London and the South-East

20

AND HE HAS other worries. His Friday-night date, for instance. A schoolteacher, someone Ned knows. Within minutes of Paul telling him that he and Heather were packing it in, Ned was pressing him to phone Jane. He was insistent, pestering. A balloon-bellied Pandarus wiping foam from his mouth. ‘Call her,’ he said, sliding the scrap of paper on which he had written her number across the bar. ‘Call her. I’ve told her you’re going to call.’ And then, a week later, ‘Have you called her yet? No? She’s expecting you to call. She wants you to. She’s waiting. If you don’t call she’ll be disappointed.’ On the phone, she sounded jolly. She was surprisingly well spoken, for a friend of Ned’s. Sweating, out in the garden, Paul said, ‘So … Should we have a drink or something?’

And now he is in the Ancient Mariner, a newish pub on Coleridge Street. He was here with Heather once; their local, the Kendal Arms — a corner building of peeling green paint with several knackered pool tables on the dusty old carpet, a dartboard and live sport on TV — she refuses to go into. The Ancient Mariner, however, has leather sofas. Despite these sofas, it had been a depressing evening. Entering the loud, smoky interior of the pub more or less straight from his porridge, Paul was still half asleep, and did not feel — really did not feel — like drinking beer and chain-smoking cigarettes. Shy and intimidated in the fashionable milieu, Heather had struggled with his obvious malaise. On the table in front of him was a lurid vodka Red Bull, which hurt his teeth every time he tentatively sipped it. She had a vase of white wine. There was also a saucer of olives. Whenever she spoke, his lips formed themselves, for a moment, into a tight little smile. ‘That’s a nice picture,’ she said. They had been sitting in silence for several minutes. He half turned to inspect it. ‘Yeah,’ he said, without seeing it. He was having trouble getting through his vodka Red Bull, and would not want another cigarette for a while. He lit one anyway.

No, it had not been an enjoyable evening. Nevertheless, when he needed somewhere to meet Jane, the Ancient Mariner seemed the place. And now he waits for her there, waits with his pint of white beer, his knees jiggling and his eyes on the door. Though it is many years since he has found himself in this situation, in his youth Paul was something of a ladies’ man. A fluent talker with a winning smile; with a finely transparent line in faux knavery. Nor was he overweight then. His self-esteem, in those early salesman years, was spry, was whippet-like. On the sales floor he was one of the top men, which thrilled him for a while. The money itself — and for a year or two there was lots of it — had made him feel strong. It had made him feel self-important. He took taxis everywhere; when he left work, he would wave down a black cab and stroll unhurriedly to where it waited. Such things were tonic to his self-esteem, and he made a name for himself as a minor ladies’ man. Murray was envious, for one.

Young women who joined the sales force at Burdon Macauliffe tended — if they were single, which they usually weren’t; and if they mixed with the other salespeople, which they usually didn’t — to fall into the hands of shambling, handsome Pax Murdoch, or of Paddy, a lean Irishman with eloquent sky-blue eyes. Paul was a sort of junior partner to these two, and enjoyed what was left over. Lucie, for instance, vivacious and pudding-faced with straw curls. With a boxer’s nose. Or Valentina, sickly-looking and unable to speak in a voice louder than a mumbled whisper — she was hopeless at selling and quickly left; she and Paul went out for more than a year. Somewhat unusual was Lorna. Raven-haired Lorna was pretty — pretty enough to make Paul wonder what she was doing with him. In her, his self-esteem found its limits, and he wondered why he merited such a woman; wondered whether she was perhaps unstable, nuts, a nymphomaniac. If he had had more money he might have understood. She was the one to initiate their short affair, practically pulling him into a taxi outside the Café de Paris, where the Burdon Macauliffe Christmas party had taken place. He presumed that he had his standing as a minor ladies’ man to thank for this. From the start, though, he had been ill at ease. He was troubled by things that had not troubled him in the past. Aspects of his physique and wardrobe, for instance. In public, he felt threatened by other men. In private, he worried inordinately about his performance. When it ended, it was like a liberation. She immediately took up with Paddy. Paul did not mind — he was flattered, in fact; felt a new parity with the pale-eyed Irishman, whose friendliness towards him increased markedly from then on. And he felt too that he had had a sort of escape; that head-turning Lorna might have led him into a total failure of self-esteem — the way that being married to Brit Ekland turned poor Peter Sellers into a paranoid schizophrenic.

