Pulse

East Wind

THE PREVIOUS NOVEMBER, a row of wooden beach huts, their paintwork lifted and flaked by the hard east wind, had burnt to the ground. The fire brigade came from twelve miles away, and had nothing to do by the time it arrived. Yobs on Rampage, the local paper decided; though no culprit was ever found. An architect from a more fashionable part of the coastline told the regional TV news that the huts were part of the town’s social heritage, and must be rebuilt. The council announced that it would consider all options, but since then had done nothing.

Vernon had moved to the town only a few months before, and had no feelings about the beach huts. If anything, their disappearance improved the view from The Right Plaice, where he sometimes had lunch. From a window table he now looked out across a strip of concrete to damp shingle, a bored sky and a lifeless sea. That was the east coast: for months on end you got bits of bad weather and lots of no weather. This was fine by him: he’d moved here to have no weather in his life.

‘You are done?’

He didn’t look up at the waitress. ‘All the way from the Urals,’ he said, still gazing at the long, flat sea.

‘Pardon?’

‘Nothing between here and the Urals. That’s where the wind comes from. Nothing to stop it. Straight across all those countries.’ Cold enough to freeze your knob off, he might have added in other circumstances.

‘Oorals,’ she repeated. As he caught the accent, he looked up at her. A broad face, streaked hair, chunky body, and not doing any waitressy number in hope of a bigger tip. Must be one of those Eastern Europeans who were all over the country nowadays. Building trade, pubs and restaurants, fruit picking. Came over here in vans and coaches, lived in rabbit warrens, made themselves a bit of money. Some stayed, some went home. Vernon didn’t mind one way or the other. That’s what he found more often than not these days: he didn’t mind one way or the other.

‘Are you from one of them?’

‘One of what?’

‘One of those countries. Between here and the Urals.’

‘Oorals. Yes, perhaps.’

That was an odd answer, he thought. Or maybe her sense of geography wasn’t so strong.

‘Fancy a swim?’

‘A swim?’

‘Yes, you know. Swim. Splash splash, front crawl, breast stroke.’

‘No swim.’

‘Fine,’ he said. He hadn’t meant it anyway. ‘Bill, please.’

As he waited, he looked back across the concrete to the damp shingle. A beach hut had recently sold for twenty grand. Or was it thirty? Somewhere down on the south coast. Spiralling house prices, the market going mad: that’s what the papers said. Not that it touched this part of the country, or the property he dealt in. The market had bottomed out here long ago, the graph as horizontal as the sea. Old people died, you sold their flats and houses to people who in their turn would get old in them and then die. That was a lot of his trade. The town wasn’t fashionable, never had been: Londoners carried on up the A12 to somewhere pricier. Fine by him. He’d lived in London all his life until the divorce. Now he had a quiet job, a rented flat, and saw the kids every other weekend. When they got older, they’d probably be bored with this place and start acting the little snobs. But for the moment they liked the sea, throwing pebbles into it, eating chips.

When she brought the bill, he said, ‘We could run away together and live in a beach hut.’

‘I do not think,’ she replied, shaking her head, as if she assumed he meant it. Oh well, the old English sense of humour, takes a while for people to get used to it.

He had a few rentals to attend to – changes of tenancy, redecoration, damp problems – and then a sale up the coast, so he didn’t return to The Right Plaice for a few weeks. He ate his haddock and mushies, and read the paper. There was some town in Lincolnshire which was suddenly half Polish there’d been so many immigrants. Nowadays, more Catholics went to church on Sundays than Anglicans, they were saying, what with all these Eastern Europeans. He didn’t mind one way or the other. Actually, he liked the Poles he’d met – brickies, plasterers, electricians. Good workers, well trained, did what they said, trustworthy. It was time the good old British building trade had a kick up the arse, Vernon thought.

The sun was out that day, slanting low across the sea, annoying his eyes. Late March, and bits of spring were getting even to this part of the coast.

‘How about that swim, then?’ he asked as she brought the bill.

‘Oh no. No swim.’

‘I’m guessing you might be Polish.’

‘My name is Andrea,’ she replied.

‘Not that I mind whether you’re Polish or not.’

‘I do not also.’

The thing was, he’d never been much good at flirting; never quite said the right thing. And since the divorce, he’d got worse at it, if that was possible, because his heart wasn’t in it. Where was his heart? Question for another day. Today’s subject: flirting. He knew all too well the look in a woman’s eye when you didn’t get it right. Where’s he coming from, the look said. Anyway, it took two to flirt. And maybe he was getting too old for it. Thirty-seven, father of two, Gary (8) and Melanie (5). That’s how the papers would put it if he was washed up on the coast some morning.

‘I’m an estate agent,’ he said. That was another line which often hampered flirting.

‘What is this?’

‘I sell houses. And flats. And we do rentals. Rooms, flats, houses.’

‘Is it interesting?’

‘It’s a living.’

‘We all need living.’

He suddenly thought: no, you can’t flirt either. Maybe you can flirt in your own language, but you can’t do it in English, so we’re even. He also thought: she looks sturdy. Maybe I need someone sturdy. She might be my age, for all I know. Not that he minded one way or the other. He wasn’t going to ask her out.

He asked her out. There wasn’t much choice of ‘out’ in this town. One cinema, a few pubs, and the couple of other restaurants where she didn’t work. Apart from that, there was bingo for the old people whose flats he would sell after they were dead, and a club where some half-hearted goths loitered. Kids drove into Colchester on a Friday night and bought enough drugs to see them through the weekend. No wonder they burnt down the beach huts.

He liked her at first for what she wasn’t. She wasn’t flirty, she wasn’t gabby, she wasn’t pushy. She didn’t mind that he was an estate agent, or that he was divorced with two kids. Other women had taken a quick look and said: no. He reckoned women were more attracted to men who were still in a marriage, however fucked up it was, than to ones picking up the pieces afterwards. Not surprising really. But Andrea didn’t mind all that. Didn’t ask questions much. Didn’t answer them either, for that matter. The first time they kissed, he thought of asking if she was really Polish, but then he forgot.

He suggested his place, but she refused. She said she’d come next time. He spent an anxious few days wondering what it would be like to go to bed with someone different after so long. He drove fifteen miles up the coast to buy condoms where no one knew him. Not that he was ashamed, or embarrassed; just didn’t want anyone knowing, or guessing, his business.

‘This is a nice apartment.’

‘Well, if an estate agent can’t find himself a decent flat, what’s the world coming to?’

She had an overnight bag with her; she took off her clothes in the bathroom and came back in a nightdress. They climbed into bed and he turned out the light. She felt very tense to him. He felt very tense to himself.

‘We could just cuddle,’ he suggested.

‘What is cuddle?’

He demonstrated.

‘So cuddle is not fucking?’

‘No, cuddle is not fucking.’

‘OK, cuddle.’

After that they relaxed, and she soon fell asleep.

The next time, after some kissing, he reacquainted himself with the lubricated struggle of the condom. He knew he was meant to unroll it, but found himself trying to tug it on like a sock, pulling at the rim in a haphazard way. Doing it in the dark didn’t help either. But she didn’t say anything, or cough discouragingly, and eventually he turned towards her. She pulled up her nightie and he climbed on top of her. His mind was half filled with lust and fucking, and half empty, as if wondering what he was up to. He didn’t think about her very much that first time. It was a question of looking out for yourself. Later you could look out for the other person.

‘Was that OK?’ he said after a while.

‘Yes, was OK.’

Vernon laughed in the dark.

‘Are you laughing at me? Was not OK for you?’

‘Andrea,’ he said, ‘everything’s OK. Nobody’s laughing at you. I won’t let anyone laugh at you.’ As she slept, he thought: we’re starting again, both of us. I don’t know what she’s had in her past, but maybe we’re both starting again from the same sort of low point, and that’s OK. Everything’s OK.

The next time she was more relaxed, and gripped him hard with her legs. He couldn’t tell whether she came or not.

‘Gosh you’re strong,’ he said afterwards.

‘Is strong bad?’

‘No, no. Not at all. Strong’s good.’

But the next time he noticed that she didn’t grip him so hard. She didn’t much like him playing with her breasts either. No, that was unfair. She didn’t seem to mind if he did or didn’t. Or rather, if he wanted to, that was fine, but it was for him, not for her. That’s what he understood, anyway. And who said you had to talk about everything in the first week?

He was glad neither of them was any good at flirting: it was a kind of deception. Whereas Andrea was never anything but straight with him. She didn’t talk much, but what she said was what she did. She would meet him where and when he asked, and be standing there, looking out for him, brushing a streak of hair out of her eyes, holding on to her bag more firmly than was necessary in this town.

‘You’re as reliable as a Polish builder,’ he told her one day.

‘Is that good?’

‘That’s very good.’

‘Is English expression?’

‘It is now.’

She asked him to correct her English when she made a mistake. He got her to say, ‘I don’t think so’ instead of ‘I do not think’; but actually, he preferred the way she talked. He always understood her, and those phrases which weren’t quite right seemed part of her. Maybe he didn’t want her talking like an Englishwoman in case she started behaving like an Englishwoman – well, like one in particular. And anyway, he didn’t want to play the teacher.

It was the same in bed. Things are what they are, he said to himself. If she always wore a nightie, perhaps it was a Catholic thing – not that she ever mentioned going to church. If he asked her to do stuff to him, she did it, and seemed to enjoy it; but she didn’t ask him to do stuff back to her – didn’t even seem to like his hand down there much. But this didn’t bother him; she was allowed to be who she was.

She never asked him in. If he dropped her off, she’d be trotting up the concrete path before he’d got the handbrake on; if he picked her up, she’d already be outside, waiting. At first this was fine, then it began to feel a bit odd, so he asked to see where she lived, just for a minute, so he could imagine where she was when she wasn’t with him. They went back into the house – 1930s semi, pebbledash, multi-occupation, metal windowframes rusting up badly – and she opened her door. His professional eye took in the dimensions, furnishings, and probable rental cost; his lover’s eye took in a small dressing table with photos in plastic frames and a picture of the Virgin. There was a single bed, tiny sink, rubbish microwave, small TV, and clothes on hangers clipped precariously to the picture rail. Something in him was touched by seeing her life exposed like that in the minute or so before they stepped outside again. To cover this sudden emotion, Vernon said,

‘You shouldn’t be paying more than fifty-five. Plus services. I can get you somewhere bigger for the same price.’

‘Is OK.’

Now that spring was here, they went for drives into Suffolk and looked at English things: half-timbered houses with no damp courses, thatched roofs which put you in a higher insurance band. They stopped by a village green and he sat down on a bench overlooking a pond, but she didn’t fancy that so they looked at the church instead. He hoped she wouldn’t ask him to explain the difference between Anglicans and Catholics – or the history behind it all. Something about Henry the Eighth wanting to get married again. The king’s knob. All sorts of things came down to sex if you looked at them closely enough. But happily she didn’t ask.

