Midnight All Day

That Was Then

We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something — to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead, or, worst of all, give us the impression that they are not inappropriate, but almost right, thus hanging us in love’s limbo. Not just anyone can do this.

All morning he had wondered whether Natasha would try to kill him.

He was not sure what she wanted, but it would not be a regular conversation. After four years of silence, she had suddenly become unusually persistent, writing to him several times at home and at his agent’s. When he sent a note to say there was no point in their meeting she rang him twice at his new house and finally spoke to Lolly, his wife, who was so concerned she opened the door to his room and said, ‘Is she trying to get you back?’

He turned slowly. ‘It’s not that, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Will you see her?’

‘No.’

‘Will you tell her not to ring again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good‚’ said Lolly. ‘Good.’

Natasha was drinking coffee at a table outside the café, wearing black, but not leather at least; probably she was the only such sombre, self-conscious person in the park. He had arrived early, but in order to be late had taken his coffee and newspaper to the conservatory, where he had considered the flowerbeds and wished for his son. Soon they would be having conversations and Nick would have less need of other people.

He had phoned Natasha unexpectedly that morning to give her the time and the place to meet, the grounds of an eighteenth century Palladian villa in West London. He was apprehensive, but could not deny that he was curious to see where they both now were. He calculated that he hadn’t actually seen her for five years.

It had been a dull summer and the schools had been open for two weeks. But a day like this, with the sun suddenly breaking through, reminded him of the seasons and of change. On the lawn that sloped down to the pond, people were in short-sleeves and sunglasses. Young couples lay on one another. As it was a middle-class area, families sat on blankets with elaborate picnics; corks were pulled from wine bottles, cotton napkins handed out and children called back from rummaging for conkers in the leaves and long grass.

He had got up and headed towards Natasha with determination, but the soft focus of the light mist and the alternate caresses of autumn heat and chill put him in an unexpectedly sensual mood. This renewed love of existence was like a low erotic charge. He came regularly to this park with his wife and baby and if, today, they were not with him, he could mark their absence by considering how meagre things were without them. At night, when he joined his woman in bed — she wore blue pyjamas, and his son, thrashing in his cot at the end of the room, a blue-striped, short-sleeved babygro, resembling an Edwardian bathing costume — he knew, at last, that there was nowhere else he would prefer to be.

What he wanted was to have a surreptitious look at Natasha, but he thought she had spotted him. It would be undignified to dodge about.

With his eyes fixed on her, he strode out of the bushes and across the tarmac apron in front of the café, weaving in and out of the tables where dogs, children on bicycles and adults with trays were crowded together, irritable waitresses tripping through. Natasha glanced up and started on the work of taking him in. She even rose, and stood on tiptoe. If he was looking to see how she had aged, she was doing the same to him.

She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

‘I’ve gone grey, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘Or was I grey before?’

Before he could draw back, her fingers were in his hair.

‘Behind the ear, there used to be a few white hairs‚’ she said. ‘Now — there’s a black one. Why don’t you dye it?’

He noticed her hair was still what they called ‘rock ‘n’ roll black’.

He said, ‘Why would I bother?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re no longer vain. Look at you in your shiny dark blue raincoat. How much did those shoes cost?’

‘I have a son now, Natty.’

‘I know that, Daddio‚’ she said. She tapped her big silver ring on the table, given to her as a teenager by a Hell’s Angel boyfriend.

‘You like fatherhood?’

He looked away at the tables piled with the Sunday papers, plates and cups, and children’s toys. He heard the names of expensive schools, like a saint’s roll-call. He remembered, as a child, his parents urging him to be polite, and wished for the time when good manners protected you from the excesses of intimacy, when honesty was not romanticised.

He said, ‘My boy’s a fleshy thing. There’s plenty of him to kiss. I don’t think we’ve ever seen his neck. But he has a bubbly mouth and a beard of saliva. I bring him here in his white hat — when he cries he goes red and looks like an outraged chef.’