His standing as a ladies’ man did not suffer. Nor did it suffer the following summer, when word spread through the sales force that he was seeing two ladies simultaneously. The only person who did not know seemed to be one of the ladies in question — Lisa O’Rourke, known privately to Paul as ‘Weathered Statue’. Her head had a uniquely smooth, worn look. Her nose a mere nub, her lips practically not there. She had poor posture, and long thin undulating mashed-swede hair. Lashless blue eyes under low, weathered brows. She was on Murray’s team — an earnest, persistent pitcher — and it was she who gave Paul the nail-biting blow job in the smoking room one evening when they stayed late to call California. Murray was still there and might have walked in on them — until the very last moments, Paul’s eyes were intent on the blond wood of the institutional door. Lisa did not know, however, that he was also seeing Sharon. ‘Beaky’ was his secret name for Sharon — she was half-Lebanese and had a nose like a toucan. (Between the two of them, he often thought — averaged out, as it were — they would have had a normalish profile.) He and Lisa had had no more than a fling when she went to Ireland for a funeral. In the end, she was away for two weeks, and Paul presumed that that was that. Murray’s birthday fell in this fortnight, and the festivities ended in a dark, airless nightspot in King’s Cross. Murray hit on Sharon there; she went home with Paul. She was a secretary in the London branch of an immense Japanese bank — these were the days when the park of the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo was worth more, it was said, than the whole of California — and she took Paul to the Japanese restaurants where she went with Mr Kojima, for whom she worked.

Paul suspects that it was Murray — for whom he worked — who told Lisa what was happening; that when she did not pick up on the tittle-tattle he was so assiduously spreading, he just sat her down in the smoking room one morning and told her. So ‘Weathered Statue’ wiped her oddly lifeless blue eyes and left the sales force. (Murray tried to meet her for a drink the following week — she said yes, then stood him up.) And in September, more or less on a whim, Paul told Sharon that he did not want to see her any more.

In later years, when there was a lesser profusion of sex and money, he would wonder why he had been so nonchalant in leaving her.

He remembers how Eddy, when he heard how long it had been, marched him to the nearest phone box and told him to take his pick of the tom cards. The phone box was on Fleet Street, and standing in its packed sour odour, Paul had surveyed the festooned cards. Then, stepping out of the stuffiness, he had said, ‘No, mate …’

‘Why not?’ Eddy shouted on the pavement.

‘I just … I don’t know. I don’t want to. Do you?’

‘Me? I’m a married man. But no it’s true,’ Eddy had said, as they walked to the Chesh, ‘you want to know what you’re getting into. Here.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘Take this number. She’s in Bayswater. She’s good. Really sweet …’

‘No —’

‘Just take it! You don’t have to call her.’

So Paul took it.

‘Her name’s Annette,’ Eddy said.

‘Annette’ worked out of a basement in a street of one-star hotels and youth hostels. The street was strange-looking because it was originally a mews of plain, pipe-disfigured house-backs which had been transformed into house-fronts with no more than the addition of narrow doors and a few half-hearted pilasters. The number in question seemed to be some sort of hostel, with a pine-panelled foyer where Paul made his way past a fridge and some CCTV monitors towards the stairs.

When she opened the door, he was surprised to see her wide, flat breasts. She was wearing forest-green knickers. ‘Annette?’ She nodded, and stood aside to let him in. She was short, solid, blondish, smiling. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said, stepping worriedly into the room. When she asked his name, she did not seem to be French, as ‘Annette’ was obviously intended to suggest; nor was she English. The room was quite large and smelt of cigarette smoke and air-freshener. It had a white, empty feel. He noticed a single plug-in electric hob, a sink, some bottles of household cleaning products. A small powder-pink stereo. The curtains were open and so was the window — it was summer — and passing footsteps were easily audible from the street overhead. She wanted a hundred pounds. He took out his wallet, and the five twenties that he had withdrawn on the way, and she put the money in a drawer. Then she pulled the thin curtains, stepped out of her knickers and asked him what he wanted. He just shrugged. Her doughy breasts swung forward slightly as she stooped to put her hand on his quiescent trouser front. Then, starting to unbutton the jeans, she licked her palm and went to work. Despite this slow start, once she had him out of half of his clothes, and onto the bed — and had fitted him with a condom, and lubricated herself — he finished very fast, within twenty seconds. She wiggled and slid off him, and for a few more seconds they lay there under a light sweat. Then she said, ‘Do you want to go again?’

