lot of them. (And now she thought TEMP might mean the Knights Templar, that seemed quite probable as she sat there with her hand on her heart and a feeling as if her blood was fizzing through her veins. A local branch. A modern version. Galloping towards truth.) They were joined together in a rousing chorus, the refrain something about getting on with it, not festering. Sharkbreath was in there too, telling her she couldn’t borrow any more. We all have to work, they were singing, moving crabwise along the stage. We all have to work! Life was short, and indeterminate, the mysteries of the universe quite out of reach, but action was required. You had to play a part. Simply, you might as well join in! You couldn’t just fall off the horse at the first hedge! Your mother has died, but worse things would happen. Your father will die, your lover, your friends, everyone will die, you included! Still, whenever she saw something that suggested a return to the office she found she couldn’t tick it. So she had gone along to the local library and asked if they needed any help. There at least she could read, she thought. She could brush her hands over the soft spines of books, stack them on shelves and she could sit at a desk and direct people to the large-print novels. She was mobile and fairly bright, she explained. She knew a few jokes and she had once been a decent raconteur. She could definitely manage a stamping thing, she said, a book stamper, a stampe de livres, whatever it was called, and she knew how to talk about books. A woman with bright red lipstick had asked her for references. Rosa said she would supply some soon, and offered to show just how she could stack. She had read a lot of books, she said. Mostly modern classics, though she had recently begun a course of reading, from the Ancients to the present day. Meanwhile she had read a lot of Dickens and much of Dostoevsky. Some of Gogol. Most of the Eliots, George and T.S…. Ask me about a book, she said, any book, I’ll pretend I’ve read it. She was trying to look practical and efficient, like a woman with better things to do who happened to feel like working in a library. But the red-lipped woman turned Rosa down. Apparently she didn’t present the right qualifications. Then she applied for jobs as a farm worker. She had a soothing image of herself living it up on a Welsh farm, drinking cider in the evenings and falling in love with a boy called Glynn. But so far no one had written back to her.

Another waste of time had been her interview with Pennington, the other day. She had really thought that job might be the one, a thing she could commit to, but Pennington had sorely disappointed her. The auguries were bad, and when she saw Pennington’s house she knew they were doomed, both of them. She was up in Kensal Green, at a forgotten line of houses far from the tube, and she looked at the snagged gate and the paint-peeling walls and the dirt-flecked windows and she stopped on the pavement, her hand poised above the gate. She was irresolute for a few minutes, perhaps it was longer, and then she found she was knocking on the door. She regretted it when she saw Pennington standing there, a man with a thatch of grey hair and a booming voice. He was smiling at her, rubbing his hands. His glasses, which were smeared with grime, had been mended with sellotape. He was looking for a proofreader, his advert had explained. ‘I have been working for twenty years on a definitive history,’ he said, as he led her through the hall to the living room of his small, shabby house. ‘I have various theories to prove. I need someone who can work with me on it. I can’t pay much. You’ll find it adequate, as long as your expenses aren’t great. Your main motive would be the experience. You would be dedicated to the research itself.’

No good, then, thought Rosa. I am dedicated only to my debt. But Pennington was saying, ‘I am very fastidious. I like people to work hard. I strongly believe the book will make me very famous. Possibly rich, in which case I would pay you a bonus. Of course if you found me a bear or if I found you a slouch’ — and he fixed her sternly, all of a sudden — ‘we could of course agree to part. I have been through a couple of assistants already. Since I began, a dozen or so. Good ones are hard to come by. Do you know anything about Ancient Egypt?’

‘A little,’ she said. ‘I have spent a lot of time in the British Museum.’ He was staring at her, screwing his face into a thousand tucks and creases, mapping himself.

‘Well, we have all been to the British Museum,’ he said. ‘Anyone from your schoolboy to your young Turk’ — my young Turk? What was the man saying, she wondered briefly? — ‘has managed to go to the British Museum.’ He said this with disdain. He definitely had her down as one of them, a vulgar day-tripper, lagging on the steps with an ice cream.

‘If I held up this,’ and he held up a hieroglyph of a figure holding a quill. ‘What would it mean?’

‘To write?’ said Rosa.

‘Good! Good! And this?’ And he held up a hieroglyph of a figure with its arms raised.

‘To praise?’ guessed Rosa.

‘Excellent. And this?’ And he held up a picture of a man tied to a stake.

‘Prisoner?’

‘Wonderful. And this one?’ And he held up a picture of a figure sitting in an arch.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rosa.

‘That’s a god wearing the sun’s disk and grasping a palm branch in each hand,’ he said. ‘But that one was difficult.’

Idly, Rosa wondered how long the game went on. And she discovered it went on for quite some time, as Pennington asked her to guess the meanings of another batch of hieroglyphs and to translate a line of them. ‘See how you do!’ he said.

Pen in hand, she went to it. She still wasn’t sure what he was paying. He had a fixed stare. He smiled a lot, but she couldn’t tell how deep the charm went. Unmarried, she assumed. Simple and terrible in his way, with his staring eyes, his shocking refusal to break eye contact. He dropped this stare only when he was reading through her translation, laughing richly at her foolishness, then he lifted his eyes again and looked long and hard at her. Eventually he said, ‘Brilliant!’ He was laughing at her. ‘Complete nonsense! But they often are! How were you to know? How could you possibly do it? Impossible! You were bound to get it all wrong. And you did! But you tried, nonetheless, you tried. And that is very important.’

She thanked him while he snorted and told her not to worry, it was quite all right, he often — now that Egyptology had become so popular, something to do with Hollywood perhaps, and he said this with distaste — got applicants who were unsuitable. She apologised to Pennington for wasting his time. He nodded with a steely little smile. ‘Thanks so much, goodbye, dear, goodbye.’ Goodbye for ever, he meant, and Rosa thought, Well, that’s that. Once he had shut her out she went back out through the little gate. She side-stepped round a yellow digger, which was sitting on the kerb like an industrial scorpion. Pennington was nothing but a diversion. He was a wrong turn, if anything, and for a moment she wanted to go back and tell him. She had a few urgent questions to answer, and none of them, but none of them, had anything to do with Osiris. Except, it was Osiris who weighed you in the balance after death. It was Osiris who put a feather on one of the scales and your heart — or soul — on the other, and if your heart sank lower on the scales than the feather, then you were doomed. Well, we must all be doomed, she thought. Every last one of us! For who, in this day and age, can make any claim to having a heart lighter than a feather!

*

‘Mr Rivers is in a meeting,’ said the woman. Mandy had come back from the store cupboard with this news. ‘Really, are you sure?’ said Rosa. She tried to sound incredulous. Had Sharkbreath really not wanted to see her? ‘Can’t you try again?’ said Rosa.

‘He is too busy to see you,’ said Mandy. She said that with an officious twang, rustling her papers.

‘But I really do need to see him,’ said Rosa. ‘I’ve been a good client, a client of many years. It’s true, my debt is quite bad. I’m not pretending there’s no debt. But I am actively seeking work. I am busy about it. And I just need some flexibility on my debt.’

Mandy bridled. She was definitely becoming sanctimonious. ‘If you’re in debt, then there’s nothing I can do about that. Mr Rivers can’t see you. I can’t help you any more,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you can help me,’ said Rosa, in a tone of ill-advised optimism. Mandy shrugged and looked as if she thought it was unlikely. When Rosa said a couple more things Mandy told her she had to talk to Rivers. Shaking her head brusquely, Mandy walked away.

*

Eager and ready, awaiting enlightenment, Rosa sat on the top deck of a bus as it rounded the corner and moved on to Kensington Park Road. There was still much to anticipate. Today she had an interview and she hoped she would get the job. She had to go back to Jess’s flat, pass the day writing applications, and prepare herself. She had to prime herself for her interview at 4 p.m. It seemed a real possibility, this job she was going to win. Her deviation would be corrected; she would climb out of her fiscal pit. After that, when that was settled, she would really get to grips with the basics, with the essential mysteries and underlying causes. She inhaled sharply as a woman elbowed her in the face. She heard Arabic behind her and German to her left. Auch wenn wir nicht wollen: Gott reisst. Then she heard the tinny sound of an iPod, whispering a tune she couldn’t remember. The bus scraped past the parked cars and people. A scaffold and the sound of drills. The yellow-fronted self-service laundry, always for let. Shops with their windows full. Pale slabs. Enfeoffed, she thought. My kingdom for an epiphany. The sun ascending. The sky a lustrous pale blue. Soon it would be mid-morning. The morning was half-finished, half-begun. And onward the day went, unstoppable, quite incessant in its vigour.

Ahead she saw the blue bridge hanging over the road, cars filing across it. It was a slung construction of steel and on its curved belly were signs and shapes, cryptic clues, left there by the taggers. TEMP. She had a fine view of a high-rise block, faded turquoise trim on the windows. On a balcony she saw two eagles, painted in gilt. Then there was the pebble-dashed side of another bank. Another bank, she thought, with bars on the doors. But there was no point trying to get symbolic about the fact that she had ripped through her overdraft and failed to supply a payment plan. The glass shivered as the bus turned abruptly and everyone swayed, rubbing shoulders in a friendly way. For all of this, despite the deep sense of community, the Blitz spirit of the upper deck, Rosa found she had her head in her hands. Suddenly she wanted to get out, she was racked with a sense of unease, and when the bus came to a halt under the Westway she ran down the steps. At the side of the road, she wondered if she should wait for another bus or walk home. Indecision stopped her for a second, then she walked up the hill and along the street thinking that here was another Georgian terrace and here a window with the curtains gusting in the breeze. She picked her way past the station where an old man was chanting a mantra, begging for change. A man with a grey face was selling papers, his hands in fingerless gloves. He mouthed an ‘A’ at Rosa, and then she heard the rest: ‘ARSENAL WIN CUP’ he was saying, and then his voice faded again. Pressing her feet carefully on the pavement she walked up the hill, passing the stalls selling falafels, the late night shops, the all-night chemist. She noticed the taggers had scrawled new words along the walls. EASY I, she read. THAT and what? she thought. She couldn’t read it.