She began to take his arm, and to smile more easily. He gave her the key to his flat; tentatively, she started leaving overnight stuff there. One Sunday, in the dark, he reached across to the bedside drawer and found he was out of condoms. He swore, and had to explain.

‘Is OK.’

‘No, Andrea, is bloody not OK. Last thing I need is you getting pregnant.’

‘I do not think so. Not get pregnant. Is OK.’

He trusted her. Later, as she slept, he wondered what exactly she had meant. That she couldn’t have kids? Or that she was taking something herself, to make doubly sure? If so, what would the Virgin Mary have to say about that? Let’s hope she isn’t relying on the rhythm method, he suddenly thought. Guaranteed to fail on a regular basis and keep the Pope as happy as Larry.

Time passed; she met Gary and Melanie; they took to her. She didn’t tell them what to do; they told her, and she went along with it. They also asked her questions he’d never dared, or cared, to ask.

‘Andrea, are you married?’

‘Can we watch TV as long as we like?’

‘Were you married?’

‘If I ate three would I be sick?’

‘Why aren’t you married?’

‘How old are you?’

‘What team do you support?’

‘You got any children?’

‘Are you and Dad getting married?’

He learnt the answers to some of these questions – like any sensible woman, she wasn’t telling her age. One night, in the dark, after he’d delivered the kids back, and was too upset for sex, as he always was on these occasions, he said, ‘Do you think you could love me?’

‘Yes I think I would love you.’

‘Is that a would or a could?’

‘What is the difference?’

He paused. ‘There’s no difference. I’ll take either. I’ll take both. I’ll take whatever you’ve got to give.’

He didn’t know why it started, the next bit. Because he was beginning to fall in love with her, or because he didn’t really want to? Or wanted to, but was afraid? Or was it that, deep down, he had an urge to fuck everything up? That’s what his wife – ex-wife – had said to him one morning over breakfast. ‘Look, Vernon, I don’t hate you, I really don’t. I just can’t live with you because you always fuck things up.’ Her statement seemed to come out of the blue. True, he snored a bit, and dropped his clothes where he shouldn’t, and watched the normal amount of sport on TV. But he came home on time, loved his kids, didn’t chase other women. In some people’s eyes, that was the same as fucking things up.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘For sure.’

‘No, “for sure” is American. English is “yes”.’

She looked at him, as if to say, Why are you now correcting my English?

‘Yes,’ she repeated.

‘When I didn’t have a condom and you said it was OK, did you mean it was OK then or OK always?’

‘OK always.’

‘Blimey, do you know what a twelvepack costs?’

That had been the wrong thing to say, even he could see that. Christ, maybe she’d had some terrible abortion, or been raped or something.

‘So you can’t have children?’

‘No. Do you hate me?’

‘Andrea, for God’s sake.’ He took her hand. ‘I’ve got two kids already. Point is, is it OK with you?’

She looked down. ‘No. Is not OK with me. It makes me very unhappy.’

‘Well, we could… I don’t know, see the doctor. See an expert.’ He imagined the experts over here were more clued-up.

‘No, no expert. NO EXPERT.’

‘Fine, no experts.’ He thought: adoption? But can I afford another, with my outgoings?

He stopped buying condoms. He started asking questions, as tactfully as he could. But tact was like flirting: either you had it, or you didn’t. No, that wasn’t right. It was just easier to be tactful if you didn’t care if you knew things or not; harder when you cared.

‘Why are you now asking these questions?’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Sorry.’

But he was mainly sorry that she’d noticed. Also sorry that he wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. When they first got together, he liked the fact that he didn’t know anything about her; it made things different, fresher. Gradually, she’d learnt about him, while he hadn’t learnt about her. Why not continue like that? Because you always fuck things up, his wife, ex-wife, whispered. No, he didn’t accept that. If you fall in love, you want to know. Good, bad, indifferent. Not that you’re looking for bad things. That’s just what falling in love means, Vernon said to himself. Or thinking about falling in love. Anyway, Andrea was a nice person, he was certain about that. So what was wrong with finding out about a nice person behind her back?

They all knew him at The Right Plaice: Mrs Ridgewell the manageress, Jill the other waitress, and old Herbert, who owned the restaurant but only dropped in when he fancied a free bite. Vernon chose a time when the lunch trade was starting, and walked past the counter towards the toilets. The room – more of a cupboard, really – where the staff left their coats and bags was just opposite the gents. Vernon went in, found Andrea’s bag, took her keys, and came back out flapping his hands as if to say, That whirry old hand-drier never quite does the trick, does it?

He winked at Andrea, walked to the hardware shop, complained about clients who had only one set of keys, strolled around for a bit, picked up the new set, went back to The Right Plaice, prepared a line about the chilly weather playing havoc with his bladder, didn’t need to use it, put her keys back, and ordered a cappuccino.

The first time he went, it was the sort of drizzly afternoon when no one looks at anyone who’s passing. A chap in a raincoat goes up a concrete path to a front door with frosted glass panels. Inside, he opens another door, sits on a bed, gets up suddenly, smoothes out the dent in the bed, turns, sees the microwave isn’t rubbish actually, puts his hand under the pillow, feels one of her nightdresses, looks at the clothes hanging from the picture rail, touches a dress she hasn’t worn before, deliberately doesn’t let himself look at the pictures on the little dressing table, sees himself out, locks up behind him. No one did anything wrong, did they?

The second time, he examined the Virgin Mary and the half-dozen pictures. He didn’t pick anything up, just went down on his haunches and looked at the photos in their plastic frames. That must be Mum, he thought, looking at the tight perm and big glasses. And there’s little Andrea, all blonde and a bit chubby. And is that a brother or a boyfriend? And here’s somebody’s birthday with so many faces you can’t tell who’s important and who isn’t. He looked again at the six-or seven-year-old Andrea – just a bit older than Melanie – and took the image home in his head.

The third time, he eased open the top drawer; it stuck, and Andrea’s mum toppled over. There was mainly underwear, most of it familiar. Then he went to the bottom drawer, because that’s where secrets are normally kept, and found only sweaters and a couple of scarves. But in the middle drawer, under some shirts, were three items he laid on the bed in the same order, and even the same distance apart, as he found them. On the right was a medal, in the middle a photo framed in metal, on the left a passport. The photo showed four girls in a swimming pool, their arms round one another, a lane-divider with cork floats separating one pair from the other. They were all smiling up at the camera, and had wrinkles in their white rubber caps. He instantly picked out Andrea, second from the left. The medal showed a swimmer diving into a pool, with some lines of German writing on the back and a date, 1986. How old would she have been then – eighteen, twenty? The passport confirmed it: date of birth 1967, which made her forty. It said she was born in Halle, so she was German.

And that was that. No diary, no letters, no vibrator. No secrets. He was in love – no, he was thinking about being in love – with a woman who had once won a swimming medal. Where was the harm in knowing that? Not that she swam any more. And now he remembered it, she’d got all jumpy at the beach when Gary and Melanie made her go to the water’s edge and started splashing around. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded. Or perhaps it was quite different, swimming in a competition pool versus having a dip in the sea. Like ballet dancers not wanting to do the sort of dancing everyone else did.

That evening he was deliberately jolly when they met, even a bit silly, but she seemed to notice, so he stopped. After a bit, he felt normal again. Almost normal, anyway. When he’d first started going out with girls, he found there were moments when he suddenly thought: I don’t understand anything at all. With Karen, for instance: they’d been jogging along nicely, no pressure, having fun, when she’d asked, ‘So where’s all this leading, then?’ As if there were only two choices: up the aisle, or up the garden path. Other times, with other women, you’d say something, just something ordinary, and – splash – you were in deep water.

They were in bed, Andrea’s nightie pulled up around her waist in the fat roll he was quite used to feeling against his belly, and he was going it a bit, when she shifted her legs and crushed him with them, like a nutcracker, he thought.

‘Mmm, big strong swimmer’s legs,’ he muttered.

She didn’t answer, but he knew she’d heard. He carried on, but could tell from her body that her mind wasn’t on things. Afterwards, they lay on their backs, and he said some stuff, but she didn’t pick up on anything. Oh well, work tomorrow, thought Vernon. He went to sleep.

When he dropped by The Right Plaice the next evening to pick Andrea up, Mrs Ridgewell said she’d called in sick. He rang her mobile but she didn’t answer, so he texted her. Then he went round to the house and tried her bell. He left it a couple of hours, phoned again, rang the bell, then let himself in.

Her room was quite neat, and quite empty. No clothes on the picture rail, no photos on the little dressing table. Something made him open the microwave and look inside; all he saw was the circular plate. On the bed were two envelopes, one for the landlord, with keys and money inside by the feel of it, the other for Mrs Ridgewell. Nothing for him.

Mrs Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.

‘She was a nice girl,’ said the manageress. ‘Very reliable.’

‘Like a Polish builder.’

‘I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.’

‘No, she wasn’t.’ He looked out to sea. ‘Oorals,’ he found himself saying.

‘Pardon?’

You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both half silly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that anyway.

At home he googled Andrea Morgen and got 497,000 results. Then he refined the question and cut the results down to 393. Did he want to search for ‘Andrea Morgan’? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the stuff was in German, and he scrolled through it helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then he had a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for swimmer. It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in ‘Andrea Morgen’, ‘1967’, ‘Halle’, and ‘Schwimmerin’.

Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit ‘Translate this page’. Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.

How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things he wished afterwards he’d never read about, things which, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in The Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.

Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven. Vernon tried to put together the probable life of that chubby little blonde girl. Her parents signing a consent form and a secrecy form. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honour to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills – vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections – just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was ‘You eat the pills or you die’. The coaches made sure she swallowed them.

She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There were sudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like ‘virilisation’ and ‘clitoral hypertrophy’, then wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need to look up heart disease, liver disease, deformed children, blind children.

They doped the girls because it worked. East German swimmers won medals everywhere, the women especially. Not that Andrea had got to that level. When the Berlin Wall came down and the scandal broke, when they put the poisoners – trainers, doctors, bureaucrats – on trial, her name wasn’t even mentioned. In spite of the pills, she hadn’t made the national team. The others, the ones who went public about what had been done to their bodies and minds, at least had gold medals and a few years of fame to show for it. Andrea had come out with nothing more than a relay medal at some forgotten championship in a country that no longer existed.

Vernon looked out at the concrete strip and the shingle beach, at the grey sea and the grey sky beyond. The view was pretending it had always been the same, for as long as people had sat at this café window. Except that there used to be a row of beach huts blocking the view. Then someone had burnt them down.

At Phil & Joanna’s 1: 60/40

IT WAS THE week Hillary Clinton finally conceded. The table was a clutter of bottles and glasses; and though hunger had been satisfied, some mild social addiction kept making hands reach out to snaffle another grape, crumble a landslip from the cliff-face of cheese, or pick a chocolate from the box. We had talked about Obama’s chances against McCain, and whether in recent weeks Hillary had demonstrated guts or mere self-deception. We had also considered whether the Labour Party was any longer distinguishable from the Conservatives, the suitability of London’s streets for bendy buses, the likelihood of an al-Qaida attack on the 2012 Olympics, and the effect of global warming on English viticulture. Joanna, who had been quiet during these last two topics, now said with a sigh,

‘You know, I could really do with a cigarette.’