He was staring at the orange pine of the bedstead, the grey wall. ‘No. Thank you.’

‘I don’t mean more money.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

He sat up. Once more, he was aware of footsteps and voices from the street outside. ‘Do you want to clean yourself?’ she said. Her eyes flicked to the little sink with its collection of plastic bottles. He stood up, naked from the waist down, and went to the sink. There he peeled off the condom and dropped it into a waste-paper basket, then tore off a square of paper towel and quickly wiped himself. He turned to look for his trousers. They were in a heap on the floor with his shorts and socks and shoes. He untangled them. Sitting on the wide bed, a sheet pulled up to her sallow face, ‘Annette’ smoked. ‘Right,’ he said, when he had his clothes on. ‘Thank you.’

‘M-hm.’

Walking to the tube station he felt fine. More than fine. The evening, the London streets, seemed vibrantly alive. There had — he thought — been something so kindly, so solicitous in the way she had offered to do it with him a second time for free; something so unlike the indifference of the city in which they lived, and which the thousand strangers of the mauve evening seemed to express.

Often — on tube-station escalators, for instance — he would think of her. And when, some time later, he saw Heather in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, and then that Friday in the Finnegans Wake, he did not fail to notice similarities of blondish solidity, of thickset shortness. The similarities were more in the figure than the face, and struck him most the first time that he saw Heather naked. His memories of ‘Annette’, however, were shadowy, and the physical facts of Heather soon obliterated what was left of them, so that when he thought of her from then on it was simply Heather that he saw — though Heather herself had seemed a sort of shadow of ‘Annette’ when he had first seen her in the secretaries’ pool.

Jane is late.

Paul is staring at the roundel of lemon in his cloudy pint — wondering whether she has stood him up — when he lifts his head and sees a woman looking lost. Ned had said that Jane was ‘fortyish’; the woman in the Friday throng seems somewhat older. She is wearing an oriental padded jacket, pink on black, and her hair is tied tightly into greyish pigtails. Her face, though it shows signs of old-womanishness, a sag on the jawline and under the eyes, is somehow youthful — soft and small-toothed. She is wide-hipped, bosomless, with narrow full lips painted pink. Seeing her, Paul experences only disappointment. What had he expected though? His expectations were silly — he sees that. The facts of life never had a fair shot. And in fact she is not so bad. He stands — she is peering worriedly into the mass of people — and tentatively holds up his hand. When she sees him she hesitates, perhaps experiencing her own moment of melancholy disappointment; then she smiles nervously.

‘Jane?’ he says.

‘Hello.’

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Okay.’

‘What would you like?’

‘What would I like. What are you having?’

He returns from the bar — she is joining him in a bière blanche — and she says, ‘This is a nice place.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, putting the glass bucket of beer on the table. ‘I think it’s new.’

‘Is it? Thank you.’

‘I think so.’

‘It’s nice,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘I didn’t know about it.’

‘No. Well, I think it’s new. Um,’ he says, a moment later, ‘so you’re from Hove?’

‘I live in Brighton.’

He smiles. ‘Oh, the other place.’

‘The other place. London-on-Sea.’

‘Yes. Well. We’re more genteel in Hove.’

‘Yes.’ She sips the cloudy greyish beer. ‘Mm. This is nice.’

‘It is, isn’t it.’

She is not shy. She is wary, watchful. And she seems somehow without the tough shell of worldliness that normally forms on people in their maturity — or if she is not without it, it is translucent and ineffectual — and perhaps because of this it is easy to imagine her when she was very much younger than she is. Loose wisps of grey hair stand out at the margins of her smooth forehead. ‘That’s a nice picture,’ she says.