‘Is that why you made me come all this way? I couldn’t find this bloody place.’

He said, ‘I thought it would amuse you to know … In May 1966 the Beatles made promotional films here, for “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”.’

‘I see‚’ she said. ‘That’s it?’

‘Well, yes.’

He and Natasha had liked pop of the sixties and seventies; in her flat they had lain on oriental cushions drinking mint tea, among other exotic interests, playing and discussing records.

Before he met her, he had been a pop journalist for several years, writing about fashion, music and the laboured politics that accompanied them. Then he became almost respectable, as the arts correspondent for an old-fashioned daily broadsheet. On this paper it amused the journalists to think of him as young, contradictory and promiscuous. He was hired to be contrary and outrageous.

In fact, at night, he was working to show them how tangled he was. Not telling anyone, he wrote, with urgent persistence, an uninhibited memoir of his father. The book spoke of his own childhood terrors, as well as his father’s vanity and tenderness. The last chapter was concerned with what men, and fathers, could become, having been released, as women were two decades earlier, from some of their conventional expectations. Before publication, he was afraid of being mocked; it was an honest book, an earnest one, even.

The memoir was acclaimed and won awards. It was said that men hadn’t exposed themselves in such a way before. He gave up journalism to write a novel about young men working on a pop magazine, which was made into a popular film. He lived in San Francisco and New York, taught ‘creative writing’, and rewrote unmade movies. He had got out. He was envied; he even envied himself. People spoke about him, as he had talked of pop stars, once. He met Natasha and things went awry.

She said, ‘You still listen to all that?’

‘How many times can you hear “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”? And the new stuff means nothing to me.’

She said, ‘All those symphonies and concertos sound the same.’

‘At least they can play‚’ he said.

‘The musicians are only reading the notes. It’s not music, it’s map-reading.’

‘How many of us can do that? It’s better that people don’t foist their original attempts on the public. Don’t forget for years I went to gigs every night. It’s funny, I couldn’t wait to get home and play something quiet by the Isley Brothers.’

He laughed and waved at a man. ‘How was your holiday?’ someone called. ‘And the builders?’

‘These people recognise you‚’ she said. ‘I suppose they are the sort to read. Insomnia would be their only problem.’

He laughed and put his face up to the sun. ‘They know me as the man with the only infant in the park who wears a leather jacket.’

She let him sit, but they were both waiting.

She leaned forward. ‘After trying to avoid me, what made you want to see me today?’

‘Lolly — you spoke to her on the phone — has gone to look at a place we’ve bought in Wiltshire.’

‘You’ve joined the aristocracy?’

‘Not a wet-dog-and-bad-pictures country house. A London house in a field. For the first time in ages I had a spare afternoon.’ He said, ‘What is it you want?’

‘It wasn’t to bother you, though it must have seemed like that.’ She looked at him with concentration and sincerity. ‘Do you want a fag?’

‘I’ve given up.’

She lit her cigarette and said, ‘I don’t want to be eradicated from your life — cancelled, wiped out.’

He sighed. ‘I was thinking the other day that I would never like my parents again, not in the way I did. There are no real reasons for anything, we just fall in and out of love with things — thank God.’

‘I would accept that, if you hadn’t written about me.’

‘Did I?’

‘In your second novel, published two and a half years ago.’ She looked at him but he said nothing. ‘Nick, I believed, at the time we were seeing one another — two years before — we were living some kind of life together in privacy.’

‘Living together?’

‘You slept at my place, and me at yours. Didn’t we see each other every day? Didn’t we think about one another quite a lot?’

‘Yes‚’ he said. ‘We did do that.’

She said, ‘Nick, you used my sexual stuff. What I like up my cunt.’

He lowered his voice. ‘The Croatian version of the book has come out. It has been translated into ten languages. Who’s going to recognise your hairy flaps or my broth of a stomach and withered buttocks?’