She reached the funeral parlour on the corner with the growl of the Westway at her back. The houses were yellow and blue and some of their lintels were crumbling. The traffic lined up in queues, and she heard the low moan of brakes. But really, she added, we’re nearly in the suburbs. She stared intently at the rooms she passed, seeing an African woman with her hair scraped into a bun, spreading out sheets on a bed, and a Middle Eastern man tying back the curtains of a bedsit — she could see the bed behind him and beyond that the shabby frame of an ancient cooker. He caught her staring and she looked away.

Everything was named for outmoded pastoralism — Oxford Gardens, St Michael’s Gardens, Ladbroke Grove. There was a sign pointing left, saying EQUAL PEOPLE. So that’s where they live, she thought, moving past. The houses on this road were Victorian, with pillars and grand windows. They were haughty in the cold sunlight. There was a mural on the side of one row, an image of stairs ascending to a celestial place. Even here they were bugging her with thoughts of eternity. Meanwhile she nodded at the blue plaque which said ‘Phiz lived here’, nailed to a house with yellowing curtains, a neon light by the door. Now she could see the Trellick Tower with washing on the balconies like semaphore flags. A pair of men who were covered in paint and a kid with a hood slung over his eyes. There was a blue sign saying offices to let, and a man saying ‘Fuck shit’ to the open air, and the number 52 was shuddering past. Beyond the prophet on the corner was the roundabout where everything looked ruined, patched in pinks and blues. There was the cheap call centre, the takeaway with its plastic pictures of faded food in the windows, a set of banished office blocks, and on a low wall running up to the red steel bridge she saw TEMP again, and a billboard saying HERE COME THE TEARS. Her mouth filled with fumes; the air was thick with the smell of petrol. Rosa always turned the corner wheezing, vowing to get out of the city. Her street had a few Victorian houses, stranded amid rubble and nothing, as if the row had been bombed and never rebuilt. On the other side of the street was a high-rise block. There was a hoarding further away, decorated with leftover scraps of former posters. One day they had pasted a sign up saying ARMAGEDDON. It was a huge hint from God. The back windows of Jess’s flat had a view of the receding parallels of train tracks, coated with moss, and a red steel bridge. To the west was a gas tower like an abandoned shrine and a burial mound of rubble.

Her mouth was dry and she could smell her own breath. Somehow the door came closer and closer until she could see the peeling paint and the small bare garden and then she dropped her keys. She scrabbled in the earth thinking it is today and I am the mother god. When the door opened she felt faint for a moment and stumbled in the hall. At the door to the flat she paused and wondered if she heard a movement within. That made her heart thump madly in her breast. She had avoided Jess for days, but it was never certain when she would be at home. She was holding the handle, but she couldn’t twist it. Then she heard a noise and the door swung open.

*

When she regained her focus, she saw Jess had a steely gaze and a resolute air. She was by the table, a Marlboro Light in one hand. Jess was dressed in pristine cream, she had a first-rate brain, and she commanded a decent salary that she had used to buy a flat in no-man’s-land. Jess was a guardian, tending her own personal shrine to normality. She was standing straight-backed, making herself as tall as she could. She stood with her cigarette in one hand, the other hand in her pocket, eyeing Rosa calmly. Then she tossed back her glossy hair; Jess was defined completely by her brown mane. Rosa had never seen her naked face; it was always half-concealed by hair. Jess lined herself up with the window, and cast a reluctant glance towards her. By God, you are a redoubtable foe, and I concede before the contest, thought Rosa. She had nothing in her armoury at all, nothing to say, and no way to defend herself. Besides, her head hurt. She knocked something off the table, a bottle of something, and it rolled away, under the sofa. Something to sort out later.

‘Rosa, now we’ve coincided, let’s go and have brunch,’ said Jess in a flinty tone. ‘I’ve been working from home this morning. Now I have to go into work. Let’s grab a bite to eat while I’m on my way. We need to talk about a couple of things. Have you got time now?’

That was clearly ironic, and Rosa rose with a sense of foreboding, staggering under it, or under the weight of something else she couldn’t identify. ‘Of course. Just have to wash my face,’ she said, her throat tight. Jess nodded, as if she understood Rosa’s reluctance, commended it as a fair assessment of the situation. ‘I have to drop off some dry cleaning. I’ll meet you at Café 204 in twenty minutes,’ she said tersely, and stalked out of the door.

In the bathroom Rosa put her head under the tap and washed her face. She rubbed the condensation from the mirror and looked at herself — mostly unchanged — wry smile, deliberately cultivated at fourteen, thin face, pale cheeks, dark eyes, nothing unattractive about her, older of course, but her family aged well, their cheekbones grew more chiselled and their jaws kept their lines, and their fat turned to scrag. Recently she had noticed deep lines across her brow, a sceptical puckering of the skin. A vein had burst on her cheek, but there was nothing else that singled her out. She looked well enough. Slightly anaemic, but she had always looked bloodless. The bags under her eyes were swarter by the day, but that was to be expected. Anyway, swart was just her colour. ‘Amor fati,’ she said to the mirror, the steamed up smear in front of her. ‘There’s no happy ending anyway.’ Through the narrow window of the bathroom she saw the feathery texture of the sky. Later the sun might shine on the city, brightening the grey fronts of the Georgian houses and the dusty terraces. There would be a smell of the approach of winter and dried out petrol and she would walk in Kensington Gardens and watch sunlight skimming on the surface of the water and people playing football in the grass. If she went to the interview and did well, she thought, then she would take a book to a quiet corner of the park and read for a while.

Now she turned off the taps. The pipes made a low groan. She took a towel from the rack and smelt it. She used it sparingly on her skin. Because Jess had already gone out, she drew the curtains and dressed quickly in the living room, looking round at the familiar objects, silhouettes in the half-light. In the corner she saw the diodes of a stereo, glinting like rubies. She could see Jess’s coat hanging on the half-open door like a timid man too nervous to approach. Then, prepared to beg, she walked out onto the street.

She caught up with Jess at a café on Portobello Road, a place where they sold designer clothes and food at the same time. The waiters passed their time sniffing down the menus, styling themselves on Satan and his minions. In the designer kitchens of Beelzebub they were dishing up much-adorned plates. Everyone in there was well clad, loaded with the latest styles. Even the brunch was as elegant as anything. Rosa didn’t care about the contrasts. It was only when she had eaten half her salmon and eggs that she understood she was there to receive advice. Jess was a small, precise person, who always thought before she spoke. She had been generous for months. Now Rosa’s whole Weltanschauung, to give it a name it hardly merited, was wearing thin. They ate toast and failed to talk seriously until a second round of coffees came. Then Jess — who was a kindly person and really quite hated to kick people in the teeth — said, ‘Rosa, I brought you here to suggest that you take a break. Why not go away for a while? A change of scene. How about it?’ She was twirling a napkin round her neat little fingers.

‘No need,’ said Rosa, her mouth full of toast.

‘Now, Rosa,’ said Jess. ‘I mean it. Have a holiday. Take a break. Go on, go and see Will and Judy. You said they invited you the other week. Go for some brisk walks, get some country air. I’ll lend you some money, if you need it’ — and Rosa said, ‘No thanks’ — and Jess made a pishing noise as if to say that they would argue about this later. ‘So why not go off for a while and then we’ll see if you don’t come back full of gusto. Give them a call later.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Rosa. ‘Quite enough gusto. Thanks for the suggestion.’

‘Why not consider it at least. It’s easy to get trapped in a way of thinking about things. You’d find it’d give you some distance. Look, I’ll square it.’

Rosa was about to say no thanks, but then she realised she wasn’t sure if Jess meant her holiday or her brunch. The holiday she could turn down with dignity, but she was hoping Jess might expense brunch. Playing for time, she said, ‘Jess, you’ve been really saintly. As soon as I regain my poise’ — at this Jess kept a straight face and said nothing — ‘I will definitely take your advice. But for the moment, I don’t want to leave the city when everything is so indeterminate. I have to get a job. I can’t just borrow money from you.’

Jess greased her lips with spittle. She said, ‘As long as you know the offer stands. The other thing is, well, I think it might be time for you to move on.’

‘Move on from what?’ said Rosa, with a heightened sense of foreboding. There was a pregnant pause while Jess seized her coffee and drank it down. When she had finished she said, quite calmly, ‘From my flat.’

‘You want me to move out?’

‘In short, yes.’

That was a blow, though far from surprising. Really, Rosa agreed. She was an imposition. However penitent she was, she was still there in Jess’s flat all day, scattering books and scraps of paper across her stripped pine floorboards, violating the sanctity of the bathroom, leaving stains on the coffee cups. She was intrusive and the offer had originally only been for a few weeks. Besides, Jess and Neil were settling down. They wanted to start a family, Jess was explaining. ‘At thirty-four,’ she said, ‘we think it’s high time. We just want a bit more space. You know, so we can sort things out and really get on to the next stage.’

The logic was irrefutable. The next stage was beckoning and who was Rosa to stand in the way? Jess was eager for her next part, ready and willing to play it. The argument was done and dusted by the time Jess had unfurled a few reasonable sentences. It was a pedestrian moment but it left Rosa with the awkward question of where she would go. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ She squinted at the table. ‘I can go as soon as you want.’

‘No no, just as soon as you can,’ said Jess, suggesting that it would be physically impossible for Rosa to go as soon as she wanted. ‘I don’t want to sling you out completely. Let’s just work towards you going as soon as possible. Think about it today and tell me how soon you think that will be, and then I’ll make plans around that.’