‘Yeah … I think it’s for sale actually.’

‘Is it?’

‘You … interested in art?’ Paul ventures.

‘Mm. Yes.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Oh. I don’t know really.’

‘Well, it’s difficult to know these days, isn’t it.’

Despite this difficulty, he soon finds himself putting forward some extremely strident opinions. Suddenly he seems to have a strident opinion on everything. He is sounding off on whatever question has the temerity to show its face. To stop himself, he asks her whether she is an art teacher — ‘You seem to know so much about it’ — and with a sharp laugh, a shake of the head, she says, ‘No, maths, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

‘Well, that’s more important than art.’ She smiles sceptically. ‘No, it is. How long have you been teaching then?’

‘God, do I really have to say?’ She has something of the hollowed-out, exhausted quality of some teachers; she is savagely matter-of-fact (dismissing her twenty-five-year membership of the profession with the statement ‘there’s not much else you can do with a maths degree’) and at the same time she seems emotionally vulnerable, easily upset. ‘Let’s just say it’s been a while.’

‘All right.’

‘Longer than I care to remember.’

‘I know the feeling. Still, it must be …’

While he puts questions to her, he wonders why her face is a strange sort of reddish brown. Perhaps it is just the light in the pub. Perhaps she has slapped on too much foundation. He has plenty of time to wonder this because she is now talking non-stop. Something seems to have set her off. He wonders what it was. One minute he was asking polite, interested questions — and she was passing him polite, meticulous answers; the next she is flushed, intense, voluble, plaintive, waspish. The subject seems to be the politics of education. Initially, he listens pert with interest. He is not able to maintain this for long, however. She seems exasperated about something — PFI, top-up fees, streaming, parents, ministers … Something. Zoning out, he nods thoughtfully, his phatics — once lovingly wrought one-offs — now no more than mass-produced murmurs. And surely she, as a teacher — a maths teacher — must have noted the total lack of positive evidence that he is following what she is saying, must have picked up on the listlessness of his eyes and posture. Or perhaps not — perhaps these are precisely the things that years of maths teaching have made her unable to see. Self-preservation. Just stand there and say your words, and then …

‘What?’ he says suddenly. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ve been off on one again.’

‘No,’ he insists. ‘No. Not at all.’

‘I’ll stop now.’

‘Not on my account.’

‘Me, me, me!’

‘It was interesting.’

‘I’ve got a bit of a … thing about all that.’

‘Sure. And it’s totally understandable.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Me? Um. I’ve been working on a night shift,’ he says. He smiles. ‘If I seem a bit tired, that’s why.’

‘You don’t seem tired.’

‘Well, I suppose I shouldn’t. I only got up a few hours ago. No, it’s a good excuse to get straight on with …’ He hesitates. ‘These.’ Indicating his empty beer bucket.

Except for a slight quiver, she seems to ignore this hint of an alcohol problem, and quickly says, ‘Where’s that?’

‘Where’s …?’

‘Where do you work, on the night shift?’

‘Oh … Just … A supermarket.’

‘Which one?’

‘Sainsbury’s. You know the west Hove Sainsbury’s?’

‘Yes, of course. You’re the night-shift manager there?’

He nods. ‘M-hm.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s all right.’

With her large, light brown eyes on him she waits for him to say more. ‘You know. I just have to make sure everything’s neat and tidy. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s not that demanding, to be honest.’

‘And,’ she says, ‘if you don’t mind my asking, why do you work nights? I mean, do all managers have to do it? For a while? Is that how it works?’

He is tempted to tell her yes and leave it there. Instead, he says, ‘No. It’s not like that.’

‘So do you like it?’ She smiles. ‘Maybe you’re a night owl!’

‘It’s all right.’ His tone is sombre — unintentionally so — and she immediately makes her eyes serious. ‘I s’pose I was a bit down,’ he says. ‘When I started. You know.’ She nods. ‘So. Well …’ And to his surprise, he finds himself launching into a long spiel about himself — one which is not even true; which has to fit with his self being a supermarket manager. So he says that he used to manage the fresh produce — ‘the fruit and veg, you know’ — and that when his marriage — ‘well, it ended’ — he started to suffer from insomnia, ‘and I thought I might as well work nights. It seemed appropriate somehow.’