‘I do. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Who says it’s your cunt? Sometimes a cunt —’

She rubbed her face with her hand. ‘Don’t start. The cunt in the book is called ME — Middle England. Those who enter it, of whom there seem to be an unnecessary number, and pretty grotesque they are too, are known as Middle Englanders. We —’

‘It was always my joke.’

‘Our joke.’

‘All right.’

‘I thought it would stop disturbing me. But it didn’t go away. I feel abused by you, Nick.’

‘That wouldn’t be the origin of that feeling.’

‘No, as you pointed out in the book, when my father was away lecturing, my mother did unwelcome things to me.’

He said, ‘Most of the women I’ve met have been sexually abused. If some women are afraid of men, or hate them, isn’t it going to start there?’

She wasn’t listening. She had plenty to say; he let her continue.

She said, ‘When I saw you the first time I was impressed. Writers are supposed to feel and know. They’re wise, with enough honesty, bravery and conscience for us all. Now I’m upset that you saw me as you did. Upset you wrote it down. Would you say anything, expose anyone, provided it served your purpose? If you only believe in your own advantage you would have to agree that that is a miserable place to have ended up.’ She picked up her cigarettes and threw them down. ‘Why didn’t you make the woman strong?’

‘Who is strong? Hitler? Florence Nightingale? Thatcher? She wishes to be strong, impervious to human perplexity. Wouldn’t that be more accurate?’

He tried to look at her evenly. She had never come at him like this. She had been confused and tolerant and afraid of losing him. They had parted suddenly, abruptly. But for over a year they had spoken on the phone several times a day, and seen one another in the most excessive situations. He had often wondered why they had not been able to continue; he had even considered seeing her again, if she wanted to. They had got along.

If Natasha was clumsy and felt that her elbows protruded; if she walked with her feet turned out, despite having tried to correct this during her childhood, she brought this to his attention. If she was quick and well read, whatever she knew was inadequate. There was always a spot, blemish, new line, sagging eyelid or patch of dry skin on her cheek which it was impossible for her not to draw attention to. She lacked confidence, to say the least, but had attacks of impassioned self-belief, gaiety and determination which she later condemned. After laughing loudly she clapped her hand over her open mouth. But she wouldn’t be suppressed; when she had a fear or phobia, she made a note of it, and fought. Perhaps when she was in her fifties she would reach a cooler equilibrium.

As he looked, her outline seemed to blur. It wasn’t only that past and present were merging to form a new picture of her, it was that a third person was sitting with them. This had happened before. Natasha had seemed to place between them another woman, a fiction, who resembled Natasha but was her denial and her Platonic ideal. This Natasha, the pop star, was cool, certain, smart. Photographed in a different light, in better clothes, good at ballet, cooking and conversation, this figure dragged Natasha along to better things, while undermining and mocking her. They had both fallen in love with this desirable prevailing woman who haunted them as a living presence, but would never let them possess her. Compared with her, Natasha could only fail. They had had to find others — strangers — to witness and worship the ideal Natasha; and, when the illusion failed, like a cinema projector breaking down, they had to get rid of them.

‘You wrote a bit‚’ he said. ‘You know how diverse and complex the sources of inspiration are.’

‘I still write‚’ she said. ‘Despite your laughing at me.’

‘It was justice you were interested in, and how to live. Literature makes no recommendations. It’s not a guidebook but you did learn that the imagination lifts something up and takes it somewhere else, altering it as it flies. The original idea is only an excuse.’

She pretended to choke. ‘The magic carpet of your imagination didn’t fly you very far, baby. Why did you take parts of me and put them in a book? Nick, you were savage about me. I’ve asked people about this.’

‘They agree with you?’ She nodded. He said, ‘What are you doing these days?’

‘I finished my training. Now I work as a therapist. I have credit card debts up to here. They took the car. Once you start sinking you really go fast. You couldn’t —’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. I’m not going to degrade myself.’

‘Not more than you usually like to‚’ he said.

‘No. That’s right. Hey. Look.’