Everyone seemed to exhale slightly.

‘It’s just on occasions like this, isn’t it?’

‘The food. That lamb, by the way…’

‘Thanks. It’s six hours. Best way to do it. And star anise.’

‘And the wine…’

‘Not forgetting the company.’

‘When I was giving up, it was the disapproval I hated more than anything. You’d ask if anyone minded, and they all said no, but you could sense them turning away and not breathing in. And either pitying you, which was patronising, or even kind of loathing you.’

‘And there would never be an ashtray in the house and they’d do a long, exaggerated hunt for some old saucer which had lost its cup.’

‘And the next stage was going outside and freezing to death.’

‘And if you stubbed it out in some plant pot they’d look at you as if you’d given a geranium cancer.’

‘I used to take my butts home in my purse. In a plastic bag.’

‘Like dog crap. When did that start, by the way? About the same time? People walking around with inverted plastic bags on their hands, waiting for their dogs to crap.’

‘I always think it must be warm, mustn’t it? Feeling warm dog crap through the plastic.’

‘Dick, really.’

‘Well, I’ve never seen them waiting for it to cool down, have you?’

‘These chocolates, to change the subject. Why do the drawings never match what’s in the box?’

‘Or is it the other way round?’

‘The other way round’s the same way round. They still don’t match.’

‘The pictures are only an approximation. Like a communist menu. What would exist in an ideal world. Think of them as a metaphor.’

‘The chocolates?’

‘No, the drawings.’

‘I used to love a cigar. It didn’t have to be a whole one. Half would do.’

‘They gave you different cancers, didn’t they?’

‘What did?’

‘Cigarettes, pipes, cigars. Didn’t pipes give you lip cancer?’

‘What did cigars give you?’

‘Oh, the poshest kind.’

‘What’s a posh cancer? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’

‘Bum cancer’s got to be the bottom of the pile.’

‘Dick, really.’

‘Did I say something?’

‘Cancer of the heart – is that possible?’

‘Only as a metaphor, I’d say.’

‘George the Sixth – was that lung?’

‘Or throat?’

‘Anyway, it proved he had the common touch, didn’t it? Like staying in Buckingham Palace and getting bombed, and going round the East End shaking hands in the rubble.’

‘So getting a common form of cancer was in line with that – is that what you’re saying?’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’

‘I don’t think he would have shaken hands. Being king.’

‘Here’s a serious question. Obama, McCain, Clinton: which of the three of them was the last to smoke?’

‘Bill or Hillary?’

‘Hillary, of course.’

‘Because we all remember Bill’s use of a cigar.’

‘Yes, but did he smoke it afterwards?’

‘Or keep it in a special humidor like she kept the dress?’

‘He could auction it to pay Hillary’s campaign debts.’

‘McCain must have smoked when he was a POW.’

‘Obama must have had a joint or two.’

‘I bet Hillary never inhaled.’

‘By their smoking shall ye know them.’

‘Actually – as your token American present – Obama used to be a big smoker. Took to Nicorettes when he decided to run. But – fallen off the wagon, I hear.’

‘That’s my man.’

‘Would anyone care if one of them did something bad in that line? And got photographed?’

‘It would depend on the quality and nature of the contrition.’

‘Like Hugh Grant after getting a blow job in his car.’

‘Now she inhaled.’

‘Dick, stop it. Remove that bottle from in front of him.’

‘“The quality and nature of the contrition” – I like that.’

‘Not that Bush apologised for having been a cokehead.’

‘Well, he wasn’t endangering others.’

‘Course he was.’

‘You mean, like passive smoking? I don’t think there’s passive coke-inhalation, is there?’

‘Not unless you sneeze.’

‘So there are no harmful effects on others?’

‘Apart from them having to listen to tediously self-excited conversation.’

‘Actually…’

‘Yes?’

‘If Bush was, as they say, an alkie and a cokehead in his former existence, then that would help explain his presidency.’

‘You mean, brain damage?’

‘No, the absolutism of the recovering addict.’

‘You are coming out with the phrases tonight.’

‘Well, it’s my trade.’

‘The absolutism of the recovering addict. Sorry about that, Baghdad.’

‘So what we’re saying is, it does make a difference what they smoked.’

‘Cigars used to make me mellow.’

‘Cigarettes used to give me such a high sometimes, my legs would tingle.’

‘Oh, I remember that.’

‘I knew someone who would set an alarm clock so he could wake up and have one in the middle of the night.’

‘Who was that, sweetie?’

‘Before your time.’

‘I should bloody well hope so.’

‘Anyone see that thing in the paper about Macmillan?’

‘The cancer charity?’

‘No, the prime minister. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. ’55, ’56, something like that. A report came in making the link between smoking and cancer. Oh fuck, he thought, where’s the money going to come from if we have to ban fags? Three and six in the pound extra on income tax, or whatever. Then he looked at the figures. I mean, the mortality figures. Life expectancy for a smoker: seventy-three years. Life expectancy for a non-smoker: seventy-four.’

‘Is that true?’

‘That’s what it said. So Macmillan wrote on the report: “Treasury think revenue interest outweighs this.”’

‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’

‘Did Macmillan smoke?’

‘Pipe and cigarettes.’

‘One year. One year’s difference. It’s amazing when you think about it.’

‘Maybe we should all take it up again. Just round this table. Secret defiance of a PC world.’

‘Why shouldn’t people smoke themselves to death? If you only lose a year.’

‘Not forgetting the hideous pain and suffering before you get to be the dying seventy-three-year-old.’

‘Reagan advertised Chesterfields, didn’t he? Or was it Lucky Strike?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘It must have something to do with it.’

‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘Well, it is. That’s why I do. Governments telling people it’s bad for them while living off the tax. Cigarette companies knowing it’s bad for people and selling their stuff to the Third World because of getting sued here.’

‘Developing World, not Third World. We don’t say that any more.’

‘The Developing-Cancer World.’

‘Not to mention the Humphrey Bogart thing. Remember when they wanted to put him on a stamp and he was smoking in the photo so they airbrushed it out? In case people were sticking a stamp on a letter and saw Bogey smoking and suddenly thought: well, that looks like a good idea.’

‘They’ll probably find a way of cutting the smoking out of films. Like colourising black-and-white movies.’

‘When I was growing up in South Africa, the censorship board cut any film that showed normal contact between blacks and whites. They got Island in the Sun down to about twenty-four minutes.’

‘Well, most films are too long.’

‘I didn’t realise you grew up in South Africa.’

‘And the other thing was, everyone smoked in cinemas. Remember that? You watched the screen through a great haze of smoke.’

‘Ashtrays in the armrests.’

‘Right.’

‘But the thing about Bogey smoking… Sometimes, when I’m watching an old film, and there’s a scene in a nightclub with a couple drinking and smoking and swapping bons mots, I think: this is so fucking glamorous. And then I think: actually, can I have a cigarette and a drink right now?’

‘It was glamorous.’

‘Apart from the cancer.’

‘Apart from the cancer.’

‘And the hypocrisy.’

‘Well, don’t inhale.’

‘Passive hypocrisy?’

‘It happens. All the time.’

‘Is “colourise” a proper verb, by the way?’

‘And does anyone want coffee?’

‘Only if you’ve got a cigarette.’

‘That was always part of it, wasn’t it? The cigarette with the coffee.’

‘I don’t think there are any in the house. Jim left some Gauloises when he stayed, but they’re so strong we threw them away.’

‘And that friend of yours left some Silk Cut, but they’re too weak.’

‘We were in Brazil last year and the health warnings out there are apocalyptic. Colour pictures on the packet of hideous things – deformed babies, pickled lungs and stuff. And the warnings… None of that polite “Her Majesty’s Government” stuff. Or “The Surgeon-General has determined”. They tell you which bits will drop off. There was this guy who went into a shop and bought a packet of… I forget which brand. And he comes out, looks at the health warning, goes back in, hands the packet back and says, “These ones make you impotent. Can I have a packet that gives me cancer?”’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I thought it was funny.’

‘Perhaps you’ve told them the story before, darling.’

‘The buggers could still laugh. It’s my wine they’re drinking.’

‘It was more the way you told it, Phil. Need to tighten the narrative.’

‘Bastard.’

‘I think we’ve got some grass someone left.’

‘Have we?’

‘Yes, in the fridge door.’

‘Where in the fridge door?’

‘The shelf with the parmesan and the tomato paste.’

‘Who left it?’

‘Can’t remember. It must be quite old. Probably lost its jizz by now.’

‘Does it lose its jizz?’

‘Everything loses its jizz.’

‘Presidential candidates?’

‘Them more than anyone.’

‘I offered it to Doreena.’

‘Who’s Doreena?’

‘Our cleaner.’

‘Doreena the Cleaner. Are you having us on?’

‘You offered it to Doreena?’

‘Sure. Is it against the Employment Act or something? Anyway, she didn’t want it. Said she didn’t do that stuff any more.’

‘Christ, what’s the world coming to when one’s cleaner refuses an offer of free drugs?’

‘Of course, we know cigarettes are more addictive than anything. Alcohol, soft drugs, hard drugs. More addictive than heroin.’

‘Do we know that?’

‘Well, I read it in the paper. Cigarettes top of the list.’

‘Then we know it.’

‘More addictive than power?’

‘Now there’s the question.’

‘We also know – but not from the papers – that all smokers are liars.’

‘So you’re calling us all ex-liars?’

‘Yup. And I’m one too.’

‘Are you going to be more specific?’

‘You lie to your parents when you take it up. You lie about how many you smoke – either under or over. Oh, I’m a four-pack-a-day man, like I’ve got the biggest cock. Or, Oh, we only have one occasionally. That means three a day, minimum. Then you lie about it when you try to give up. And you lie to your doctor when you get cancer. Oh, I never smoked that much.’

‘Bit hard-line.’

‘True, though. Sue and I used to cheat on one another.’

‘Dav-id.’

‘I only mean about cigarettes, sweetie. “I just had one at lunchtime.” And “No, the others were smoking, that’s what you can smell.” We both did that.’

‘So vote for the non-smoker. Vote Hillary.’

‘Too late. Anyway, I think smokers just lie about smoking. Like drinkers just lie about drinking.’

‘That’s not true. I’ve known drinkers. Serious drinkers lie about everything. So they can drink. And I’ve lied about other things so I could smoke. You know, “I’ll just go outside and get some fresh air”, or “No, I’ve got to get back to the kids.”’

‘OK, so we’re saying, smokers and drinkers are general liars.’

‘Vote Hillary.’

‘We’re saying, all liars indulge in lying.’

‘That’s too philosophical for this time of night.’

‘Self-deceivers, too, that’s the other thing. Our friend Jerry was a big smoker – he was of that generation. Went for a general check-up in his sixties and was told he had prostate cancer. Opted for radical surgery. They took his balls away.’