That was pretty brutal, and Rosa thought about launching a protest. Jess, if I may beg you?! I understand, you have been generous, toweringly generous, far more than you needed to be. In honesty, we were never close friends, you and I. Cordial with each other, part of a bonded group, but there was no particular tie between us. Which makes your patience still more commendable. But perhaps you are being hasty? After all, I’ve been here only two months and in that time I have made good progress. I have read some of Euripides, a bit of Seneca, a few poems by Catullus, a little (though tentatively and in some confusion) of Plotinus, and, in my leisure hours, some Wordsworth, a lot of Blake, a number of sonnets by Donne. I have really cracked on with ancient philosophy. While doing this, I have managed nonetheless to pay rent every month. I understand, you gave me a good rate on the room, minimal compared to the market rate, I can hardly complain. Nonetheless, Sharkbreath will tell you, that money was sucked out of my account each month. Eventually it was sucked from my debt. I have not been tidy, I know, but I have never been late with a payment! And she thought of the hours she had spent pacing the streets, or sitting in cinemas and bars, trying to avoid going back to Jess’s flat, giving her evenings on her own and evenings with Neil and disappearing when Jess had guests over — as if she was merely a sponging interloper, the recipient of charity. Still it was hard to construct a case. There was no way she could justify herself. Instead she said ‘Of course’ in a weak voice. ‘Thanks so much for letting me stay for so long. I know it hasn’t been ideal for you.’ She sipped her coffee and thought, Now what will you do? There was a pause, while Rosa considered the question and Jess looked eagerly for the waiter.

‘I still think you should just get away,’ said Jess. ‘I’m really happy to lend you the money. Let me know. And if I can help you in any other way.’

‘Oh no, that’s fine. You’ve really helped already,’ said Rosa. ‘It’s not your fault at all. I’m sorry if I’ve been inconsiderate.’

Jess shook her head, impatiently.

‘In truth, Jess,’ said Rosa, ‘these months have been a trifle hard.’ A trifle trying, she thought, these last few months. ‘I feel — well, frankly, I feel as if I am presiding over a small tranche of chaos, my own, but completely beyond my control. It’s a sort of self-consciousness I feel. I’m watching the descent. Like a novice skier, I am flying down the slope, without a sense of direction.’ Jess looked unimpressed. The wind is whipping at my ears. Someone! Slow me down! The wind is really chasing me along. I can see a few faces, a few spectators, but they can’t stop me. It’s a following wind, following me along, gusting me into what can only be a crevasse. A great gaping chasm. I don’t want to plunge in, I want to turn the skis around, or at least fall to the side into an accommodating snowdrift, but the snow is too pacey and slithery and I’m gathering speed, hurtling faster and faster and now I can see the blackness opening up before me, do you understand? I should be screaming at these people standing around on the slopes. I should be screaming HELP ME! SAVE ME! But I’m worried they might have other things to do, better things to do, so I’m skiing along, smiling at them, trying to look like I know what I’m doing. It’s trenchant, the darkness. Black and compelling. Here we are, faster and faster and here’s the hole! Here’s the damn dark hole! Ahead! Ahead!

Jess asked for the bill. When it came she said, ‘I’ll get it’, and slapped her credit card on the table. Rosa let her pay.

*

Later she and Jess went their separate ways: Jess to the tube with a spring of plain relief in her step and Rosa back to the flat, her own personal sword of Damocles dangling above. At the flat, she checked the post and wrote a few petitions, attempts to placate the fates. She wrote a letter to the Flower Shop, applying for a job tying bows round bouquets. Dear Sir or Madam, I would be delighted to be considered for this position. As a child, I was quite good at playing the piano and the violin. I have always enjoyed using my fingers. Really, though my training was in journalism I have long felt that flowers were my true metier. She could imagine herself there, tying up a bouquet, one hand to her temple, the other struggling with a piece of ribbon. ‘Fancy a batch of lilies, sir, quite your nicest funeral flower?’ ‘There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. And there are pansies, that’s for thoughts. There’s rue for you. There’s a daisy. Thanks so much. Come again soon. For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.’ She wrote,

Dear Mr Pennington, Thanks for your time the other day. Just to emphasise, I really am very interested in the culture of Ancient Egypt. I know we didn’t get on so well, but I’m never at my best under pressure. And you were a funny old man, not my kind of person at all. But Ancient Egypt — it’s been a fascination of mine ever since I saw the sarcophagi at the British Museum as a child. We went on a school trip, all the way from Bristol. We were eleven or twelve. The tube train stopped in a tunnel and we all screamed. Then we saw the gold cases with their inscriptions — I remember wondering if there were still bodies inside.

She had wandered around with her mouth open. She had often imagined going to Egypt, sitting at the edge of the pyramids watching the sun set across the sands, with the age-blasted head of the Sphinx above her. I would be so honoured to help you with such a fascinating project. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Dear Mr Sharkbreath, Thank you for your letter dated whenever of whenever threatening to send bailiffs round to my address if I don’t pay the interest on the loan you gave me in August. You are of course welcome to drop round, but Jess might be angry. Jess owns the flat I live in, and all the furniture. I am afraid that in recent months I have given most of my things away, or sold them. There are a few things I could offer you: one smart suit in cream (more like oyster, really), a pair of jeans and a jumper, two shirts, my small collection of undergarments, four pairs of socks, a very warm grey coat, and a couple of second-hand books. If you feel any of this would help then do come and get it. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Dear Viracocha, Buddha, Osiris, Isis, Zeus, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, Humbaba, Yabalon and the rest,

What is it that you want me to do? Just what is it? Yours expectantly, Rosa.

She tore that out. ‘Impractical,’ she said aloud. She was still racking her brains.

She took the paper and circled jobs. She smiled as she went. Here she was, rushing towards a blank wall with little in her pockets, and there were thousands of opportunities out there, marvellous jobs, well paid and with associated perks, company cars and the rest, presenting the perfect prospect of fulfilment. She only had to tick the boxes, marshal herself.

Wanted, she read. European Sales and Marketing manager. London-based Design and Product Distribution company seeks an experienced Sales and Marketing manager for Europe.

Can you focus on the detail while keeping sight of the big picture? No, thought Rosa. No, she wasn’t sure she could.

Leading London-based media measurement agency seeks go-getting grads with excellent writing and analytical skills.

She shook her head. Communications Coordinator, she read. Excellent opportunity! Depending on how you look at it. Marketing office administrator. This could be the job for you! Do you want to be part of the fastest growing Communications agency in the UK?

No, thought Rosa. No, she didn’t. Wanted, a secretary for a busy London company. She or he will be stylish and efficient, ready for the thrust and parry of office life, and great at dealing with people. Starting salary of — but Rosa had flicked over the page. Do you long for opportunities to travel? If so, this job is for you! Personal assistant to head of company, always on the move, needs efficient person to manage his meetings and schedules. Degree preferred. Apply to …

Do you long for the peace that passes understanding. Apply to … — but she couldn’t find an advert that said that. Instead, she began scribbling words. Wanted Customer Manager for bright bubbly company in Vauxhall. Wanted Director of communications for a small dynamic company in Angel. Wanted spawn of Satan for a saucy company in Stockwell. Wanted brethren of Beelzebub for a blazing bubbling cauldron in Bow.

Her lists were creative acts in themselves. Initially she had written with the bold idea that she would actually achieve the things set out on them, but after a few days she realised that wasn’t going to happen. They represented what was required of her, with a few extras thrown in that were plain unlikely. But she couldn’t get through the entries, unlikely or otherwise. It was pure catharsis, writing them out.

Now you are home, it’s definitely time to:

Get a job.

Wash your clothes

Clean the kitchen.

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Phone Kersti

Find a place to stay

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Go to the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Unearth the TEMP

She drank her tea. She took a slice of bread and put it in the toaster. ‘But come now,’ she said to herself, standing with the lemon walls around her staring at the kettle and thinking she might pilfer some more tea. Really, she was reminding herself, things weren’t that bad! If she could just get the furniture sold then she would feel much better. If Liam would only sell it, she would have money for a month or two. But he was clinging onto it, the hankering hand-me-down swine. Why he wanted to guard the shiny black sofa and the stained dining table, she didn’t know. A month or two seemed like a long time, the way things were. It would tide her over. Though to what? And where would it wash her up? She wasn’t taking any chances. At 4 p.m., she would go and see Mrs Brazier about the job. A few weeks ago, she had written a little advert and walked around putting it up in shops. Intelligent — in theory — and qualified. Can teach English and History to children up to the age of twelve. Also the piano up to grade five. Flexible hours. Good references on request. No one had answered for weeks, and the advert started to droop and fade and generally look like a symbol of her inner blah, until Mrs Brazier rang her the other day.

She set down her pen. She folded up the list and put it in her pocket. Then she turned to the room. Jess’s flat was at the junction of several fields of noise; always you heard cars skimming past the front and trains hammering along at the back. Jess lived in denial of hostile elements. She didn’t care that a gas tower squatted at the windows and a nearby billboard said Abandon Hope. She had furnished the place with care. First she had bought up a stock of self-assembly furniture. She had fitted in a long beige sofa and some shelves. The chairs were fold-away, because the living room was so small. Jess had built-in cupboards like stowage on a boat, with novelty portholes. On the wall she had put up framed posters from exhibitions she had seen at the Tate. She had painted everything pale pink. The furniture — such as it was — had been angled carefully round the TV. The kitchen Jess had painted yellow. Everything in the kitchen was yellow: the crockery, the kettle, the washing-up bowl, the cupboards and even the fridge stood behind a yellow door. It was moving, how colour-coordinated Jess had made her flat. A Roman blind obscured the graffitiladen tracks behind, the names of taggers and the word TEMP. Rosa, who slept in a room at the back, woke with the early trains. She liked that, though now it was nearly winter it meant she opened her eyes before the sun rose, and lay in the darkness wondering what time it was and if she should sleep some more. No need to complain now, she thought, when you are leaving anyway. So, the cheap accommodation hasn’t suited you! Well, now you can find some more!