She listens with an expression of intent sympathy, her head slightly lowered, looking up from under pencil-line eyebrows. When he pauses, she puts sympathetic questions. ‘Wasn’t it weird?’ she says quietly. ‘To work at night.’

‘It was weird. At first it was very weird, yeah. You get used to it. You do get used to it.’

‘You get used to everything,’ she says.

‘You do. That’s true.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘Not that long. Six months.’

‘Are you going to carry on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I know it’s none of my business,’ she says.

‘No, go on.’

‘Maybe … I don’t know …’ She is looking at the tabletop; then she turns to him. ‘Maybe … Do you think you’re hiding from something?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe …’

‘I don’t know. I’m probably just being silly.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Psychobabble …’

Something touches his foot, and he looks down to see one of her black trainers stepping swiftly away. ‘I’m sorry. And before that?’ she says, flushing. ‘Before you worked nights. Did you like your work?’

‘Yeah, I did. You know.’ He smiles wryly. ‘As much as one can. Being fresh-produce manager, it’s a bit like working in a garden.’

She looks surprised. ‘Is it?’

‘Sometimes. You know — the fresh fruit and vegetables. Organic matter. Yeah, it is.’

‘Maybe you’ll go back to it one day.’

‘Maybe,’ he says.

‘Are they good employers, Sainsbury’s?’

‘Dunno. Yeah. I’d say so.’

‘And have you always worked for them?’

‘No, not always. Since, um. Since ninety … ninety-five. I was on the, um, the management training scheme.’ He is himself slightly shocked at what is happening. Slowly, he is spinning a whole past for this other Paul Rainey — this Paul Rainey who is a manager at Sainsbury’s, and has been since ninety-five. Underlying the first part of the story, of course, the night-shift part, was a sort of metaphorical truth; an emotional or psychological truth in the story of a man — ‘Paul Rainey’ — who slides into a sadness, and sick of this marauding insatiable world, signs on to work nights. As it spreads further into the past, though, he starts to wonder just how much material he is going to have to make up. He is telling her about the management training scheme — how it took place in White City, how it involved a mock-up of a supermarket floor. How, as part of the scheme, the trainees were sent out to work in various jobs in supermarkets all over the country. (He has heard that this happens.)

‘Where were you sent?’ she asks.

‘Where was I sent? A few different places.’

‘Like where?’

‘Um. Darlington.’ He has never been there, does not even know where it is. ‘It’s quite nice actually,’ he says. ‘Quite a nice little place, market town. Do you know it?’ She shakes her head. ‘All I know,’ she says, ‘is that it’s in Yorkshire.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Typical Yorkshire town. Really friendly people. People are so friendly up north, aren’t they?’

‘And where else were you?’

‘Where else?’

‘You said you were in a few different places.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’

In Swansea, he says, he packed people’s shopping. In Gillingham he was in the warehouse. Then he starts to tell her about his first proper posting, in London …

‘Where was that exactly?’

‘Oh, you won’t know it …’

‘I’m sure I will.’ She smiles. ‘Try me.’

Suddenly, though, he is unable to think of a single Sainsbury’s in London. It is extraordinary. There must be two hundred of them. ‘The one in Hammersmith?’

‘Hammersmith?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t know Hammersmith. Is there one in Hammersmith?’

‘Of course.’

‘So how did you end up here?’

‘Here? In Hove?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well. I was offered a promotion. It was too good an opportunity to turn down really.’ She nods. ‘And my wife was — is — from round here.’ On the mention of his wife, her eyes droop for a moment. ‘And I wanted to get out of London anyway …’

Finally, somewhere in the early nineties, he manages to fuse this fictitious existence with his own, saying, ‘And before that, I was a salesman for a few years.’

‘A salesman?’ she says. ‘Well, it’s good you got out of that racket! Anyway.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What sort of salesman?’

‘Well …’

‘Not the sort who phones people up at home?’

‘Well, no — it was business-to-business.’

‘That must have been awful,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you have to lie all the time?’

‘Sort of …’

‘I think that’s awful. Isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘People seem to think it’s just normal now.’