‘They took his balls away?’

‘Yup.’

‘So – so he had just a cock?’

‘Well, they gave him prosthetic balls.’

‘What are they made of?’

‘I don’t know – plastic, I think. Anyway, they’re the same weight. So you don’t notice.’

‘So you don’t notice?’

‘Do they make them move around like real ones?’

‘Are we getting off the subject?’

‘Do you know what French slang for balls is? Les valseuses. The waltzers. Because they move around.’

‘Is that female? I mean feminine. Valseuses.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why is bollocks feminine in French?’

‘We’re definitely getting off the subject.’

‘Testicules isn’t. But valseuses is.’

‘Female bollocks. Trust the French.’

‘No wonder they didn’t support the Iraq war.’

‘Not that anyone around this table did.’

‘I was sort of 60/40.’

‘How can you be 60/40 on something like Iraq? It’s like being 60/40 on flat-earth theory.’

‘I’m 60/40 on that too.’

‘Anyway, the reason I brought up Jerry was because he said he was relieved when they told him he had prostate cancer. He said if it’d been lung cancer, he’d have had to give up smoking.’

‘So he carried on?’

‘Yup.’

‘And?’

‘Well, he was OK for a few years. Quite a few years. Then the cancer came back.’

‘Did he give up then?’

‘No. He said there was no point giving up at that stage – he’d rather have the pleasure. I remember the last time we visited him in hospital. He was sitting up in bed watching the cricket with a huge ashtray full of butts in front of him.’

‘The hospital let him smoke?’

‘It was a private room. It was a private hospital. And this was some years ago. He’d paid – it was his room. That was the attitude.’

‘Why were you telling us about this guy?’

‘I can’t remember now. You distracted me.’

‘Self-deception.’

‘That’s right – self-deception.’

‘Sounds like the opposite to me – as if he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he decided it was worth it.’

‘That’s what I mean by self-deception.’

‘In which case being a smoker is a necessary training for being president.’

‘I really think Obama can do it. As your token American.’

‘I agree. Well, I’m 60/40 on it.’

‘You’re a liberal – you’re 60/40 on everything.’

‘I’m not sure I’d agree.’

‘See, he’s even 60/40 on whether or not he’s 60/40.’

‘By the way, you’re wrong about Reagan.’

‘He didn’t advertise Chesterfields?’

‘No, I mean he didn’t die of lung cancer.’

‘I didn’t say he did.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No. He had Alzheimer’s.’

‘Statistically, smokers get Alzheimer’s much less than non-smokers.’

‘That’s because they’re already dead by the time it normally strikes.’

‘New Brazilian health warning: “These Cigarettes Help Avoid Alzheimer’s.”’

‘We picked up a New York Times the other week. We were on a flight. There was a report about a study of life expectancy and the comparative cost to the government, or rather the country, of different ways of dying. And those statistics Macmillan was given – when was that?’

‘’55, ’56, I think.’

‘Well, they’re all to cock. Probably were at the time too. If you’re a smoker you tend to die in your mid-seventies. If you’re obese, you tend to die around eighty. And if you’re a healthy, non-smoking, non-obese person, you tend to die at an average of about eighty-four.’

‘They need a study to tell us that?’

‘No, they need a study to tell us this: the cost in healthcare to the nation. And this was the thing. Smokers were the cheapest. Next came obese people. And all those healthy, non-obese, non-smokers ended up being the biggest drain of all on the country.’

‘That’s amazing. That’s the most important thing anyone’s said all evening.’

‘Apart from how good the lamb was.’

‘Stigmatising smokers, taxing the fuck out of them, making them stand on street corners in the rain, instead of thanking them for being the nation’s cheap dates.’

‘It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.’

‘Anyway, smokers are nicer than non-smokers.’

‘Apart from giving non-smokers cancer.’

‘I don’t think there’s any medical basis for the theory of passive smoking.’

‘Nor do I. Not being a doctor. Just as you aren’t.’

‘I think it’s more a metaphor really. Like, don’t invade my space.’

‘A metaphor for US foreign policy. Are we back to Iraq?’

‘What I meant was, well, it always seemed to me that when everyone smoked, non-smokers were nicer. Now it’s the other way round.’

‘The persecuted minority is always nicer? Is that what Joanna’s saying?’

‘I’m saying there’s a camaraderie. If you go up to someone on the pavement outside a pub or a restaurant and ask to buy a cigarette, they’ll always give you one.’

‘I thought you didn’t smoke.’

‘No, but if I did, they would.’

‘I spy a late switch into the conditional tense.’

‘I told you, all smokers are liars.’

‘Sounds like a matter to be discussed after we’ve all departed.’

‘What’s Dick laughing at?’

‘Oh, prosthetic balls. It’s just the idea. Or the phrase. Multiple application, I’m sure. French foreign policy, Hillary Clinton.’

‘Dick.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m just an old-fashioned guy.’

‘You’re just an old-fashioned child.’

‘Ouch. But Mummy, when I grow up, will I be allowed to smoke?’

‘All this stuff about politicians needing balls. It’s just… bollocks.’

‘Touché.’

‘You know, I’m surprised that pal of yours didn’t go back to the doctor, or the surgeon, and say, Can I have a different sort of cancer instead of the one that makes you chop my bollocks off?’

‘It wasn’t like that. He had a choice of different approaches. He chose the most radical.’

‘You can say that again. Nothing 60/40 about it.’

‘How can you do 60/40 when you’ve only got two balls?’

‘60/40 is a metaphor.’

‘Is it?’

‘Everything’s a metaphor at this time of night.’

‘On which note, can you call us a literal taxi?’

‘Do you remember the morning after a big smoke? The cigarette hangover?’

‘Most mornings. The throat. The dry nose. The chest.’

‘And the way it was clearly separable from the booze hangover you often had at the same time.’

‘Booze makes you loose, fags make you tight.’

‘Eh?’

‘Smoking constricts the blood vessels. That’s why you could never start the day with a decent crap.’

‘Was that why?’

‘Speaking as a non-doctor, that was your problem.’

‘So we’re back where we began?’

‘Which is where?’

‘The inverted plastic bag and -’

‘Dick, now we really are going.’

But we didn’t. We stayed, and talked some more, and decided that Obama would beat McCain, that the Conservatives were only temporarily indistinguishable from the Labour Party, that al-Qaida would certainly attack the 2012 Olympics, that in a few years Londoners would start getting nostalgic about bendy buses, that in a few decades vineyards would once again be planted along Hadrian’s Wall as in Roman times, and that, in all probability, for the rest of the life of the planet, some people somewhere would always be smoking, the lucky buggers.

Sleeping with John Updike

‘I THOUGHT THAT went very well,’ Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and stale.

Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance. ‘You were certainly on good form.’

‘Oh, I had a nice room for a change. It always helps.’

‘They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.’

‘They usually do,’ Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.

‘I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?’

‘You know, I never worry about that any more. It fills a slot.’

When had they first met? Neither could quite remember. It must have been nearly forty years ago, during that time of interchangeable parties: the same white wine, the same hysterical noise level, the same publishers’ speeches. Perhaps it had been at a PEN do, or when they’d been shortlisted for the same literary prize. Or maybe during that long, drunken summer when Alice had been sleeping with Jane’s agent, for reasons she could no longer recall or, even at the time, justify.

‘In a way, it’s a relief we’re not famous.’

‘Is it?’ Jane looked puzzled, and a little dismayed, as if she thought they were.

‘Well, I imagine we’d have readers coming to see us time and again. They’d expect some new anecdotes. I don’t think either of us has told a new story in years.’

‘Actually, we do have people coming to see us again and again. Just fewer than… if we were famous. Anyway, I think they like hearing the same stories. When we’re on stage we’re not literature, we’re sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.’

‘Like your Graham Greene story.’

‘I think of that as a bit more than a… catchphrase, Alice.’

‘Don’t prickle, dear. It doesn’t suit.’ Alice couldn’t help noticing the sheen of sweat on her friend’s face. All from the effort of getting from taxi to platform, then platform to train. And why did women carrying rather more poundage than was wise think floral prints were the answer? Bravado rarely worked with clothes, in Alice’s opinion – at least, after a certain age.

When they had become friends, both were freshly married and freshly published. They had watched over each other’s children, sympathised through divorces, recommended each other’s books as Christmas reading. Each privately liked the other’s work a little less than they said, but then, they also liked everyone else’s work a little less than they said, so hypocrisy didn’t come into it. Jane was embarrassed when Alice referred to herself as an artist rather than a writer, and thought her books strove to appear more highbrow than they were; Alice found Jane’s work rather formless, and at times bleatingly autobiographical. Each had had a little more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back, than they thought they deserved. Mike Nichols had taken an option on Alice’s Triple Sec, but eventually pulled out; some journey-man from telly had come in and made it crassly sexual. Not that Alice put it like this; she would say, with a faint smile, that the adaptation had ‘skimped on the book’s withholdingness’, a phrase some found baffling. Jane, for her part, had been second favourite for the Booker with The Primrose Path, had spent a fortune on a frock, rehearsed her speech with Alice, and then lost out to some fashionable Antipodean.

‘Who did you hear it from, just out of interest?’

‘What?’

‘The Graham Greene story.’

‘Oh, that chap… you know, that chap who used to publish us both.’

‘Jim?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Jane, how can you possibly forget Jim’s name?’

‘Well, I just did.’ The train blasted through some village halt, too fast to catch the signboard. Why did Alice need to be so stern? She wasn’t exactly spotless herself. ‘By the way, did you ever sleep with him?’

Alice frowned slightly. ‘You know, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember. Did you?’

‘I can’t either. But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as well.’

‘Doesn’t that make me sound a bit of a tart?’

‘I don’t know. I thought it made me sound more of a tart.’ Jane laughed, to cover the uncertainty.

‘Do you think it’s good or bad – the fact that we can’t remember?’

Jane felt back on stage, facing a question she was unprepared for. So she reacted as she usually did there, and referred the matter back to Alice: the team leader, head girl, moral authority.

‘What do you think?’

‘Good, definitely.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I think it’s best to have a Zen approach to that sort of thing.’

Sometimes, Alice’s poise could make her rather too oblique for ordinary mortals. ‘Are you saying it’s Buddhist to forget who you slept with?’

‘It could be.’

‘I thought Buddhism was about things coming round again in different lives?’

‘Well, that would explain why we slept with so many pigs.’

They looked at one another companionably. They made a good team. When they were first asked to literary festivals, they soon realised it would be more fun to appear as a double act. Together they had played Hay and Edinburgh, Charleston and King’s Lynn, Dartington and Dublin; even Adelaide and Toronto. They travelled together, saving their publishers the cost of minders. On stage, they finished one another’s sentences, covered up each other’s gaffes, were satirically punitive with male interviewers who tried to patronise them, and urged signing queues to buy the other one’s books. The British Council had sent them abroad a few times until Jane, less than entirely sober, had made some unambassadorial remarks in Munich.