*

TEMP, she thought. Temper. Temperature. The tempo of the times. Time’s grasping temper. The temperature of the city. Was that what it meant? She couldn’t be sure. Temptation. The temptation to do nothing. It was heavy upon her. A few months ago she had still been industrious. She went out seeking advice from anointed experts. She had been to see Dr Kamen in September because she was concerned her mood had dipped. She wasn’t ill, she explained. She just needed something to steady her, calm her nerves. I have undertaken a labour. If she was honest, she was sometimes disturbed by the intensity of her thoughts, the way they held her. She couldn’t control her obsessions. Months after leaving her job, she was still undisciplined, still quite out of sorts. I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. I have been panicked. I am seized by the play of opposites, she had suggested to Dr Kamen, as they sat in the small room where he worked, a room like a throat lozenge — purple walls, tapered sides. ‘You know, the usual ones, being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the rest.’ It was nothing serious, she said, smiling in embarrassment. ‘It just stops me using my time properly. Getting on with things. Work, that sort of thing. I just walk around and read and run my overdraft closer to the limit. I make long lists of things I have to do. It’s hardly the way to use a life. Time is so short, and there I am drifting quietly, lagging out the days.’ Perhaps it wasn’t her thoughts that were the main problem. A few thoughts never harmed anyone, she added. The thing was she would try to get back to earning money and there she would be, dropped back, inert, prone, quite incapable of action. To earn was not to think, she explained. Work — the sort of work she was fitted for — and thought were, though ideally allied, not necessarily — when thought was excessive — best friends, not strictly speaking teeming with mutual amity. ‘Do you understand?’ she said to Dr Kamen. Dr Kamen said, ‘Not quite yet, but we’ll soon get to the bottom of it.’ Dr Kamen was a good doctor; Rosa had always liked him. He took her temperature, peered in her ears, made her stick out her tongue. He asked her if she had any aches or pains. He did some blood tests and said he would send them away to a lab. Then he wrote something in his notes.

Kamen told her to explain her problems as she saw them. Rosa saw them in lots of ways which never quite formed a cogent pattern, but she talked quickly, qualified herself, decided that wasn’t what she meant, began again, lost herself in tangents, dried up and stared at the rug. She thought her symptoms might be psychosomatic, she added.

‘I can’t be sure until the tests come back, but I would say you are not physically unwell,’ he said, a man with a brown beard and greying hair. He had an avuncular air, it made her submit to what he said. ‘You are young, fit, you say you exercise. You are thin and should try to eat a bit more. But the skin is healthy. The eyes are healthy. You might be a bit worn out, or agitated. Do you sleep well?’

The room they were in was tight and cramped, with a low door which you had to stoop to get through. You entered bowing and Dr Kamen bowed too. Despite his cramped quarters, Dr Kamen kept up the gravitas. He was a neat man; his beard was trimmed and his clothes were freshly ironed. He was certainly reassuring. Through the window there was a view of bricks and grey sky. They were in Kilburn, on a street of bay windows. The area was suburban without being friendly, full of the disenfranchised and uncertain. She had seen them walking outside, the minorities left to stew, piled in together, and the single mothers pushing prams in high heels, bellies out, and the truant gangs on the corners. She wondered briefly about Dr Kamen. What did he do on Sundays? Did he play cricket? Go to the pub? Not, she thought, to the church. She imagined he liked a pint. She saw him with a beer and a bag of crisps, reading the papers by a fire. She was sure he had a well-organised life. Time management, the relegation of certain things to certain parts of the day — he looked the sort. He didn’t seem troubled by global war or the rule of violence. He had crinkled eyes; his face was neither young nor old. He was easy with his gestures, self-confident but not flashy. He was a measured, contemplative man. Alert to the frailties of the human frame, of course. Quite aware of the skull beneath the skin and the rest. As a doctor you could hardly ignore it, you could hardly bury your head in myth and hope it wasn’t happening. But it didn’t stop him getting up in the mornings. He must be pragmatic, she thought, as he said, again, ‘Are you finding it hard to sleep?’

‘I don’t sleep especially well,’ she said. ‘But I never have. I have always been a light sleeper, I mean. But I don’t have insomnia, no.’

‘Do you wake early?’ Dr Kamen was saying.

‘Yes, quite early.’

‘Do you have panic attacks, anxiety attacks, difficulty breathing?’ he said. In his hand he held a pen. He had her notes on a computer screen, her small ailments of the last decade. Sometimes she was troubled by flu and once she had turned up with bronchitis. Then he had told her to stay off work for two weeks. On his desk there was a photo of his family — a wife, three children, it looked like, but Rosa couldn’t quite make them out. Young children, she imagined, looking at the crayon drawings pinned to the wall behind his desk. A tractor. Signed Oliver.

‘No no, nothing like that,’ said Rosa. ‘I just feel a bit withdrawn.’

‘Withdrawn, you say?’ Dr Kamen looked slightly concerned.

‘There’s just something, like an unseen impediment.’

‘An impediment?’

‘A temporary something, you know, I can’t see. Some basic fact. Or a conjunction of facts. Perhaps not even facts, just things. And then some days I think that maybe this is what I’m trying to get to, this fact — or facts, this thing — or things — that would explain everything.’

‘And why do you feel that?’ said the doctor with an eyebrow raised.

‘Because …’

She stopped short, reluctant to dwell on things she didn’t understand. She was aware she seemed recalcitrant. Now they were staring at each other, and then she felt awkward and dropped her gaze. She fiddled with her nails, bit one, scratched her ear. Still Dr Kamen was waiting patiently, glancing at the screen, at his watch, clicking a pen in his hand.

‘Because, you say?’ he said finally, after the clock had scraped round a few more minutes. He wasn’t going to sit there in silence for ever.

‘I was aware I was stuck in the — you know — the rut people mention, when they’re on this subject. Eyes down. Head to the desk. Nose to the grindstone, you know. And I was angry with other people. Bystanders, all of them. Then I realised how comic it was. Quite impossible, the whole thing. But I haven’t progressed. I was trying to focus my thoughts, but I’ve found the last few months have been as confused as those that went before.’

‘Well, we all feel that,’ said Kamen, smiling. ‘Particularly after a bereavement. You are bound to feel confused, knocked back, depressed.’

He meant it was hardly a pathology, hardly deviant at all.

‘Now I feel as if everyone speaks something else, some other language,’ said Rosa. ‘I really find I can’t raise myself to the challenge. There is something I am still failing to understand. A gap. Truth.’ Kamen nodded, perhaps impatiently. It didn’t sound any better the second time. ‘Perhaps beauty,’ she said, but that didn’t go so well. Kamen wasn’t interested in Rosa’s under-cooked theories of truth and beauty, her mixture of other people’s ideas and prevailing cliché.

‘Yes?’ said the doctor, expectantly.

‘I feel as if the real world, with its laws of time and space, its economics, politics, and even morality, has dissolved. Or I have been detached from it, and have emerged somewhere — I’m not quite sure where. But really it’s much better here, on the edge. It affords quite the best view. The only problem is debt, of course. And that’s why I need to change a little, sort things out.’

He smiled. She thought it was simple enough. There must be a reason behind it all. What did she and Dr Kamen know about the order of the universe? What could they know? Everything might be preordained. It might be part of an immaculate order, impossible for them to understand. Of course as Stoicism would have it no action that befell the individual — death included — could be bad, because everything that was part of logos was fundamentally good. In that case, her mother’s death was part of logos, and her current state must also be, and who was she to resist? If it left her quite shattered that was simply her impoverished perspective. She lacked pneuma perhaps, she was deficient in life force, but she was sure that things occurred for a reason. She was, she said to Dr Kamen, no Epicurean. ‘My mother disagreed,’ she added. She was explaining this to Dr Kamen, adding that they were a very primitive species, with very little to be proud of, while he nodded slightly. He wrote something down on a piece of paper.

‘I think,’ said Dr Kamen, straightening his tie, ‘you’re depressed. You should have a holiday. Go to see some friends, some good friends who cheer you up. I’m going to prescribe you some antidepressants and see if they might help you. At this stage of things you really just have to manage. If things get worse I could refer you to a psychiatrist. At present, try this course of tablets, and we’ll make another appointment soon to see how you’re getting on.’

‘Thank you very much. Very kind,’ said Rosa. He had her wrong, she was thinking. She wasn’t depressed at all. Earlier, she had been depressed. Now she woke each day at dawn; it was her excitement that was making her rise so early. That and the grinding of the trains. It was just her thoughts, she wanted to say. But Kamen had his eye on his watch, so she stood up. As she walked away, he said, ‘Don’t worry, your prince will come.’ It made her stop with her hand on the door.

‘My prince?’ she said. She thought she had heard him wrong, but he was smiling back at her.

‘Yes, your prince,’ he said. His face had wrinkled up and he meant to be kind. Like so much these days, it made her quite confused. She couldn’t think how to reply. Well, perhaps she appeared solitary to him — was it the deep lines in the centre of her brow, or something else about her all-over aspect, that made him think she was questing for love? She wanted to say ‘No, no, you’ve got me wrong, all wrong, that’s not the point at all’ but it got tangled up. She ended up blushing and backing out of the door.

*

Now she heard the distant chimes of a church clock. 1 p.m., and she really had to deal with the day’s events, rather than wallowing in thoughts of the past. She had three hours until her interview. She was considering the importance of living in the present when the phone rang. That made her jump and then she edged towards it. Nervously, she held her hand above the receiver. She meant to let it ring, knowing it was likely to be someone either threatening her with dissolution or offering her advice. Yet she lacked willpower. She was too lonely and eager to leave a ringing phone. There was a pause after she answered. ‘Rosa,’ said her father. ‘Rosa, how are you?’ The old rasper, on the phone again. Good God, thought Rosa. He wanted to mend her, with his rasping voice. It was with a thick throat that she answered.