She threw her cigarette down and pushed up her sleeve. Drawing a breath, she pushed. There was an appreciable swelling. ‘I’ve been going to the gym.’

He wondered if she required him to squeeze the muscle. ‘Popeye’s been eating her spinach‚’ he said.

‘It makes me feel good‚’ she said.

‘That’s all that matters.’

‘I’ve got into young men.’

‘Good.’

He noticed that her ears were pierced in several places. Perhaps she had violated herself all over. It would be like going to bed with a cactus. He wouldn’t mention it. The less he said, the sooner it would be over. He saw he was only there to listen. However, something came to him.

‘My mind hasn’t entirely gone‚’ he said. ‘But these days I do’ pick up a book and have no memory of what I read yesterday. However, I was labouring through a seven-hundred-page biography of someone I liked. It bulged with facts. Almost the only part I found irresistible was the subject’s sciatica and slipped disc — you know how it is at our age. In the end I had no idea what the man might be like. Everything personal and human was missing. Then I thought: where else could you get the complexity and detail of inner motion except in fiction? It’s the closest we can get to how we are inside.’

She looked away. ‘I’ve never had a vocation.’

‘Why don’t you go to Spain?’

‘What? Vocation, I said.’

‘Why does a vocation matter?’

‘I want to find something to be good at. One of my patients is a skinhead, sexually abused by his mother and sister. I don’t think he can even read his own tattoos. It is not me he’s hating and sapping as he sits there saying “cunt, cunt, cunt”. Why am I compelled to help this bastard? Nick, you’re omnipotent and self-sufficient in that little room with your special pens that no one’s allowed to touch, the coffee that only you can make, music where you can reach it, postcards of famous paintings pinned in front of you. Is it the same?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You were always retreating to that womb or hiding place. What made me cross was how you placed the madness outside yourself — in me, the half-addicted, promiscuous, self-devouring crazy girl. Isn’t that misogyny?’

He looked startled. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘You made yourself, Nick, you see, before things got … a little mad. You weren’t privileged, like some of those show-off scribblers. I remember you sitting with your favourite novels, underlining sentences. The lists of words pinned up by your shaving mirror — words to learn, words to use. You’d write out the same sentence again and again, in different ways. I can’t imagine a woman being so methodical and will-driven. You want to be highly considered. Only I wish you hadn’t taken a sneaky and spiteful revenge against me.’

He said, ‘It’s never going to be frictionless between men and women as long they want things from one another — and they have to want things, that’s a relationship.’

‘Sophistry!’

‘Reality!’

She said, ‘Self-deception!’

He got up. It wouldn’t take him long to get home. He could carry a low chair out into his new garden, on which they had recently spent a lot of money, and read and doze. Six men had come through the side door with plants, trees and paving stones; he and Lolly couldn’t wait for nature. It wasn’t his money, or even Lolly’s, but her American father’s. He wondered if he knew what married but dependent women must feel, when what you had wasn’t earned or deserved. Humiliation wasn’t quite what he felt, but there was resentment.

He had met Natasha one Mayday at a private party at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, just down from Buckingham Palace, in sight of Big Ben. He would always drink and smoke grass before leaving his flat — in order to get out at all; and he was chuckling to himself at the available ironies. Apart from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, there couldn’t have been a worse time for socialism. Certainly no one he knew was admitting to being on the hard left, or to having supported the Soviet Union. ‘I was always more of an anarchist than a Party man‚’ Nick heard as he squeezed through the crowd to the drinks table. A voice replied, ‘I was only ever a Eurocom-munist.’ He himself announced, ‘I was never much of a joiner.’ His more imaginative left-wing acquaintances had gone to Berlin to witness the collapse of the Wall, ‘to be at the centre of history’, as one of them put it. ‘For the first time‚’ Nick had commented.