‘What’s the worst thing anyone’s done to you?’

‘Are we still talking bed?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Jane, what a question.’

‘Well, we’re bound to be asked it sooner or later. The way everything’s going.’

‘I’ve never been raped, if that’s what you’re asking. At least,’ Alice went on reflectively, ‘not what the courts would call rape.’

‘So?’

When Alice didn’t answer, Jane said, ‘I’ll look at the landscape while you’re thinking.’ She gazed, with vague benignity, at trees, fields, hedgerows, livestock. She had always been a town person, and her interest in the countryside was largely pragmatic, a flock of sheep only signifying roast lamb.

‘It’s not something… obvious. But I’d say it was Simon.’

‘Simon as in the novelist or as in the publisher or as in Simon but you don’t know him?’

‘Simon the novelist. It was not long after I was divorced. He phoned up and suggested coming round. Said he’d bring a bottle of wine. Which he did. When it became pretty clear that he wasn’t going to get what he’d come for, he corked up the rest of it and took the bottle home.’

‘What was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, was it champagne?’

Alice thought for a moment. ‘It can’t have been champagne because you can’t get the cork back into the bottle. Do you mean was it French or Italian or white or red?’

Jane could tell from the tone that Alice was riled. ‘I don’t know what I meant actually. That’s bad.’

‘What’s bad? Not remembering what you meant?’

‘No, putting the cork back in the bottle. Really bad.’ She left an ex-actress’s pause. ‘I suppose it might have been symbolic.’

Alice giggled, and Jane could tell the moment had only been a hiccup. Encouraged, she put on her sitcom voice. ‘Got to laugh after a bit, haven’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ replied Alice. ‘It’s either that or get religion.’

Jane might have let the moment pass. But Alice’s reference to Buddhism had given her courage, and besides, what are friends for? Even so, she looked out of the window to confess. ‘Actually, I’ve got it, if you want to know. A little, anyway.’

‘Really? Since when? Or rather, why?’

‘A year or two. It sort of makes sense of things. Makes it all feel less… hopeless.’ Jane stroked her handbag, as if it too needed consolation.

Alice was surprised. In her world view, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn’t much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game. She considered whether to answer seriously or lightly, and decided on the latter.

‘As long as your god allows drinking and smoking and fornication.’

‘Oh, he’s very keen on all of those.’

‘How about blasphemy? I always think that’s the key test when it comes to a god.’

‘He’s indifferent. He sort of rises above it.’

‘Then I approve.’

‘That’s what he does. Approves.’

‘Makes a change. For a god, I mean. Mostly they disapprove.’

‘I don’t think I’d want a god who disapproved. Get enough of that in life anyway. Mercy and forgiveness and understanding, that’s what we need. Plus the notion of some overall plan.’

‘Did he find you or you find him, if that makes sense as a question?’

‘Perfect sense,’ replied Jane. ‘I suppose you could say it was mutual.’

‘That sounds… comfy.’

‘Yes, most people don’t think a god ought to be comfy.’

‘What’s that line? Something like: “God will forgive me, it’s his job”?’

‘Quite right too. I think we’ve overcomplicated God down the ages.’

The sandwich trolley came past, and Jane ordered tea. From her handbag she took a slice of lemon in a plastic box, and a miniature of cognac from the hotel minibar. She liked to play a little unacknowledged game with her publishers: the better her room, the less she pillaged. Last night she had slept well, so contented herself with only the cognac and whisky. But once, in Cheltenham, after a poor audience and a lumpy mattress, she was in such a rage that she’d taken everything: the alcohol, the peanuts, the chocolate, the bottle opener, even the ice tray.

The trolley clattered away. Alice found herself regretting the days of proper restaurant cars with silver service and white-jacketed waiters skilled at delivering vegetables with clasped fork and spoon while outside the landscape lurched. Life, she thought, was mostly about the gradual loss of pleasure. She and Jane had given up sex at about the same time. She was no longer interested in drink; Jane had stopped caring about food – or at least, its quality. Alice gardened; Jane did crosswords, occasionally saving time by filling in answers which couldn’t possibly be right.

Jane was glad Alice never rebuked her for taking a drink earlier than some. She felt a rush of affection for this poised, unmessy friend who always made sure that they caught their train.

‘That was a nice young man who interviewed us,’ said Alice. ‘Properly respectful.’

‘He was to you. But he did that thing to me.’

‘What thing?’

‘Didn’t you notice?’ Jane gave a sigh of self-pity. ‘When he mentioned all those books that my latest reminded him of. And you can’t very well say you haven’t read some of them or you’ll look like an ignoramus. So you go along with it and then everyone assumes that’s where you got your ideas from.’

Alice thought this unduly paranoid. ‘They weren’t thinking that, Jane. More likely they were writing him down as a show-off. And they loved it when he mentioned Moby-Dick and you put your head on one side and said, “Is that the one with the whale?”’

‘Yes.’

‘Jane, you’re not telling me you haven’t read Moby-Dick?’

‘Did it look as if I hadn’t?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Good. Well, I wasn’t exactly lying. I saw the film. Gregory Peck. Was it good?’

‘The film?’

‘No, the book, silly.’

‘Since you ask, I haven’t read it either.’

‘Alice, you’re such a friend, you know.’

‘Do you read those young men everyone’s going on about?’

‘Which ones?’

‘The ones everyone’s going on about.’

‘No. I think they’ve got quite enough readers already, don’t you?’

Their own sales were holding up, just about. A couple of thousand in hardback, twenty or so in paper. They still had a certain name-recognition. Alice wrote a weekly column about life’s uncertainties and misfortunes, though Jane thought it would be improved by more references to Alice’s own life and fewer to Epictetus. Jane was still in demand when radio programmes needed someone to fill the Social Policy/Woman/Non-Professional/Humour slot; though one producer had firmly added ‘BIM’ to her contact details, meaning ‘Best in Morning’.

Jane wanted to keep the mood going. ‘What about the young women everyone’s going on about?’

‘I suppose I pretend a little more to have read them than with the boys.’

‘So do I. Is that bad?’

‘No, I think it’s sisterly.’

Jane flinched as a great wind-blast from a train going in the opposite direction suddenly rocked them. Why on earth did they put the tracks so close together? And instantly her head was full of helicopter news-footage: carriages jackknifed – they always used that verb, making it sound the more violent – trains strewn at the bottom of embankments, flashing lights, stretcher crews and, in the background, one carriage mounting another like mating metal. Quickly her mind ran on to plane crashes, mass slaughter, cancer, the strangling of old ladies who lived alone, and the probable absence of immortality. The God Who Approved of Things was powerless against such visions. She tipped the last of the cognac into her tea. She must get Alice to distract her.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, timid as a first-timer in a book-signing queue.

‘Actually, I was wondering if you’d ever been jealous of me.’

‘Why were you wondering that?’

‘I don’t know. Just one of those stray thoughts that arrive.’

‘Good. Because it’s hardly kind.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Well, if I admit I’ve been jealous of you, that makes me a mean-spirited friend. And if I say I haven’t, it sounds as if I’m so smug I can’t find anything in your life or your books worthy of jealousy.’

‘Jane, I’m sorry. Put like that – I’m a bitch. Apologies.’

‘Accepted. But since you ask…’

‘Are you sure I want to hear this now?’ Strange how there were still times when she underestimated Jane.

‘… I don’t know if “jealous” is the right word. But I was envious as hell about the Mike Nichols thing – until it went away. And I was pretty furious when you slept with my husband, but that was anger not jealousy, I think.’

‘I suppose that was tactless of me. But he was your ex-husband by then. And back in those days everyone slept with everyone, didn’t they?’ Beneath such worldliness, Alice felt pressing irritation. This again? It wasn’t as if they hadn’t discussed it to death at the time. And afterwards. And Jane had written that bloody novel about it, claiming that ‘David’ was just about to return to ‘Jill’ when ‘Angela’ intervened. What it didn’t say in the novel was that it was two years, not two months, on, and by that time ‘David’ was fucking half of west London as well as ‘Angela’.

‘It was tactless of you to tell me.’

‘Yes. I suppose I hoped you’d make me stop. I needed someone to make me stop. I was a mess at the time, wasn’t I?’ And they’d discussed that too. Why did some people forget what they needed to remember, and remember what was best forgotten?

‘Are you sure that was the reason?’

Alice took a breath. She was damned if she was going to carry on apologising for the rest of her life. ‘No, I can’t really remember what the reason was at the time. I’m just guessing. Post hoc,’ she added, as if that made it more authoritative, and closed the matter. But Jane wasn’t so easily put off.

‘I wonder if Derek did it because he wanted to make me jealous.’

Now Alice was feeling properly cross. ‘Well, thank you for that. I thought he did it because he couldn’t resist the many charms I had to offer in those days.’

Jane remembered how much décolletage Alice used to show. Nowadays it was all well-cut trouser suits with a cashmere sweater and a silk scarf knotted around the tortoise neck. Back then it had been more like someone holding up a fruit bowl in your direction. Yes, men were simple beings, and Derek was simpler than most, so maybe it was all really about a cunning bra.

Not entirely changing the subject, she found herself asking, ‘Are you going to write your memoirs, by the way?’

Alice shook her head. ‘Too depressing.’

‘Remembering all that stuff?’

‘No, not the remembering – or the making up. The publishing, the putting it out there. I can just about live with the fact that a distinctly finite number of people want to read my novels. But imagine writing your autobiography, trying to summarise all you’ve known and seen and felt and learnt and suffered in your fifty-odd years -’

‘Fifty! ’

‘I only start counting at sixteen, didn’t you know? Before that I wasn’t sentient, let alone responsible for what I was.’

Perhaps that was the secret of Alice’s admirable, indefatigable poise. Every few years she drew a line under what had gone before and declined further responsibility. As with Derek. ‘Go on.’

‘… only to find that there was no one extra out there wanting to know. Or perhaps even fewer people.’

‘You could put lots of sex in it. They like the idea of old…’

‘Biddies?’ Alice raised an eyebrow. ‘Bats?’

‘… bats like us coming clean about sex. Old men look boastful when they remember their conquests. Old women come across as brave.’

‘Be that as it may, you’ve got to have slept with someone famous.’ Derek could never be accused of fame. Nor could Simon the novelist, let alone one’s own publisher. ‘Either that or you’ve got to have done something peculiarly disgusting.’

Jane thought her friend was being disingenuous. ‘Isn’t John Updike famous?’

‘He only twinkled at me.’

‘Alice! I saw you with my own eyes perched on his knee.’

Alice gave a tight smile. She could remember it all quite clearly: someone’s flat in Little Venice, the usual faces, a Byrds LP playing, a background smell of dope, the famous visiting writer, her own sudden forwardness. ‘I perched, as you put it, on his knee. And he twinkled at me. End of story.’

‘But you told me…’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘But you let me understand…’

‘Well, one has one’s pride.’

‘You mean?’