‘Dad, hi. I was just about to call you. I did get your messages. Thanks so much. I wanted to call you when I had some news, but nothing so far has happened.’

‘Yes, yes. So what’s happening?’

‘I’m going for an interview later, then I’ll call you and let you know,’ said Rosa. Her father sniffed and paused. He was about to challenge her outright, and then he decided that being wry was best, so he said, ‘Excellent, Rosa, what is it for this time?’

‘Oh, something I’d like to do,’ she said. That wasn’t true, but she didn’t want the inevitable row. She didn’t like lying to her father. But the other option — being honest with him — was out of the question.

‘Well, you really do need to get a move on with it. Speed up a bit. So silly! Such a silly waste of your talents.’ He was still angry. But mostly he was confused.

‘Dad, the last thing I need is more speed. Everything’s fast enough already. Even today — the morning has just vanished.’

‘Vanished has it? Another day! Of course — because you don’t have a plan. Look at me. I’m retired. I woke at 7 a.m., learnt some Spanish, read an account of the fall of Berlin in 1945, took the dog for a walk, went for a Spanish lesson, and later I’m meeting my friend Adam for lunch, playing a round of bridge with Sarah and two of my neighbours, and finishing that account of the fall of Berlin this evening. And then my doctor tells me to take it easy!’

‘Gosh, Daddy,’ said Rosa. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t take it easy?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. I feel better by the day,’ said her father. ‘Now, let’s see, I have to come to London tomorrow, to see a friend who is emigrating to America. You know, at my age, you have to mark these partings. So why don’t we have lunch? You can tell me all about the job.’

‘Let’s,’ said Rosa. ‘Thanks for the invitation.’

‘If you want to come for the weekend some time, do come down and stay with us,’ he said.

She said, ‘Thanks, thanks so much.’ Us meant him and Sarah. Sarah was new, improbable, but there was no point getting into a funeral-baked-meats frenzy about it all. She didn’t want to think about Sarah, she didn’t want to stand on the parapet mouthing Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt so she had been avoiding her father. That was unkind, when the man was like a mummy, dried out and shrivelled and really not looking his best. She ought to have been glad he had Sarah. When you were seventy you had to get along as best you could. Really, Rosa understood that. She didn’t judge him. She just found it hard to talk to him. She understood what he was doing. If he could sling it all off, mourn and then displace his wife, then she admired him. It was just Sarah’s lisp and her wide-eyed benevolence that made Rosa want to wander away yelping like an injured dog.

But now she wondered if she should just go home after all. Get a job in Bristol, and live with her father. She thought of going back to that tall cold house and imposing on his privacy, disrupting the delicate balance he had established for himself. He and Sarah in their last-stop love nest — it would hardly improve her mood. Rosa wandering down to breakfast, into their cloud of amiable grey. It was regression, or worse, but she was tempted by it nonetheless. They fixed a time and Rosa’s father said, ‘Don’t forget like last time and don’t be late,’ and then they said goodbye.

Things to do, Monday

Get a job.

Wash your clothes

Clean the kitchen.

Phone Liam. Furniture. Ask him.

Phone Kersti. Entreat.

Find a place to stay. WHO? Whitchurch? Impossible! Kersti?

Too flinty by half. Then WHO? Andreas? Could you?

Absurd!

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Go to the bank and tell them you need more time — more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao,the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Distinguish the various philosophies of the way — read History of Western Philosophy

Sort through your papers and see if there is anything you can send to anyone who might plausibly pay you some money for it

Clean the bath

Unearth the TEMP

Go to see Andreas and ask him for somewhere to stay for a few days until you find somewhere else.

The last she could do, or at least she could certainly go to see Andreas. It was a quick walk to the corner, and at the corner she saw pink and blue walls and signs on the guttering and she heard the planes whining their descent and the trilling choirs of birds. An immaculate day stretched out before her, around her, and Rosa was walking past the lines of cars and the ragged thin-stripped trees, laughing quietly to herself. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. She was leaning back now, finding that her head was sore. She was aware of a vague smell of sweat and dust. Her mouth was dry and she wanted something to drink. She saw the roads winding along the canal, and the concrete skeleton of a new block of flats. There was a church and a matted line of old houses. She saw everything in monochrome, because she had screwed up her eyes. The light made her head pound, but really, the doctor had misdiagnosed her. It was perhaps not significant, but she had a prince. It was uncertain what they were to each other, but he was called Andreas and he was a fine man, presiding over a few feet of space by another stretch of railway tracks. Had she been less distracted she might have fallen in love with him. But love was quite impossible, given the conditions. With things as fleeting as they were you couldn’t risk it. Instead she turned up at his flat and they slithered in the darkness. He was young — perhaps too young, at twenty-five — but he was beautiful, with his brown hair, brown eyes, long limbs. He was German and he wanted to be an actor. Beauty hadn’t yet propelled him onwards, so he waited on tables and taught German. They had little in common, and they couldn’t express themselves together. Nonetheless she liked talking to him.

*

She could see a slanted forest of cranes in the distance. They were angled over a building site on the horizon, suspending cables. She turned left and saw a pub. Thin black doors, a big Victorian advertisement on the upper wall: The PARROT. A Fine Victorian Pub. Original features. Fine Ales. Good food. She had always liked the atmosphere of pubs. That was because her parents often ate in pubs: at the weekends, on holidays, they went for pub lunches, and so, perversely enough, she associated pubs with her childhood. She had played in the gardens of a hundred pubs, pawing the grass with other infants, as if the grass was a lost continent a thousand miles wide. She remembered the pub they went to on Sundays — a big Georgian hotel on a long winding street — had a donkey in the garden. It was roped to a fence, and it groaned and shrieked as she played. And there was another pub her father liked, with a view of the Avon Gorge. She remembered playing on the patio there, the paving stones stern in the dusk. At the edge was a deep drop to the muddy estuary beneath, and upstream was the inverted arch of the Suspension Bridge. In the summer months she liked to stand by the wall watching the light shining on the muddy water, though her mother always summoned her back from the edge. The gorge was vast and green, its slopes full of slanted trees.

*

As she walked, hands in her pockets, chin lifted, quite alert and aware of the seeping colours of the sky and the progress of the cars, she was thinking that Andreas had appeared to her one night in a bar. That was a few weeks ago, when she had been sitting on her own drinking wine. She had taken herself out because Jess had told her she was having a dinner party. ‘Friends for supper. Will you be here?’ which meant ‘Can you not be here?’ She had been in the bar for a while, picking at the complimentary nuts and writing in her notebook, when Andreas came over and asked if she was waiting for someone. She wasn’t sure what to say, and then she held up her hands and confessed, ‘No no, I’m not. No I always come here and drink alone. Pretty much every night.’ She thought she might have blushed.

‘That’s not true,’ he laughed. ‘I work here pretty much every night.’

She was apprehensive, monosyllabic at first, but they drank a glass of wine together. They could hardly hear each other, and he kept putting his lips close to her ear, and she discovered he told plausible jokes. At one point she laughed, genuinely and without strain. When they had shouted for a while, he said: ‘Shall we get out of here?’ and she said ‘Yes.’ Her friends would have told her not to bother, had they been there. But they weren’t. Rosa was really alone and the thought of walking back to Jess’s flat and twisting the key in the door, nodding her way through the living room and retreating to her bed, made her take his hand on the corner. This was how she got to know him, through lust and a fear of solitude. Still, they scuffed along the streets, suddenly self-conscious, and he said, ‘Do you like jazz?’ and Rosa said, ‘No, I detest jazz.’ And he laughed. ‘I was about to say,’ he said, ‘that there’s a fantastic jazz club which I go to. But I suppose that’s not of interest any more.’

‘Is there another sort of music you enjoy?’ asked Rosa.

‘No, only jazz,’ he said. They were standing outside a large church, a grey spire behind them. The sky was thick with clouds and she could hear the leaves swirling along the pavement. It was quite cold.

‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘For you, anyway.’

‘I feel a great sense of sorrow,’ he said.

They stood stock still, and he seemed embarrassed. They were smiling at each other. He was tall, statuesque, and when he turned his head to look at the street she saw he had a stark profile, a long nose, an overhanging brow. His features were unsubtle in their handsomeness; it was hard to tell what age would do to them, whether it would refine them or blunt them altogether. She caught herself looking at his lips, which were bright red against a surrounding shadow of stubble.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’

‘Here we are,’ she said. Inevitably, they kissed. He smelt strongly of aftershave and more remotely of smoke. It was curious but far from seedy; she was surprised how glad she was to kiss him.

*

They spent a weekend in his flat on Tavistock Crescent. It was part of a modern development, handy for the shops of Portobello Road, set back from the terrorist safe house nearby. After that weekend she had seen him a dozen times perhaps. She found him relaxing company. He expected very little of her. He seemed to understand that she was not quite herself. He told her that she was a beautiful woman, but sad and grave. He explained to her that they transcended the boundaries of youth and age. In this equation, she suspected she was age. He enjoyed being naked, he explained. He wanted to worship her body, and he announced that he loved her thighs. ‘And the curve of your back, and the muscles on your arms, long thin muscles,’ he said. ‘You’re very graceful.’ That should have been a sop for her ego, but she couldn’t absorb it. When they lay in bed listening to the trains hammering past and the usual grinding of the Westway, he said, ‘I would like to take you on holiday. You seem tired.’

‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly be tired,’ said Rosa, reclining into a pile of pillows. He had dark hair and alabaster skin. It was a good contrast, and she admired his youth. It gave her an illusion that she might also be twenty-five, poised on the brink of everything. At twenty-five she had been naive and driven. More naive, less driven than him. She had been resolutely, devoutly fashionable; it amused her to remember her faithful adherence to fleeting trends. She had spent so much time trying to enjoy herself in the usual ways — clubbing, drinking, dying her hair. Her bathroom had been full of balms and ointments. Now, at the stage when she was meant to be plastering herself in unguents, she had thrown that stuff away. At twenty-five she had felt that there was time, that life was long. Now, the years since then had been soft sift in an hourglass, they had poured through so quickly. She wanted to tell this to Andreas, but there was little she could offer him. Compared with Rosa at twenty-five, Andreas was distinct and resolute. He told her she was going through a bad patch. It sounded reassuring that way, as if it was all just as fleeting as a fever. He understood, but he wanted her to know that he found her fascinating, he said. ‘Your eyes, your dark wit, some days you are pained, others quite childlike and funny. I like your range. I think you must always have been like this. I have no depth at all, but I admire it in others,’ he said. When he talked like that she lapped it up, her with her dented self. She enjoyed it, and didn’t care if he was filling time. He had that sort of carelessness. Sometimes she knew he was talking for the hell of it, to stop a gap, stuff a bung in a silence.

*

He had photographs of his parents on the table by his bed. His mother looked beautiful in a high-cheekboned way. His father was tall and thin, bent slightly. Andreas polished the frames, laughing at his reverence. He slung his legs out of the bed and offered to bring her coffee.

‘My mother’, he said, when he came back with a tray, ‘always told me I should learn how to wait on women. She says it is an important skill, perhaps the most important.’

‘It is a skill,’ said Rosa. ‘Knowing when to serve and when to command.’

‘I can do either,’ he said. Their repartee was a little forced. But his eyes shone when she kissed him. He listened well, laughed in the right places, generously plied her with questions. Still, the balance between them kept slipping. Within a few days, he was offering her advice.

‘You need to get a sense of what you want to do,’ he kept saying. ‘You have to do something. We all, we all have to do something. I feel I can help, at least with this.’

‘I just need to get back into the Polis,’ she said.

‘The Polis,’ he said. He sounded tired. They were wrapped in sheets. Theirs was a bed-bound romance. It did best at night. But now it was early morning, and they were both hung-over.

‘It’s hard to get back in,’ she said. ‘Once you fall out.’

He stayed silent, looking at her. Then he rolled over and folded his arms around her. She was pressed into his wide chest. He seemed to be smiling. He kissed the back of her neck.

I just wonder what it means, she wanted to say. Us, here, in this tentative version of romance, and before, Liam and I. These entanglements. All of us with our bare bones of knowledge. Not knowing what we are. The birth of tragedy. This smallness I feel deep inside myself. The Birth of Smallness. Yes, yes, after the Egyptians, the Greeks with their fetish for dying beauty, doomed greatness, comes the birth of smallness, the soaring rise of the insignificant. Here I am, thought Rosa, the living embodiment of the new age of minutiae. She understood it clearly. Gradually everything had been taken over by people like Rosa. In general, her kind were doing very well. She had been given a generous slice of the pie; it was just that she couldn’t quite eat it.

Andreas was explaining that he was naturally idle. It was only by an effort of will that he made himself do things. The key was to set yourself small goals, he said.

‘So there’s one thing we must establish — what are your small goals?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing much. Avoid the onslaught. Stay out of trouble.’

‘Well, that’s not quite what I meant. As goals, I am not sure they work. Because eventually something will come to you, debt or death, or something anyway. This onslaught, you can’t really avoid it.’

‘Why?’ she said.

‘Why can’t you avoid death? I don’t know, for pity’s sake,’ he said. He raised a long, thick arm and slapped his hand on his forehead.

‘No, I mean the everlasting why,’ said Rosa. He yawned, and turned onto his front. He crossed his hands above his head, defensively.

‘I thought it was an everlasting yes,’ he said into the pillow.

‘No, that must be something else.’

‘Anyway it’s not a goal.’ He scratched his arm. He had a hand on her back, she could feel the warmth and pressure of his hand.

‘Why?’

‘Let’s not go round again.’

‘No, I mean why is “why” not a goal?’

Now his head was buried in the pillow. His voice was muffled. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘in the name of God in Heaven, “why” is a question, not a goal. It’s a goddamn question!’

‘Huh, profound,’ she said, but it wasn’t fair to mock him. Now he sat up and took her hand.

‘You say you are tired. Well, give yourself a few weeks, and then really get cracking.’

‘Get cracking?’ she said.

‘Is it not a contemporary phrase?’

‘No, it’s perfect,’ said Rosa. ‘It’s just the right phrase.’ And she kissed him, though she knew she was wasting his time.

*

He was vain, and his motions were sometimes contrived, the studied flick of his head, the way he moved his hands. She could see his health was immanent. She was sure any woman would like him. Because they saw each other so seldom, she was convinced he must have another lover, a batch of them. This made her distant and sometimes preoccupied. It wasn’t jealousy she felt. It was a relief, if anything, that he wasn’t hanging around expecting love. Still, in a few weeks she knew a lot about him. He filled her in on the basics, meticulously, sparing her none of the details. He came from Berlin. His father had been a diplomat, and had been posted to China and Morocco when Andreas was a child. So by the age of seven he spoke German, English, French and a little Mandarin Chinese. His English was grammatically impeccable, but his idiom was inconsistent. It was a sort of cinema slang, derived from English-language films. He was tall and pale, with a smooth, line-free face. His hair was slightly curly and he wore it long. He had fine muscular legs; he liked to run. He walked with great confidence; he stood upright with his hands resting in his pockets. He was rarely pensive or demoralised, as far as Rosa could see. In fact he seemed to possess a blissful sense of optimism that Rosa dimly remembered, and felt was bound up with youth. He always dressed well, in smart, freshly ironed clothes, and his underwear was striped. He had a slight accent, but it was not immediately possible to place him. Initially she had thought he might be American.

*

For all this, she wasn’t quite sure what he wanted from her. What meaning did he attack to their liaison? She hadn’t got round to asking him the question, but she was sure she should. He was far too robust to lie around droning on about the self. He was too young, too optimistic, too fixed on his as yet nonexistent career as an actor. He was reasonably interested in the contemporary novel, he said. He was good at entertaining himself. Other than jazz he liked Wagner and The Pixies. That seemed a contrivance to Rosa, but she didn’t mind. He moved with the grace of someone whose gestures have not yet become habitual, as if he would be quite capable of casting off his ways of speaking and moving, switching them suddenly for another mode.

*

Now she was at the peeling door of his flat. There was a Moroccan sitting on the balcony above, smoking a cigarette. She nodded at him, and he bowed his head. A mother and child were playing in a multicoloured playground behind her. She heard childish squeals, adult congratulations. ‘Very good!’ ‘Very very good sweetie!’ A TV was on in the flat next door, and she saw the colours shifting in the glass. She waited while the day continued, and when Andreas answered the door he said, ‘ROSA!!’ and weighted the word with exclamation marks. ‘It’s so nice when you come round,’ he said, smiling and kissing her cheek. ‘How are you? And what, what has been happening?’

‘Nothing at all. And to you?’ That was their chaste opening, and they stood in the hall with their hands in their pockets. He was wearing the whitest shirt she had ever seen. His body felt warm, and she grasped his hands. There was the cuckoo clock behind him and she saw her face was red in the distorting mirror.

‘It’s so boring, but I have to go out any minute,’ he said. ‘So boring. Just to the dentist, but I have to go. I’ve waited a month for the appointment and I’m in agony. My mouth is disgusting, I’m ashamed.’ He gestured at a tooth, and made a grimace. ‘But can I walk you some of the way home? The dentist is just by Ladbroke Grove. So you see, it’s perfect, if you don’t mind going back that way? Did you have something else to do over here? Are you on your way somewhere?’ A few stories came to mind, but she said, ‘No, I just did some shopping on Portobello Road, and thought I’d drop by.’

‘What did you buy?’ Her hands were empty.

‘Oh, window shopping, nothing.’

‘So you’ll walk back with me? As an unexpected treat before I go to my torture.’

‘OK, that would be nice.’

‘Just wait here, wait here just a second.’

He vanished along the corridor, and she heard him switching off a radio.

*

Hand in hand for a while, and then walking apart, they passed along the crescent of balconies, satellite dishes hammered up on the walls and washing floating on invisible currents of air. They neared the metal haunches of Westbourne Studios. She thought of Whitchurch at her meeting, speaking in a soft voice. She would be poised, convincing. Then she would leave, safe in the knowledge of her continued relevance.

She said, ‘How are you?’ and he said, ‘Good, good. I’ve been thinking about you this week.’

‘That’s kind of you,’ she said. ‘Depending on the way in which you have thought of me, of course.’ They arrived under the concrete slur of the Westway. She saw the sign scrawled on the bricks. TEMP — it ran over and over again — TEMP TEMP TEMP TEMP — in red spray paint. Next to it were some stencils of a man walking backwards. What the TEMP, she thought. She saw the day spread out, the trees and the sky.

‘Oh, mostly about the curves of your ass, I’m joking,’ he said. ‘But how are you? Are you tired? You look a bit tired.’

‘No no I’m fine.’

He kissed her nonchalantly. He had a hand on her back, and she could feel his breath on her skin.

‘I was thinking that when I have more money, we should go away,’ he said. ‘You’d love it. A weekend in Berlin. We should go when my parents are away and we can have the run of their flat. It’s a gross place, in many ways, terrible furnishings, but you’d probably enjoy it. We have a few really dreadful family portraits, painted by my sister, who has no artistic talent at all.’

‘Of course,’ said Rosa. But that made her laugh. ‘Well, that sounds good.’

‘Would you really like to come?’

‘Oh yes, that sounds great.’ And she thought she would.

‘When?’

‘Well, soon. Soon would be great,’ she said.