It was easy to sneer. What did he know? It was only now that he was starting to read history, having become intrigued by the fact that people not unlike him had, only a few decades before, been possessed by the fatal seriousness of murderous, mind-gripping ideologies. He’d only believed in pop. Its frivolity and anger was merely subversive; it delivered no bananas. If asked for his views, he’d be afraid to give them. But he was capable of description.

Like him, Natasha usually only worked in the morning, teaching, or working on these theses. They both liked aspects of London, not the theatre, cinema or restaurants but the rougher places that resembled a Colin Mclnnes novel. Nick had come to know wealthy and well-known people; he was invited for cocktails and launches, lunches and charity dinners, but it was too prim to be his everyday world. He started to meet Natasha at two o’clock in a big deserted pub in Notting Hill. They’d eat, have their first drinks, talk about everything and nod at the old Rastas who still seemed permanently installed in these pubs. They would buy drugs from young dealers from the nearby estates and hear their plans for robberies. Notting Hill was wealthy and the houses magnificent, but it had yet to become aware of it. The pubs were still neglected, with damp carpets and dusty oak bars covered in cigarette burns, about to be turned into shiny places crammed with people who looked as though they appeared on television, though they only worked in it.

He and Natasha would take cocaine or ecstasy, or some LSD, or all three — and retire for the afternoon to her basement nearby. When it got dark they pulled one another from bed, applied their eye-shadow in adjacent mirrors, and stepped out in their high heels.

Now she took his hand. ‘You can’t walk out on me!’ She tugged him back into his seat.

He said, ‘You can’t pull me!’

‘Don’t forget the flowers you came at me with!’ she said. ‘The passion! The hikes through the city at night and breakfast in the morning! And conversation, conversation! Didn’t we put our chairs side by side and go through your work! Have you forgotten how easily you lost hope in those days and how I repeatedly sent you back to your desk? Everyone you knew wanted to be a proper writer. None of them would do it, but you thought, why shouldn’t I? Didn’t I help you?’

‘Yes you did, Natasha! Thank you!’

‘You didn’t put it in the book, did you? You put all that other stuff in!’

‘It didn’t fit!’

‘Oh Nick, couldn’t you have made it fit?’ She was looking at him. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

‘There’s no way out of this conversation. Why don’t we walk a little?’

‘Can we?’

‘Why not?’

‘I keep thinking you’re going to go away. Have you got time?’

‘Yes.’

‘My sweet and sour man I called you. D’you remember?’ She seemed to relax. ‘A fluent, creative life, turning ordinary tedium and painful feeling into art. The satisfactions of a self-sufficient child, playing alone. That’s what I want. That’s why people envy artists.’

‘Vocation,’ he said. ‘Sounds like the name of someone.’

‘Yes. A guide. Someone who knows. I don’t want to sound religious, because it isn’t that.’

‘A guiding figure. A man.’

She sighed. ‘Probably.’

He said, ‘I was thinking … how our generation loved Monroe, Hendrix, Cobain, even. Somehow we were in love with death. Few of the people we admired could go to bed without choking on their own vomit. Wasn’t that the trouble — with pop, and with us?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘We were called a self-indulgent generation. We didn’t go to war but we were pretty murderous towards ourselves. Almost everyone I know — or used to.’

‘But I was just going to —’ She reached into her bag and leaned over to him. ‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘Go on. I got you something.’ She passed the object to him. ‘Now look.’

He opened his hand.

*

On a dreary parade in North Kensington, between a secondhand bookshop and a semi-derelict place hiring out fancy-dress costumes, was a shop where Nick and Natasha went to buy leather and rubberwear. Behind barred windows it was painted black and barely lit, concealing the fact that the many shiny red items were badly made or plain ragged. The assistants, in discreet versions of the available clothes — Nick preferred to call them costumes — were enthusiastic, offering tea and biscuits.