‘I mean he said he had an early start the next day. Paris, Copenhagen, wherever. Book tour. You know.’

‘The headache excuse.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Well,’ said Jane, trying to hide a sudden surge of jauntiness, ‘I’ve always believed that writers get more out of things going wrong than things going right. It’s the only profession in which failure can be put to good use.’

‘I don’t think “failure” exactly describes my moment with John Updike.’

‘Of course not, darling.’

‘And you are, if you don’t mind my saying so, coming on a little like a self-help book.’ Or like you sound on Woman’s Hour, brightly telling others how to live.

‘Am I?’

‘The point is, even if personal failure can be properly transformed into art, it still leaves you where you were when you started.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘Not having slept with John Updike.’

‘Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m jealous of him twinkling at you.’

‘You’re a friend,’ Alice replied, but her tone betrayed her.

They fell silent. Some large station went by.

‘Was that Swindon?’ Jane asked, to make it sound as if they weren’t quarrelling.

‘Probably.’

‘Do you think we have many readers in Swindon?’ Oh, come on, Alice, don’t get huffy on me. Or rather, don’t let’s get huffy on one another.

‘What do you think?’

Jane didn’t know what to think. She was half in a panic. She reached for a sudden fact. ‘It’s the largest town in England without a university.’

‘How do you know that?’ Alice asked, trying to appear envious.

‘Oh, it’s just the sort of thing I know. I expect I got it from Moby-Dick.’

They laughed contentedly, complicitly. Silence fell. After a while they passed Reading, and each gave the other credit for not pointing out the Gaol or going on about Oscar Wilde. Jane went to the loo, or perhaps to consult the minibar in her handbag. Alice found herself wondering if it were better to take life seriously or lightly. Or was that a false antithesis, merely a way of feeling superior? Jane, it seemed to her, took life lightly, until it went wrong, when she reached for serious solutions like God. Better to take life seriously, and reach for light solutions. Satire, for instance; or suicide. Why did people hold so fast to life, that thing they were given without being consulted? All lives were failures, in Alice’s reading of the world, and Jane’s platitude about turning failure into art was fluffy fantasy. Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamt for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

When Jane returned, Alice was busy folding up the sections of newspaper she would keep to read over her Sunday-night boiled egg. It was strange how, as you aged, vanity became less a vice and almost its opposite: a moral requirement. Their mothers would have worn a girdle or corset, but their mothers were long dead, and their girdles and corsets with them. Jane had always been overweight – that was one of the things Derek had complained about; and his habit of criticising his ex-wife either before or shortly after he and Alice went to bed together had been another reason for finishing with him. It wasn’t sisterliness, more disapproval of a lack of class in the man. Subsequently, Jane had got quite a bit larger, what with her drinking and a taste for things like buns at teatime. Buns! There really were a few things women should grow out of. Even if petty vices proved crowd-pleasing when coyly confessed into a microphone. And as for Moby-Dick, it had been perfectly clear to all and sundry that Jane had never read a word of it. Still, that was the constant advantage of appearing with Jane. It made her, Alice, look better: lucid, sober, well read, slim. How long would it be before Jane published a novel about an overweight writer with a drink problem who finds a god to approve of her? Bitch, Alice thought to herself. You really could do with the scourge of one of those old, punitive religions. Stoical atheism is too morally neutral for you.

Guilt made her hug Jane a little longer as they neared the head of the taxi queue at Paddington.

‘Are you going to the Authors of the Year party at Hatchards?’

‘I was an Author of the Year last year. This year I’m a Forgotten Author.’

‘Now, don’t get maudlin, Jane. But since you’re not going, I shan’t either.’ Alice said this firmly, while aware that she might later change her mind.

‘So where are we off to next?’

‘Is it Edinburgh?’

‘Could be. That’s your taxi.’

‘Bye, partner. You’re the best.’

‘So are you.’

They kissed again.

Later, over her boiled egg, Alice found her mind drifting from the cultural pages to Derek. Yes, he had been an oaf, but one with such an appetite for her that it had all seemed not worth questioning. And at the time Jane didn’t appear to mind; only later did she start to become resentful. Alice wondered if this was something to do with Jane, or with the nature of time; but she failed to reach a conclusion, and went back to the newspaper.

Jane, meanwhile, in another part of London, was watching television, and picking up cheese on toast with her fingers, not caring where the crumbs fell. Her hand occasionally slipped a little on the wine glass. Some female Euro-politician on the news reminded her of Alice, and she thought about their long friendship, and how, when they were on stage together, Alice always played the senior partner, and she always acquiesced. Was this because she had a subservient nature, or because she thought it made her, Jane, come across as nicer? Unlike Alice, she never minded owning up to weaknesses. So maybe it was time to admit the gaps in her reading. She could start in Edinburgh. That was a trip to look forward to. She imagined these jaunts of theirs going on into the future until… what? The television screen was replaced by an image of herself dropping dead on a near-empty train coming back from somewhere. What did they do when that happened? Stop the train – at Swindon, say – and take the body off, or just prop her up in the seat as if she was asleep or drunk and continue on to London? There must be a protocol written down somewhere. But how could they give a place of death if she was on a moving train at the time? And what would Alice do, if her body was taken off? Would she loyally accompany her dead friend, or find some high-minded argument for staying on the train? It suddenly seemed very important to be reassured that Alice wouldn’t abandon her. She looked across at the telephone, wondering what Alice was doing at that moment. But then she imagined the small, disapproving silence before Alice answered her question, a silence which would somehow imply that her friend was needy, self-dramatising and overweight. Jane sighed, reached for the remote, and changed channel.

At Phil & Joanna’s 2: Marmalade

IT WAS THE KIND of mid-February which reminds the British why so many of their compatriots chose emigration. Snow had fallen intermittently since October, the sky was a dull aluminium, and the television news reporting flash floods, toddlers being swept away and pensioners paddled to safety. We had talked about SAD, the credit crunch, the rise in unemployment and the possibility of increased social tension.

‘All I’m saying is, it’s not surprising if foreign firms operating here fly in foreign labour when there are piles of job-seekers at home.’

‘And all I’m saying is, there are more Brits working in Europe than Europeans working here.’

‘Did you see that Italian worker giving the finger to photographers?’

‘Yes, I’m all for importing foreign labour if it looks like that.’

‘Don’t give her any more, Phil.’

‘Without sounding too much like the prime minister or one of those papers we don’t read, at the moment I think it should be a case of British jobs for British workers.’

‘And European wine for British wives.’

‘That’s a non sequitur.’

‘No, it’s a postprandial sequitur. Amounts to the same thing.’

‘As your resident alien -’

‘Pray silence for the spokesman of our former colony.’

‘… I recall when all you guys were arguing about joining the single currency. And I was thinking: what’s their problem? I’ve just driven to the middle of Italy and back using a single currency and it’s called Mastercard.’

‘If we joined the euro the pound would be worth less.’

‘Surely, if we joined the euro -’

‘Joke.’

‘You’ve got the same colour passports. Why not cut to the chase and say you’re all Europeans?’

‘Because then we wouldn’t be allowed to make jokes about foreigners.’

‘Which is after all a central British tradition.’

‘Look, go to any city in Europe and the stores are more or less the same. At times you wonder where you are. Internal borders hardly exist. Plastic’s replacing money, the internet’s replacing everything else. And more and more people speak English, which makes it even easier. So why not admit the reality?’

‘But that’s another British trait we cling to. Not accepting reality.’

‘Like hypocrisy.’

‘Don’t get her started on that. You rode that hobby horse to death last time, darling.’

‘Did I?’

‘Riding a hobby horse to death is flogging a dead metaphor.’

‘What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile, by the way?’

‘Marmalade.’

‘Which of you two is driving?’

‘Have you made yours?’

‘You know, I always spot the Sevilles when they first come in and then never get around to buying any.’

‘One of the last fruit or veg still obedient to the concept of a season. I wish the world would go back to that.’

‘No you don’t. You’d have turnips and swedes on the trot all winter.’

‘When I was a boy, we had this big sideboard in the kitchen with deep drawers at the bottom, and once a year they’d all suddenly be full of marmalade. It was like a miracle. I never saw my mum making it. I’d come home from school, and there’d be this smell, and I’d go to the sideboard, and it was all full of pots. All of them labelled. Still warm. And it had to last us the whole year.’

‘My dear Phil. Cue rheumy tear and violins. This was when you were stuffing newspaper into your shoes as you trudged to your holiday job at t’mill?’

‘Fuck off, Dick.’

‘Claude says this is the last week for Sevilles.’

‘I knew it. I’m going to miss out again.’

‘There’s a pun in Shakespeare on “Seville” and “civil”. Not that I can remember what it is.’

‘You can freeze them, you know.’

‘You should see our freezer already. I don’t want it to become an even greater repository of guilt.’

‘Sounds like those damn bankers – repositories of gilt.’

‘They don’t look very guilty.’

‘I was trying to make a pun, sweetie.’

‘Who’s Claude?’

‘He’s our greengrocer. He’s French. Actually, French Tunisian.’

‘Well, that’s another thing. How many of your traditional shopkeepers are English any more? Around here, anyway. A quarter, a third?’

‘Speaking of which, did I tell you about the home bowel-screening kit the government kindly sent me now I’m officially an old git?’

‘Dick, must you?’

‘I promise not to offend, though the temptation is glittering.’

‘It’s just that you get so potty-mouthed with booze.’

‘Then I shall be demure. Prim. Leave everything to the imagination. They send you this kit, with a plasticky envelope in which to send back the – how shall I put it? – necessary evidence. Two specimens taken on each of three separate days. And you have to fill in the date of each sample.’

‘How do you… capture the sample? Do you have to fish it out?’

‘No, on the contrary. It must be uncontaminated by water.’

‘Then…’

‘I have promised to restrict myself to the language of Miss Austen. I’m sure they had paper towels and little cardboard sticks back then, and probably a nursery game called Catch It If You Can.’

‘Dick.’

‘That reminds me, I had to see a proctologist once, and he told me one way to check my condition – whatever it was, I deliberately forget – was to squat down over a mirror on the floor. Somehow, I thought I’d rather risk whatever it was I might be getting.’

‘Doubtless some of you are wondering why I raised the subject.’

‘It’s because you get potty-mouthed with booze.’

‘A sufficient but not a necessary condition. No, you see, I did my first test last Thursday, and I was just about to do the next one the next day until I realised. Friday the 13th. Not an auspicious day. So I did it on the Saturday instead.’

‘But that was -’

‘Exactly. St Valentine’s Day. Love me, love my colon.’

‘How often do you think that happens, Friday the 13th followed by Valentine’s Day?’

‘Pass.’

‘Pass.’

‘When I was a boy – a lad – a young man – I don’t think I sent a single valentine or got one. It just wasn’t what… people I knew did. The only ones I’ve had have come since I’ve been married.’

‘Joanna, aren’t you worried by that?’

‘No. He means, I send them.’

‘Ah, sweet. Indeed, schweeeet.’