‘Soon, well, I’ll check my diary and see what I’m doing. Anything more specific?’

‘You know, I’m between jobs, I can fit in almost any time. You’re the one with the packed schedule,’ said Rosa.

‘Yes, I’m pretty in demand. An audition here, a phone call here, another rejection here. Though I do have a job — I’ll tell you about it later. Not now though, it’s a real yarn.’

‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘A job, that’s great!’

‘Great!’ he said, mocking her. ‘Great!’ and now he seized her arm again. Here they were trimming the trees, and their conversation was drowned by the sound of a chainsaw. Anyway it was a very short walk, hardly supplying enough time to pose the question. She was wondering if she could slip it in. It would change something, if she said it. She wasn’t even sure how she could phrase it. Andreas, funny thing to ask. Bit of an embarrassment. Row with my flatmate. Just need a place for a few days, until I sort myself out. You can say no. But that would involve a full-on confession, revealing much that she had not yet told him, the fact that she was debt-laden and generally adrift, more adrift than he thought she was.

‘I really don’t think you’re being entirely honest,’ he was saying, which made her snap her head towards him. Now the sound of the saw had died away.

‘Why?’ she said, caught out.

‘I think you’re just fobbing me off, and thinking you’ll find an excuse another time. Is it my sister’s art that’s putting you off? We don’t have to look at her portraits, I promise. I know I haven’t really made the flat sound so nice. But it’s fine really.’ She realised he was joking, and smiled.

‘Really, it sounds fantastic. I can’t wait,’ she said.

‘Still not convincing. Perhaps it’s me? You’d like someone older and fatter, some ancient relic, really yellow in the gills?’

‘Green about the gills,’ she said, automatically.

‘Thanks, thanks so much.’

So she laughed like a drain and turned away. She stared out at the patchy, greying branches of the trees, the pale washed sky.

‘Do you really mean it?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to go away?’

‘Yes, I always mean what I say,’ said Rosa. That really was a lie. With Andreas, she almost never meant what she said. It was a shame, but she had discovered that when she spoke to him she was usually incapable of telling the truth. She saw the word again, TEMP, sprayed on the stone rafters. And she saw billboards with words on them — THE KILLS: LOVE IS A DESERTER. HEY LYLA — A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL. Vowing readily, she followed him along. Ask Andreas. Clean the kitchen. Explain to Jess. But ask Andreas. Ask him for somewhere to stay. Get a job. Read History of Western Philosophy. Read the later plays of Shakespeare. Clean the bathroom and scrub the toilet. Really, explain everything to Andreas.

*

At Ladbroke Grove station she felt a low sense of disappointment because she had failed to ask. Something in his cordiality prevented her. He kept it all humorous, and she was forced to play along. He made jokes and laughed loudly and she thought, A BED! Still she couldn’t summon it, and he pushed his hair out of his eyes, wrapped his arms around her and said, ‘So I’ll see you later?’

‘Later?’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Is that why, or the everlasting why?’ he said. He had been making this joke for a few weeks, ever since she had mentioned it. Still, she laughed politely. ‘I’m proposing that we meet again later. Because I haven’t enjoyed enough of your company just now. How about it? Dinner? Something? Drink?’ He shrugged his shoulders at her.

A place to stay? she thought. Anyway it was a reprieve. She could go round and ask him over a bottle of wine. Casually, not urgently and in the harsh daylight. So she nodded. ‘That would be great,’ she said.

‘Always great, this word, great.’

‘It is all great,’ she said, and he smiled a thin determined smile and said, ‘See you later. Any time. Drop by. I’m just learning lines,’ he said. ‘Any old time.’

‘OK,’ she said.

‘Ciao bella,’ he said.

They kissed at the entrance of the tube, surrounded by the milling floods of people and then she turned and, like a villain thwarted, walked home again.

Things to do, Monday

Get a job.

Wash your clothes

Clean the kitchen.

Phone Liam.

Ask Andreas if you can stay

Read widely in world religions

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Call Jess and apologise.

Go to the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao,the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Distinguish the various philosophies of the way

Unearth the TEMP

Collate, sort, discard your so-called papers

Clean the bath

Before Jess gets home — clean!

When she got back she saw the answer-machine light was flashing, and in the hope that one of the messages might be for her, she pressed the button. Eternally optimistic, she was thinking the flashing light might save her. If she had been offered a celestial helping hand, she would have grasped it. But instead there was a computer pretending to be a man: ‘HELLO, THIS IS DAVE CALLING TO TELL YOU THAT YOU HAVE WON AT LEAST A THOUSAND POUNDS’ it said. ‘CALL THIS NUMBER TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE. MANY CONGRATULATIONS!’ The computer pretending to be a woman said ‘To listen to the message again, press one’, and Rosa pressed two instead.

‘This message has been deleted.’

‘Hello, this is Jackie from the bank calling for Miss Lane. Can you give me a call when you have time.’

An emissary of Sharkbreath, so Delete! DELETE! Rosa instructed the friendly computerised voice, and the message vanished for ever.

She thought she might clean the kitchen, but instead she made another call. After a few rings Kersti answered. Kersti was definitely becoming waspish. Here they were, this afternoon, this day fleeting softly towards evening, and Rosa said, ‘Hello, Kersti, it’s Rosa’ and there was no reply. No trace of friendly recognition at all! That sounded bad, so Rosa, nervous and picking up speed, said, ‘Hi, Kersti, sorry to bother you, it’s Rosa.’

‘Yes, Rosa, what?’

‘Hoping you have worked a miracle of legalese.’

‘Don’t you know it’s Monday?’

‘Monday? What happens on Monday?’

‘Monday is my worst day.’

‘Should I perhaps call later?’

‘I haven’t been in touch with Liam,’ said Kersti. ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’

‘Look, Kersti, I know you’re very busy. It’s very kind of you to help. I know it seems stupid, trivial, to be quibbling about a tacky sofa and some chairs, a second-hand bed, the rest. But my credit card is about to explode in a ball of fire, so satanic is the interest. And then there’s the overdraft, you know, it’s dull but it would really help,’ she said. ‘The furniture would help. If Liam would only do the decent thing, sell it, give me my half.’

‘You see, Rosa, the rest of us prefer to have a JOB,’ Kersti said, repeating the refrain. Everyone hymned it in a different way, but they all hymned it the same. It reminded her of a song someone sang when she was young. You got to have a J O B if you wanna be with me. Anything would be better, Kersti was saying, than ringing around begging her ex-boyfriend to sell her furniture. Almost anything would be more dignified.

‘A lot isn’t,’ said Rosa. ‘Believe me, I’ve had a look. A lot out there isn’t dignified at all.’ And after dignity, there was the getting up, getting there on time, sitting yourself down, the rest.

‘Rosa, I have to go,’ sighed Kersti.

‘It’s not lassitude that stops me.’

‘Rosa, I’m going now. Talk to the bank.’

‘The bank is proving intractable.’

Kersti said, ‘Yes, tell him to come in. OK, Rosa, time’s up. I’ll have another go soon, OK. Now Mr Wharton is waiting.’

‘I do understand, absolutely. I agree, you must get on. If you could call Liam, that would be great. But I’ll understand if you’re too busy.’

‘Yes, thanks for your call. I’ll get back to you soon,’ said Kersti, because Mr Wharton had just come in.

‘Well, it’s very kind of you. I am very grateful,’ said Rosa.

She had phoned a few too many times already. Really, it was sketchy of Liam. He was holding onto the stuff, waiting for her to succumb to madness or to marry rich. She couldn’t think why else he was delaying. Negotiations had stalled. The furniture was still in his flat. The bank sharks were getting vicious, showing a distinct sense of purpose. They really wanted the money back. Or her head on a platter. Now it was just Rosa and Kersti, trading barbs. Kersti smiling through her deep sense of frustration.

‘OK, Mrs Middleton, I’ll speak to you soon,’ said Kersti.

Then the line went dead, leaving her standing with a rictus grin and a receiver pressed superfluously to her face. Tabula rasa, she thought. Hardly possible at all.

*

Now she heard the dry speech of the commentator, releasing the latest. Today the war continued. The police caught a man trying to board a train with a bomb. The prime minister announced that global warming is a serious threat, perhaps the most serious our civilisation has faced. Interest rates went up. The archbishop said that abortion laws should be revised. England lost at sport. And, breaking news, Rosa Lane distinctly failed to pass the guardians of the gate and unearth the thing that lies within. Yes, that’s right, initial reports are confirming that Rosa Lane — thirty-five and quite a lot, creeping towards the end that awaits us all — is still steadfastly failing to cast off the manacles, mind-forged or otherwise — and gain the pearl beyond price! We’ll be following that story through the evening but now let’s go back to the war. The clock in the corner was like a metronome. It steadied her nerves. She found some pieces of paper on Jess’s desk, and a black fountain pen in a silver box. She sat down to write. She wrote to her father, telling him not to worry. Things were fine. The furniture was well in hand. The furniture is definitely going to come good. The cash is mine, daddy, all mine.

She wrote to Liam. Dear Liam, Please can you sell the furniture. I need my half. Or could you buy your half from me? It is quite urgent. Thanks, Rosa.

She wrote: Dear Mr Martin White, I have never written for your publication. I wrote for years for the Daily Rag. I was a mediocre but fairly successful journalist. I wondered if you might be interested in a few ideas I have. An article perhaps about graffiti and its significance, the mythic suggestiveness it contains? I promise you, there is ancient lore being spelt out on the streets, prophecies of the future. I can’t unravel them, but I can see they are there. Or, perhaps, a piece about elective destitution — an inexcusable squandering of one’s job and training, a burgeoning refusenik cultural movement? That was Rosa, she knew no others. Devastating to those who have struggled to support you. Clearly ungrateful. Prompted by something difficult to treat, apparently, some lurking sense of WHY BOTHER? I have many more ideas, and look forward to talking to you. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Then she wrote: Plot scenario. Rosa Lane is saved. Flights of angels sing her to her supper. She is carted away from the weariness, the fever and the fret. Ahem.