‘Well. I don’t do it any more.’

He has needed a piss for a long time. And he is on the point of excusing himself when she starts to tell him how she ended up in ‘London-on-Sea’. It is a long story — involving several further forays into the politics of education. It takes in a stint in India, and somewhere, some schools — the ferocious pressure in his lower abdomen is preventing him from following what she is saying — and finally ‘London-on-Sea’, a term she insists on using, though it sounds sour in her mouth since it was, she says, precisely to escape ‘the smoke’ of London-on-Thames that she fled there. (On the subject of smoke, she has spent the evening squinting in it, and swatting the fug, and staring sadly at the filling ashtray.)

When she has finished, Paul says, ‘Do you want another one?’

‘Um … A little one?’ she says, indicating an inch with her thumb and forefinger.

‘Okay.’

He stands up. First, urgently, he slips to the toilets. The evening, he feels — in the peace and quiet of the tiled space — has so far been a qualified success. When she listened to him, with her solid head on one side while he spoke of himself, putting her sensitive questions, he had started to quite like her. Had even started to fancy her. What troubles him is that what he told her was mostly lies. He thinks of the unfortunate Frenchman who posed as a surgeon, and sees that something similar is possible here; and he has not even opted for the kudos and sexiness of surgery. His lie is that he is the night-shift manager in a provincial supermarket. Which does not seem worth quadruple murder and suicide, if that is how this is to end. He turns to the sink. And the lie is wearying. Now, after only an hour or two, it seems like a load of luggage. Washing his hands, inspecting his face in the mirror — he is looking okay — he finds himself hoping — it is precipitous — to spend the rest of his life with this woman, this Jane, this teacher with her small teeth and weary solid face and overpowering feelings on the politics of education. (He hopes, too, that something of her youthfulness persists under her clothes.) So he should start with the truth. He waves his hands under the hand dryer. Start with the truth. The truth.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been lying to you,’ he says, once more installed in his seat, two fresh bières blanches on the table, hers a half. She looks startled. ‘What do you mean?’ He is lighting a B&H. (He thought his pouch of smuggled Drum tobacco would make a poor impression.) ‘I’ve been lying,’ he says. ‘Not telling the truth.’

Smiling unsurely, wondering whether this is some sort of joke, she says, ‘What do you mean?’

‘About myself.’

‘What about yourself?’ She is starting to sound slightly distraught.

‘I’m not really a manager at Sainsbury’s,’ he says.

This takes a second to sink in. And of course it overturns not just some small talk, but an intense section of the evening during which she listened with intent sympathy while he spoke — it seemed — in solemn, thorny earnest; and it was perhaps his willingness to do this that had persuaded her to do the same; to speak so openly — she had surprised herself — of her unhappy life in London, her years off work, the stalker, the flood, the insurance nightmare, the endless legal hell …

‘Then why did you …?’

‘Say I was? I’m not sure.’

They sit in silence for a few moments. Her voice, when she speaks, is offended and thin. ‘What are you then?’

‘A warehouse operative. That’s what they call it. I mean, I do work nights,’ he says. Pink-faced, she stares at him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What do you mean “warehouse operative”?’

‘You know …’ He flicks ash into the tray, shamefaced.

‘A shelf-stacker?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I wish you’d stop smoking,’ she whispers, sweeping some from her face with a small, tense movement.

‘Sorry. You should’ve said …’ He stubs out his unspent cigarette.

‘I don’t … I don’t feel … I’m sorry.’ She shakes her head, looking elsewhere.

‘What? What don’t you feel?’

‘I think I should go.’

‘Go? Why?’

She sighs tremulously, and stands up. She seems in a hurry.

‘Look, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean … Are you really going?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? Please …’ he says, half standing. For a few moments he stays on his feet, prevaricating, wondering whether to follow her, whether the situation might still be saved. It seems unlikely. In haste, she is pushing her way tearfully towards the exit. He sits, and fishes his cigarette from the ashtray. On his own — feeling shaky, empty — he finishes the pint and a half of bière blanche. He tries her phone. It is switched off. For several seconds he hesitates, poised to leave a message. Then he hangs up, and threads his way through strangers’ voices to the door.