‘You know, I’ve heard of your famous English emotional reticence, but that really does set the bar high. Not sending valentines till after you’re married.’

‘I read that there was a possible link between Seville oranges and bowel cancer.’

‘Did you really?’

‘No, but it’s the sort of thing you say when it gets late.’

‘You’re funnier when you don’t strain so much.’

‘I remember one of the first times I went into a lavatory stall and read the graffiti, there was one that said, “Do not bite the knob while straining.” It took me about five years to work it out.’

‘Is that knob as in knob?’

‘No, it’s knob as in doorknob.’

‘Changing the subject entirely, I was in a stall once and taking my leisure when I noticed something written down at the bottom of the side wall at a sort of slant. So I bent over until I could read it, and it said, “You are now crapping at an angle of 45 degrees.”’

‘I would just like to say that the reason I mentioned marmalade…’

‘Apart from its link to bowel cancer.’

‘Is because it’s such a British phenomenon. Larry was saying how we’re now all the same. So instead of saying the Royal Family or whatever, I said marmalade.’

‘We have it in the States.’

‘You have it, in little pots in hotels at breakfast. But you don’t make it in your homes, you don’t understand it.’

‘The French have it. Confiture d’orange.’

‘Same thing applies. That’s just jam. Orange jam.’

‘No, it’s French to begin with, it comes from “Marie malade”. That Queen of Scotland who had French connections.’

‘FCUK. They were here already?’

‘And Mary, Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, or whoever it was, was ill. And they made it for her. So Marie malade – marmalade. See?’

‘I think we were there already.’

‘Anyway, I’ll tell you why we Brits will always remain British.’

‘Don’t you hate the way everyone says “the UK” or just “UK” nowadays? Not to mention “UK plc” and all that.’

‘I think Tony Blair started it.’

‘I thought you blamed everything on Mrs Thatcher.’

‘No, I’ve switched. It’s all Blair’s fault now.’

‘“UK plc”’s just honest. We’re a trading nation, always were. Thatch just reconnected us to the real England that is for ever England – money-worshipping, self-interested, xenophobic, culture-hating. It’s our default setting.’

‘As I was saying, do you know what we also celebrate on February the 14th, apart from St Valentine’s Day?’

‘National Bowel-Screening Day?’

‘Shut up, Dick.’

‘No. It’s also National Impotence Day.’

‘I lurv your Breedish sense of yumor.’

‘I lurv your Croatian accent.’

‘But it’s true. And if anyone asks me about national characteristics, or irony, for that matter, that’s what I tell them: February the 14th.’

‘Blood oranges.’

‘Let me guess. Named after Bloody Mary.’

‘Did you notice a few years ago they started calling blood oranges “ruby oranges” in supermarkets? Just in case anyone thought they might really contain blood.’

‘As opposed to containing rubies.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Anyway, they’re just about coming into the shops, so they’re overlapping with Sevilles, and I was wondering if that happens as often, say, as Friday the 13th precedes Valentine’s Day.’

‘Joanna, that’s another reason I love you. You’re able to impose narrative coherence on the likes of us at this time of night. What could be more flattering than a hostess who can make her guests imagine they’re sticking to the point?’

‘Put that on next year’s Valentine, Phil.’

‘And does everyone agree tonight’s blood or ruby orange salad was fit to set before a queen?’

‘And the neck-of-lamb stew fit to be set before a king.’

‘Charles the First’s final request.’

‘He wore two shirts.’

‘Charles the First?’

‘On the day he was beheaded. It was extremely cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering and have Ye People believe he was frightened.’

‘That’s pretty British.’

‘All those people who dress up in period costume and fight Civil War battles all over again. That’s very British too, I always think.’

‘Well, we do it in the States. I guess in lots of other countries too.’

‘OK, but we did it first. We invented it.’

‘Like your cricket and your soccer and your Devonshire cream teas.’

‘If we can stick to marmalade for the moment.’

‘It gives a good glaze to a duck.’

‘I bet everyone here who makes it does it differently and wants a different consistency.’

‘Runny.’

‘Sticky.’

‘Sue boils it so hard it falls off the toast if you aren’t careful. No stick at all.’

‘Well, if you leave it too runny it pours off the toast.’

‘You have to put the pips in a muslin bag to get extra… whatsit.’

‘Pectin.’

‘That’s the stuff.’

‘Fine cut.’

‘Coarse.’

‘I cut mine up in the Magimix.’

‘Cheat.’

‘My friend Hazel does hers in the pressure cooker.’

‘But that’s my point. It’s like boiling an egg. Or was it frying? They did a survey and discovered everyone does it differently and everyone thinks theirs is the right way.’

‘Is this leading anywhere, O keeper of the communal narrative?’

‘What Larry was saying. About us all being the same. But we aren’t. Not even with the simplest things.’

‘The marmalade theory of Britishness.’

‘That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of being Europeans. All of you guys.’

‘I don’t know if Larry was in the country when our distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer, now soon-to-be-ex-prime minister, Mr Brown, laid down a number of conditions before we would submerge the good old British pound in the filthy foreign euro.’

‘Converge. Not submerge. The tests for convergence.’

‘Can anyone remember them, by the way? Even one of them?’

‘Of course not. They weren’t designed to be comprehensible. They were designed to be incomprehensible, and, therefore, unmemorable.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the decision to join the euro was always going to be political not economic.’

‘That’s very lucid and may even be correct.’

‘But does anyone think the French are less French, or the Italians less Italian, because they joined the euro?’

‘The French will always be French.’

‘That’s what they say about you.’

‘That we’ll always be French?’

‘Anyway, you don’t need Seville oranges to make marmalade.’

‘I’m glad we’re back on the subject.’

‘Dick’s made it with every kind of citrus fruit.’

‘There goes my reputation.’

‘There was one year he made it with a mixture of – what was it? – Sevilles, sweet oranges, pink grapefruit, yellow grapefruit, lemons and limes. Six-fruit marmalade, I put on the labels.’

‘That wouldn’t get past EU regulations.’

‘Remind me – mint tea, mint tea, nothing, decaf, mint tea?’

‘I’ll switch to nothing tonight.’

‘So much for my chances later on.’

‘David, sweetie…’

‘Yes, Sue, sweetie?’

‘OK, since you raised it. Just to ask a non-British question, have any of us, in recent memory, left Phil and Joanna’s table and gone home and…’

‘“Had a spot of old-fashioned nookie” is what she’s trying to say.’

‘What counts as old-fashioned?’

‘Oh, anything involving intromission.’

‘Isn’t that a horrible word?’

‘I was told a story about Lady Diana Cooper. Or was it Nancy Mitford? One or the other, anyway, posh. And they were – she was – on a transatlantic liner and whichever of them it was fucked one of the stewards one evening. And the next morning he ran into her in the fo’c’sle or whatever and said hello in a friendly way -’

‘As one would.’

‘As one would. And she replied, “Intromission is not introduction.”’

‘Ah, doncha love our upper classes? There’ll always be an England.’

‘That sort of story makes me want to stand on the table and sing “The Red Flag”.’

‘“The Ruby Flag”.’

‘You’re all avoiding my question.’

‘How can we be if we can’t remember it?’

‘Then shame on you.’

‘It’s not really the alcohol, or the lack of caffeine, it’s not even the tiredness. It’s more that by the time we get home we’re what we in our house call TFTF.’

‘An acronym you are about to deconstruct.’

‘Too Fat To Fuck.’

‘Talk about secrets of the bedchamber.’

‘You remember Jerry?’

‘The guy with the plastic testicules?’

‘I thought you’d remember that detail. Well, Jerry was abroad for a few months, and Kate – his wife – started getting worried that her tummy was a bit on the fat side. And she wanted to be in perfect shape for Jerry’s return, so she went to a plastic surgeon and asked about liposuction. And the guy said yes, he could give her a flattie again…’

‘A flattie?’

‘I paraphrase the medispeak. The only downside, he said, was that she wouldn’t, as he so tactfully put it, be able to take any weight on her stomach for quite a number of weeks.’

‘Oh-oh. Posterior intromission only.’

‘Don’t you think, actually, that’s a story about true love?’

‘Unless it’s a story about female insecurity.’

‘Hands up all those who might like to know the derivation of the word “marmalade”.’

‘I thought you’d been a long time having a pee.’

‘It’s nothing to do with Marie malade. It comes from some Greek word meaning a kind of apple grafted on to a quince.’

‘All the great etymologies are wrong.’

‘You mean, you’ve got another example?’

‘Well, posh.’

‘Port out, starboard home, best accommodation to and from India, quarters on the side sheltered from the sun. Word applied to Lady Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford.’

‘Afraid not. “Origin unknown”.’

‘That’s not a derivation, “origin unknown”.’

‘It says, “Possibly connected to a Romany word for money.”’

‘That’s most unsatisfactory.’

‘Sorry to be a spoilsport.’

‘Do you think that’s another national characteristic?’

‘Being a spoilsport?’

‘No. Inventing fanciful derivations and acronyms.’

‘Perhaps UK really stands for something else.’

‘Uro Konvergence.’

‘It’s not that late, is it?’

‘Maybe it doesn’t stand for anything at all.’

‘It’s an allegory.’

‘Or a metaphor.’

‘Will someone please explain the difference between a simile and a metaphor?’

‘A simile’s… more similar. A metaphor’s more… metaphorical.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s a question of convergence, as the prime minister put it. At the moment, the euro and the pound are miles apart, so their relationship is metaphorical. Maybe even metaphysical. Then they become close, like similes, and there’s convergence.’

‘And we finally become Europeans.’

‘And live happily ever after.’

‘Teaching them all about marmalade.’

‘Why didn’t you guys join the euro, as a matter of fact?’

‘We had the introduction, we just didn’t want the intromission.’

‘We were too fat to fuck at the time.’

‘Too fat to be fucked. By some lean and hungry Eurocrat.’

‘I think we should join on St Valentine’s Day.’

‘Why not Friday the 13th?’

‘No, it has to be the 14th. The celebration of both love and impotence. That’s the day we become fully paid-up members of Europe.’

‘Larry, do you want to know how this country’s changed in my lifetime? When I was growing up, we didn’t think about ourselves as a nation. There were certain assumptions, of course, but it was a sign, a proof, of who we were that we didn’t think much about who or what we were. What we was was normal – or is it “what we were was normal”? Now, this might have been due to the long overhang of imperial power, or it might be a matter of what you earlier called our emotional reticence. We weren’t self-conscious. Now we are. No, we’re worse – worse than self-conscious, worse than navel-gazing. Who was saying about that proctologist who told him to squat over a mirror? That’s what we’re like now – arse-gazing.’

‘Mint tea, another mint tea here, that’s the decaf. I’ve ordered two minicabs. Why the silence? Did I miss something?’

‘Only a simile.’