She meant Amen, but it was so long since she had written the word she had forgotten how to spell it.

‘Oh God,’ she said to the room. She tore up the piece of paper and dropped it on the floor. Then she wrote: We live in the conviction that we are masters of our lives, that life is given to us for our enjoyment. But this is obviously absurd. Surely we can be happy in the knowledge of our mortality? Surely we must be? There is no eternal substance in the universe. Even the stars are subject to flux. Even the sun must fade. If we look around we understand that mutability is the inevitable state. So why not a religion of the mutable, rather than the eternal? Worshipping the ceaseless tendency of things to alter? This is my philosophy … She tore up that as well and threw the pieces away. She whistled guiltily and thought about giving Liam a friendly call. At least then she could wish him luck and check on the furniture. It seemed odd that he would marry so soon, but there was nothing she could do and she wanted him to know that she was glad, really, ultimately she was happy he was so well. He had jumped, head first, into the consoling barrel, the malmsey marriage butt. And here she was in the great loneliness, trying to keep her nose in the air. She aimed to smile, but found she couldn’t summon it. She was confused, thinking about food and money and the death of love. She found she remembered so many small things. Things of life. The almost invisible backdrop. Years flooding past her. Only a few years ago she had been young and it seemed like there was a lot of time. Doubtless she had wasted far too many days. Of course she had always surrendered hours to the simple business of stuffing her belly. But that was inevitable. Eros agape and amor, she thought. Now she remembered an evening when she and Liam had sat together in a restaurant. She had it clear in her mind — both of them tired, in smart clothes, having come there straight from work. It seemed an age ago, an eon back, in a misty past when she was the suave owner of an array of A-lined skirts and smart jackets, and wore them elegantly, with a scarf around her neck. She tied her hair up, clipped it into a chignon. Then she and Liam looked well together, her clicking in high heels, and Liam in a sensible suit and a pastel-blue tie. Each of them with a glass, sure of themselves.

On their table was a flower standing in a slender vase. There were photos on the walls, patched pictures of forgotten celebrities. The place was subdued, a little seedy, but the pasta was edible, caked in cream. They were both labouring over their plates. When they were no longer hungry, they fought half-heartedly about a crisis Liam was having at work. Liam was fighting a rearguard action against Rosa’s insistence, her pointed questions. She was asking him to try harder. ‘Go back and renegotiate,’ she was saying. ‘Tell them you won’t take it. Threaten to walk out.’

‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I just don’t do things that way.’

‘Well, you have to. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. They’ll ignore you. The reason they treat you this way is because you never stand up for yourself. In this, you’re hopeless.’

‘Hopeless?’ He looked hurt.

‘Only in this. In this you are spineless. What would be so wrong about saying what you think?’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said.

‘Well, what does that mean?’

It was ironic, how ambitious she had been for him. She jostled at him; she hardly ever praised him. That was her fault. Those evenings when she picked at him, explained what he was doing wrong, standing on the pedestal of her so-called career, she had slowly forced him into action. Liam was tortoise-brained, he liked to move to the slowest available timescale, but eventually she made him resolute. Bedding Grace was a coup de théâtre. Perhaps it was an act of revenge. That evening, she recalled, they had passed some hours discussing his latest small failure. Rosa was steely and certain of herself. At the end of the beating he picked up the bill. It didn’t help to pity him. Still, the hours they had passed discussing his job! Tearing him apart, mostly. Why did she care so much? She had been too engaged with it all; she had been too frantic. Evening after evening they had debated their small lives, writ them large together. And though she saw her enthusiasm — her concern for these elements — as incomprehensible, quite inscrutable from her present state, it remained strange to her that it should be impossible to return to these evenings, that she would never sit again in a small Italian restaurant with Liam. At the time it had seemed ongoing, each evening part of a limitless series. Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they — alone of everyone — might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point — the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning — it seemed as if this pattern would recur for ever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she had failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.

There were days when she wondered if she had been profligate. If she had been idle, and inert, sluggish in love and then in saving herself. Perhaps she should have fought for him, challenged Grace to a duel. And that wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought. She would have liked the chance to blast a shot at Grace. Pistols out. The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking each took four steps. The clock of destiny chimed, and the poet, without a sound, dropped his pistol onto the earth. Better to be Lensky, or Pushkin, blasted and shot to shreds, than no one at all. She always liked the absolute insanity of the duel, the loss of a sense of proportion inherent to the ritual. Grace would have tried to talk her way out of it. Laconically, she would have said, ‘Essentially, Rosa you are succumbing to an atavistic — and unfeminine — urge for violence. Why? Why suppress centuries of progress, because you are feeling upset?’ — but Rosa would have her pistol cocked already.

Sitting in the present, a cold wind swirling at the windows, Rosa wrote: tat tvam asi. In another we recognise our true being. She screwed up the piece of paper and held it in her hand. Bodhi, or something like, the pure beauty of the bed, the origin of the world. The love grotto! The enchantment of the heart, a moment of perfect suspension, above the clashing forces of desire and loathing, a moment of beauty. Love as a casting off of the bonds of the ego. Supplying an instant of perfection, ecstasy in beholding the object of this pure and selfless love! A condition remote from the sneering final stages of her relationship with Liam, it had to be acknowledged. Yet for a few years, Liam was your god. Now she heard the thrum of the rain. A sudden storm had begun. The sash windows rattled and she heard the softened sounds of tyres on the road. The clouds swirled. Later there might be thunder, she thought. Later there might be thunder, she wrote, and tore up the paper and threw the pieces into the toilet.

She felt sick, but that was because she had drunk too much tea. It was clear she had to get away, out of her head. Out of the city which had a dark cloud hanging above it, apprehension, fear perhaps. She perceived that the flat was small and the house was whirling in space. We are all, thought Rosa, speeding through space, a velocity too wild to contemplate. Of course her surroundings were significant, but they changed so quickly. Time’s winged whatsit, flapping at her back. These feuds, wars, everything spinning in emptiness. And Rosa as her own fleeting vantage point. Changing all the time, even as she tried to think of herself as the still centre. Even Whitchurch was spinning, turning swift circles. She could move as slowly as she liked, and she couldn’t change a thing. The earth wobbles on its axis and turns through the days and wanders round the sun. Everything is speed and light, and will be until the galaxy becomes static and dark. The Vedas talked of a pattern of dreams. Brahma dreamt of a serpent on a river, and on the serpent’s back was a tree, and each leaf of the tree was a dreamer, dreaming their own dream. Every few thousand years Brahma would awake, and a flower would appear from his navel and drift downstream. Or something like that. Definitely a flower and a navel involved. She remembered a song her grandfather had sung her when she was a child. Row row row the boat gently down the stream, Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream. It was a neat little Heraclitan ditty, and he had sung it as a lullaby. Hardly consoling, she thought. Even worse, life is but a dream of a dream, said the Vedas, a dreamer dreaming of others dreaming, more perplexing still. Indra’s net. You were netted at birth, confined and quite entangled. She didn’t trust much, except experience, her own small sense of things. In this she called herself Jamesian, though really she knew little of William James. Any number of labels would fit this feeling, she was sure. And her experience, though she perceived it as her own, her unique perspective on the world, was most likely collective; it seemed unlikely she was privy to any secrets.

Wiping her hands, she walked to the bathroom. Clean the bathroom! she thought. She ran the tap, and watched the water whirl into the plughole. She touched the plastic of the shower curtain and saw light sliding down it. The universe was riddled with impossible elements, she thought, absurd symmetries. It was curious to her that she was presented daily with irrefutable evidence, these traces of vastness, a galaxy of stars and lights spiralling into infinity, unknown space. Faced with the moon and the stars, now visible in the rising dusk, she was briefly aware of the absurdity of considering anything at all. Reality became a meaningless piece of fabric, tugged around this cluster of humans, as they waited on their fertile rock. And yet people lived with passion, conviction. Even though they saw the stars and accepted the passage of millions of years, antiquity stamped on the surface of the planet. They lived and died for manufactured causes. She understood almost nothing of the materials of her universe. She knew of gases and solar flares, of intense variations in the brightness of the sun. When she thought of the sun she thought in lists of words, of gamma rays and optical emissions. She understood that the sun was a collective term, that the light she saw derived from the photosphere, where gaseous layers became transparent. She dimly apprehended that the sun’s corona, alone, burned at a temperature greater than one million degrees Kelvin, she had once been told. That was the sort of fact she couldn’t process at all. They might as well tell her the earth was shaped like a dinner plate and floated on a pool of eternal water. She had her five senses, concerned as they were with basic survival, and her brain was busy with the functions of her body and something she had been taught to refer to as thought. Then she had this intimation of something else — a knowledge that if she only could — if she only could! — she would break away, break out of bondage, and stand free of it all, transcend it somehow, find the World Will, sink into the Geist, whatever the hell it was that she was trying to unearth — and when she read Schopenhauer she thought it was that, but she was impressionable and another book would cast her thoughts in a different light, shade them in differently. She had all of this to struggle with, and instead she thought about Grace and Liam! It was a travesty, when she could be trying to understand the sun.

She splashed water on her face. She wore her last suit and forced her hair to settle. Because her shoes were grey and weathered she borrowed a clean pair from Jess’s cupboard and forced them on. When she was dressed and ready, she took a Hoover to the living room carpet. It was goodwill cleaning, an attempt to make things up to Jess. She marshalled objects in the kitchen and hoped that made a difference. She ran a cloth round the kettle. She aimed the showerhead at the bathroom and left it like a banya. Then she took all her papers and her pen and her coat and thrust them into her bedroom. Pausing only to take an apple from the kitchen, she ran out of the flat and vaulted down the steps.