Wrapping themselves in fake-fur coats from charity shops, Natasha and Nick began going to places where others had similar tastes, seeking new fears and transgressions, of which there were many during this AIDs period. If couples require schemes, they had discovered their purpose. It was possible to be a sexual outlaw as long as there were still people who were innocent. They pressed each other on, playing Virgil to one another, until they no longer knew if they were children or adults, men or women, masters or servants. The transformation into pleasure of the banal, the unpleasant and the plain unappetising was like black magic — poor Don Juan on a treadmill, compelled to make life’s electricity for ever.

Nick recalled walking one night onto the balcony of a vast club, seeking Natasha, and looking down on a pageant of bizarre costumes, feathers, semi-nudity, masks and clothes of. all periods, representing every passion, every possible kink and kook, zig and zag. Natasha was among them, waiting for him with some bridled old man who worked in a post office.

Nick wondered if everyone involved liked participating in a secret, as they recreated the mystery which children discover by whispers, that what people want to do with one another is strange, and that the uncovering of this strangeness is itself the excitement. Certainly there were terrifying initiations, over and over. They were the oddest people; he learned that there was little that was straightforward about humanity. But what appeared to frighten them all was the mundane, the familiar, the ordinary.

Like actors unable to stop playing a part, as though they could be on stage for ever, he and Natasha wanted to remain at a dramatic pitch where there was no disappointment, no self-knowledge or development, only a state of constant, narcissistic emergency and a clear white light in the head.

In order to consume their punishment with their pleasure, which some might call a convenience, they were stoned. Nick remembered a friend at school saying — and this was the best advertisement for drugs he’d heard — ‘If you are stoned you can do anything.’ Why was living the problem? If he looked around at his friends and acquaintances, how many of them were able to survive unaided? They sought absence until they had become like a generation lost to war. Those who survived were sitting in shell-shocked confessional circles in countryside clinics. He suspected they had left success to fools and mediocrities. By midnight he was rarely able to see in front of him; he and Natasha held one another up, like the vertical arms of a staggering triangle. Sobriety was a terror, though they couldn’t remember why, and their heroes, legends, myths, were hopeless incompetents, death-soaked tragic imaginations.

He saw people going to heroin like a fate; imagining you could shun it was arrogant or solemn. Nick had wanted to find like-minded people; he turned them into his jailers. He recalled people in rubber masks, coming at him like executioners. It was arduous work, converting people into objects, when he had not been brought up to it

Midday one morning he woke up at her place. He rose and lumbered about, reacquainting himself with an unfamiliar object, his body. He had been whipped, badly; his face and hands were grazed, too: he must have fallen somewhere and no one, not even him, had noticed.

Somehow she had gone to work, leaving him a note. ‘Remember, Remember!’ she had scrawled in lipstick.

Remember what? Then it returned. His task was to withdraw three thousand pounds from his bank account, which, apart from his flat, was all he had and buy drugs from a man who sold everything, but only in large amounts. It would save them the trouble of having to score continually. In two hours he would have the drugs; minutes later the cocaine would be working, stealing another day and night of his life. Natasha would return; there was a couple they were to meet later; there would be cages, whips, ice, fire.

There had been the death-laden ways of teachers and employers, and there had been rebellion, drugs, pleasure. No one had shown him what a significant life was and the voices that spoke in his head were not kind.

And yet something occurred to him. He walked out of the flat and kept walking through his pain until he reached the suburbs; at last he fell through fields and fields. He never returned to her place. The rest was a depressing cold abstinence and mourning, sitting at his desk half the day, every day, repeatedly summoning a half-remembered discipline, wishing someone would lash him to the chair. Those characters in Chekhov’s plays, forever intoning ‘work, work, work’. How stale a prayer, he thought, as though the world was better off for the slavery in it. But boredom was an antidote to unruly wishes, quelling his suspicion that disobedience was the only energy. He had to teach himself to sit still again.

After a freezing month he rediscovered capability and audacity. Even the idea of public recognition returned, along with competitiveness, envy, and a little pride. He made her leave him alone, and when they met again, tentatively, his fear of any addiction, which had saved him, but which was also the fear of relying on anyone — some addictions are called love — meant he could not like her any more. What could they do together? It wouldn’t have happened to the ideal, desirable Natasha.

*

She had pressed a small envelope into his palm.

‘There.’

He glanced down.

She said, ‘You’d be making a mistake to think it was the other things I liked, when it was our talks and your company. You’re sweet, Nick, and strangely polite at times. I can’t put that together with all you’ve done to me.’ She touched his hand. ‘Go on.’

‘Now?’

‘Then we’ll walk.’

In the park toilet a boy stood in a cubicle with his trousers down, bent over. His father wiped him, helping him with his belt, zip and buttons. Nick went into the next cubicle and closed the door. He would open the envelope, have a look for old times’ sake, and return it. She had had the day she had wanted.

His hands were shaking. He held it in his palm, before opening it. A gram of fine grains, untouched. Heavenly sand. His credit card was in his back pocket.

He returned to her.

He said, ‘I took the parts of you I needed to make my book. It wasn’t a fair or final judgement but a practical transformation, in order to say something. Someone in a piece of fiction is a dream figure … picked from one context and thrust into another, to serve some purpose. A tiny portion of them is used.’

She nodded but had lost interest.

They walked by the pond, the cascade and the cricket pitch. Children played on felled logs; people sketched and painted; on pedestals, the heads of Roman emperors looked on. Nick and Natasha stepped from patches of vivid sunlight into cooler tunnels. The warm currents had turned chilly. As the sky darkened, the clouds turned crimson. Parents called to their children.

She started to cry.

‘Nick, will you take me out of here?’

‘If you want.’

‘Please.’

She put her dark glasses on and he led her past dawdling families to the gate.

In his car she wiped her face.

‘All those respectable white voices behind high walls. The wealth, the cleanliness, the hope. I was getting agoraphobic. It all makes me sick with regret.’

She was trembling. He had forgotten how her turmoil disturbed him. He was becoming impatient. He wanted to be at home when Lolly got back. He had to prepare the food. Some friends were coming by, with their new baby.

She said, ‘Aren’t we going to have a drink? Is this the way? Where are we now?’

‘Look‚’ he said.

He was driving beside a row of tall, authoritative stucco houses with pillars and steps. Big family cars sat in the drives. Across the narrow road was a green; overlooked by big trees there were tennis courts and a children’s playground. During the week children in crisp uniforms were dropped off and picked up from school; in the afternoons Philippino and East European nannies would sit with their charges in the playground. This was where he lived now, though he couldn’t admit it.

‘We are thinking of moving here‚’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

‘There’s no point asking me‚’ she said. ‘Everything has become very conventional. You’re either in or you’re out. I’m with the out — with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It’s the only place to be.’

‘Why turn habit into principle?’

‘I don’t know. Nick, take me to one of the old places. We’ve got time, haven’t we? Are you bored by me?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’m so glad.’

He drove to one of their pubs, with several small rooms, blackened ceilings, benches and big round tables. He ordered oysters and Guinness.

As he sat down he said embarrassedly, ‘Have you got any more of that stuff?’

‘If you kiss me‚’ she said.

‘Come on‚’ he said.

‘No‚’ she said, putting her face close to his. ‘Pay for what you want!’

He pushed his face into her warm mouth.

She passed him the envelope. ‘If you don’t leave some I’ll kill you.’

‘Don’t worry‚’ he said.

‘I will‚’ she said. ‘Because I know what saved you — greed.’ She was looking at him. ‘My place? Don’t look at your watch. Just for a little bit, eh?’

*

He could tell from the flat that she hadn’t gone crazy. The furniture wasn’t frayed or stained; there were flowers, a big expensive sofa with books on nutrition balanced on the arm. The records were no longer on the floor. She had CDs now, in racks, alphabetical. As usual there were music papers and magazines on the table. She went to put on a CD. He hoped it wouldn’t be anything he knew.

He went into the bedroom. It was as dark as ever, but he knew where the light switches were. Looking at the familiar Indian wall-hangings, he sank onto the mattress to pull off his shoes. He flung his clothes onto the bare, unvarnished floorboards, covered in threadbare rugs. The smell of her bed he knew. He could reach the opened bottles of wine and the ashtray. He swigged some sour red and reached for the pillows.

She almost fell on him; she knew he liked her weight, and to be pinned down. He closed his eyes. When she tied him quickly and expertly, he remembered the frisson of fear, the helplessness, and the pleasure coming from some rarely lit place. He struggled, giggled, screamed.

When he awoke she was sitting across the room at her table in her black silk dressing gown, surrounded by papers, unguents, tins, boxes, with her hands in front of her, like a pianist looking for a tune. She turned and smiled. The door to the cupboard in which she kept her ‘dressing up’ things was open.

‘Untie me.’

‘In a while. Tomorrow, maybe.’

‘Natasha —’

‘Look.’ She opened her dressing gown and sat over him. How salty she was. ‘Here. If you don’t behave I’ll read to you from your own work.’

He looked up to see her lips pursed in concentration. At last she released him. They were both pleased, a job well done. He started to move quickly in the bed as some inner necessity and accompanying fury led him to desire satisfaction. There was a man he had to meet in a pub, a greedy, unbalanced man with, no doubt, a talent for rapid mathematics. But Nick couldn’t find his clothes amongst the flimsy things flung over the bed.

As it was cold he pulled his clothes on under the sheets as usual. But they smelt musty, as if he’d been wearing them for several days. He turned his sweater inside out.

She pulled him up, holding him in her arms. He lit a cigarette. ‘Natty, I’m off to get the stuff.’

She nodded. ‘Good. Got the money?’

He patted his pocket. ‘You’ll be here when I get back?’

‘Oh yes‚’ she said.

He went out into the living room and shook himself, as if he would wake up.

She followed him and said, ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m marked‚’ he said, pulling his sleeves up. ‘Christ. Look! My wrists.’

‘So you are‚’ she said. ‘A marked man. They’ll fade.’

‘Not tonight.’

She said, ‘I hope I’m pregnant. It’s the right time of the month.’

‘That would be a nuisance to me.’

‘Not to me‚’ she said. ‘It would be a good memento. A decent souvenir.’

He said. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Yes I do. Would you like me to let you know?’

‘No.’

‘That’s up to you.’

He said, ‘I’d forgotten how drugs make the dullest stuff tolerable. I hope everything goes well for you.’

He went out into the street. He was walking quickly but to where he didn’t know. He had emptied his mind out; there were good things but not to hand. If only the drug would stop working. At last he remembered his car and returned for it. He drove fast but carefully. Lolly would have finished at the house. She would be on her way back, singing to the boy in the car. He hoped she was safe. He thought of the pleasure on his wife’s face when she saw him, and the way his son turned to his voice. There was much he had to teach the boy. He thought that pleasures erase themselves as they occur — you can never remember your last cigarette. If happiness accumulates it is not because it remains in the bloodstream but because it is the bloodstream.

He unlocked the house. He still hadn’t become used to the size and brightness of the kitchen, nor to the silence, unusual for London. The freezer was a room in itself. He took the food out and put it on the table. Now he had to get to the supermarket to pick up the champagne.

On the way out he opened the door to his study. He hadn’t been to his desk for a few days. He wanted to think there were other things he liked more, that he wasn’t possessed by it. He went in and quickly scribbled some notes. He couldn’t write now but after supper he would go to bed with his wife and son; when they were asleep he’d get up to work.

Sitting outside in the car, he examined his sore wrists. He pulled his shirt sleeves down. Before, he’d never cover them; he knew some men and many women who would show off their hacked, scarred or cut arms, as important marks.

There was something he wished he’d said to Natasha as he left — he had looked back and seen her face at the window, watching him go up the steps. ‘There are worlds and worlds and worlds inside you.’ But perhaps it wouldn’t mean anything to her.