After that, we talked about holidays, and who was going where, and how the days were getting longer, apparently at the rate of one minute per day, a fact which no one disputed, and then someone described looking at the inside of a snowdrop, and how you lifted the head of the flower expecting it to be all white inside as well, only to discover a lacy pattern of the purest green. And how different varieties of snowdrop had different internal patterns, some almost geometrical, others quite extravagant, although it was always the same green, and of a vibrancy that made you feel spring was eager to arrive. But before anyone could say anything about or against that, there was a concerted and impatient hooting from the street.

Gardeners’ World

THEY HAD REACHED the stage, eight years into their relationship, when they had started giving each other useful presents, ones that confirmed their joint project in life rather than expressed their feelings. As they unwrapped sets of coathangers, storage jars, an olive stoner or an electric pencil sharpener, they would say, ‘Just what I needed’, and mean it. Even gifts of underwear nowadays seemed more practical than erotic. One wedding anniversary, he’d given her a card that read, ‘I have cleaned all your shoes’ – and he had, spraying everything suede against the rain, dabbing whitener on an old pair of tennis pumps she still wore, giving her boots a military shine, and treating the rest of her footwear with polish, brush, rag, cloth, elbow-grease, devotion, love.

Ken had offered to waive presents this year, as his birthday fell only six weeks after they moved into the house, but she declined to be let off. So, this Saturday lunchtime, he gently palpated the two parcels in front of him, trying to imagine what they might contain. He used to do this out loud, but if he guessed right she was visibly disappointed, and if he guessed silly, disappointed in a different way. So now he addressed only himself. First one, soft: got to be something to wear.

‘Gardening gloves! Just what I needed.’ He tried them on, admired their mixture of flexibility and robustness, commented on the leather bands which reinforced the stripy canvas at key points. This was the first time they had owned a garden, and his first pair of such gloves.

His other present was some kind of oblong box; when he was about to give it a shake, she warned that some bits were fragile. He unpeeled the Sellotape carefully, as they saved wrapping paper for re-use. Inside he found a green plastic attaché case. Frowning, he raised its lid and saw a line of glass test tubes with corks in the top, a set of plastic bottles containing different coloured liquids, a long plastic spoon, and assorted mysterious dibbers and wodgers. Had he been guessing silly, he might have suggested an advanced version of the home pregnancy kit they had once used way back, when they were still hoping. Now he knew not to mention the comparison. Instead, he read the title of the handbook.

‘A soil-testing kit! Just what I needed.’

‘They really work, apparently.’

It was a good present, appealing to – what, exactly? – perhaps that small area of masculinity which modern society’s erosion of difference between the sexes had not yet eliminated. Man as boffin, as prospective hunter-gatherer, as boy scout: a bit of each. Among their circle of friends, both sexes shared the shopping, cooking, housework, childcare, driving, earning. Apart from putting on their own clothes, there was almost nothing one partner did that the other was not equally capable of. And equally willing, or unwilling, to do. But a soil-testing kit, now that was definitely a boy thing. Clever Martha does it again.

The handbook said the kit would test for potassium, phosphorus, potash and pH, whatever that was. And then presumably you got bags of different stuff and dug them in. He smiled at Martha.

‘So I suppose it will also help us work out what will grow best where.’

When she only smiled back, he assumed that she assumed he was referring to the contentious subject of his vegetable patch. His theoretical vegetable patch. The one which she said there was no room for, and anyway no need for, given the farmers’ market every Saturday morning in the nearby school playground. Not to mention the lead content likely to occur in any vegetables grown so close to one of the chief arterial roads leading out of London. He had pointed out that most cars nowadays used lead-free petrol.

‘Well then, diesel,’ she had replied.

He didn’t – still – see why he shouldn’t have a little square patch down by the end wall, which already had a blackberry on it. He could grow potatoes and carrots, perhaps. Or Brussels sprouts, which, he had once read, sweeten up as soon as the first hard frost hits them. Or broad beans. Or anything. Even salad. He could grow lettuces and herbs. He could have a compost heap and they could do even more recycling than they did already.

But Martha was against it. Almost as soon as they had made an offer on the house she started clipping and filing articles by various horticultural sages. Many were on the subject of How to Make the Most of a Tricky Space; and no one could deny that what owners of terrace houses like theirs ended up with – a long thin strip bounded by yellow-grey brick walls – was indeed a Tricky Space. The classier gardening writers tended to suggest that in order to Make the Most of it, you should break it up into a series of small, intimate areas with different plantings and different functions, perhaps linked by a serpentine path. Before and After photos demonstrated the transformation. A nook designed to catch the sun would give way to a little rose garden, a water feature, a place where plants were grown just for the colour of their leaves, a hedged square containing a sundial, and so on. Sometimes Japanese principles were invoked. Ken, who like most of the inhabitants of the street considered himself tolerant and open-minded in matters of race, told Martha that while the Japanese had many admirable qualities, he didn’t know why they should create a Japanesy garden any more than she should wear a kimono. Privately, he thought the whole notion poncey. Terrace for sitting out, preferably with barbecue area, plus grass, borders, veg patch – that was his idea of a garden.

‘Don’t you think I’d look good in a kimono?’ she had asked, turning the argument.

Anyway, she assured him, he was taking things far too literally. They weren’t going to have flowering cherries and koi carp and gongs; it was more a sensible way of interpreting a general principle. Besides, he liked the way she did salmon steaks with a soy-sauce marinade, didn’t he?

‘I bet the Japanese grow vegetables,’ he had replied, mock-grumpily.

Martha’s interest in gardening had come as a surprise to him. When they had first met, she owned a window box in which she grew a few herbs; later, when they moved in together, they acquired access to a shared roof terrace. Here she kept a few terracotta planters with chives, mint, thyme and rosemary, some of which, they suspected, were stolen by their neighbours; also the bay tree her sentimentally interfering parents had given them as an augury of marital good fortune. It had been repotted a couple of times, and now stood immoveably outside their front door in a thick wooden tub.

Marriage was a democracy of two, he liked to say. He had somehow assumed that the garden would be decided upon much as the house had been, by a process of reasoned yet enthusiastic consultation in which requirements were enunciated, mutual tastes considered, finances estimated. As a consequence, there was almost nothing he actively hated in the house, and much he approved of. Now he found himself silently resenting the catalogues of teakware that arrived, the horticultural magazines piled on Martha’s bedside table, and her habit of shushing him when Gardeners’ Question Time was on the radio. He would eavesdrop on matters of leafcurl and black spot, some new threat to wisteria, and advice about what to plant beneath an elder tree on a north-facing slope. He didn’t feel threatened by Martha’s new interest, just found it excessive.

pH, he learnt, was a number used to express degrees of acidity or alkalinity in solutions, formerly the logarithm to base 10 of the reciprocal of the concentration of hydrogen ions, but now related by formula to a standard solution of potassium hydrogen phthalate, which has value 4 at 15 degrees centigrade. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers, Ken thought. Why not just get a bag of bonemeal and a sack of compost and dig them in? But Ken was aware of this trait of his, a tendency to settle for the approximate, which one irate girlfriend called ‘just being incredibly fucking lazy’ – a description he had always cherished.

And so he read most of the instructions that came with his soil-testing kit, identified several key locations in the garden, and proudly pulled on his new gloves before digging small samples of earth and crumbling them into the test tubes. As he added drops of liquid, inserted the corks, and shook the contents up and down, he occasionally glanced towards the kitchen window, hoping that Martha would be tenderly amused by his professionalism. His attempt at professionalism, anyway. He left each experiment the required number of minutes, took out a little notebook and recorded his findings, then he went on to the next location. Once or twice he retested when the first result had been dubious or unclear.

Martha could tell he was in a jolly mood that evening. He stirred the fricassee of rabbit, decided to give it another twenty minutes or so, poured them each a glass of white wine, and sat on the arm of her chair. Looking down indulgently at an article about different types of gravel, he played with the hair at the nape of her neck, and said, with a cheery smile,

‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’

She looked up, uncertain where his remark might fall on a scale from gentle tease to full critical objection.

‘I’ve tested the soil. In places I had to do it more than once before I was confident of my findings. But the surveyor-general is now ready to report.’

‘Yes?’

‘According to my analysis, madam, there is no soil in your soil.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It is impossible to address deficiencies in the terroir, because there is no soil in your soil.’

‘You’ve said that. So what is there instead?’

‘Oh, stones mainly. Dust, roots, clay, ground elder, dogshit, catcrap, bird-droppings, stuff like that.’

He liked the way he had said ‘your soil’.

On another Saturday morning three months later, with the December sun so low that the garden would be lucky to get the slightest warmth or light, Ken came into the house and threw down his gardening gloves.

‘What have you done with the blackberry?’

‘What blackberry?’

This made him more tense. Their garden was hardly that big.

‘The one along the back wall.’

‘Oh, that briar.’

‘That briar was a blackberry with blackberries on it. I brought you two and personally fed them into your mouth.’

‘I’m planning something along that wall. Maybe a Russian vine, but that’s a bit cowardly. I was thinking a clematis.’

‘You dug up my blackberry.’

‘Your blackberry?’ She was always at her coolest when she knew, and knew that he knew, that she’d done something without consultation. Marriage was a democracy of two, except when there’s a tied vote, in which case it descends into autocracy. ‘It was a godawful briar.’

‘I had plans for it. I was going to improve its pH factor. Prune it, and stuff. Anyway, you knew it was a blackberry. Blackberries,’ he added authoritatively, ‘produce blackberries.’

‘OK, it was a bramble.’

‘A bramble!’ This was getting ridiculous. ‘Brambles produce bramble jelly, which is made from blackberries.’

‘Do you think you could check what we need to dig into the soil to help a clematis on a north-facing wall?’

Yes, he thought, I might very well leave you. But until then, forget it, change the subject.

‘It’s going to be a hard winter. The bookies are only offering 6-4 against a white Christmas.’

‘Then we must get some of that plastic fleece to protect what’s vulnerable. Perhaps some straw as well.’

‘I’ll pop along to the nearest stables.’ Now, suddenly, he wasn’t cross any more. If she got greater pleasure out of the garden, let her have it.

‘I hope there’s lots of snow,’ he said boyishly.

‘Is that what we want?’

‘Yup. Proper gardeners pray for a hard winter. Kills all the bugs.’

She nodded, allowing him that. The two of them had come at the garden from different directions. Ken had grown up in the country, and all through his adolescence couldn’t wait to get to London, to university, work, life. Nature for him represented either hostility or tedium. He remembered trying to read a book in the garden, and how the combination of shifting sun, wind, bees, ants, flies, ladybirds, birdsong and his mother’s chivvying made plein-air studying a nightmare. He remembered being bribed to supply his reluctant manual labour. He remembered his father’s vastly overcropping vegetable beds and fruit cages. His mother would dutifully fill the chest freezer with the superabundance of beans and peas, strawberries and currants; and then, each year, guiltily, while Dad was out, throw away any bags found to be more than two years old. Her kitchen version of crop rotation, he supposed.

Martha was a town girl, who thought nature essentially benevolent, who wondered at the miracle of germination, and badgered him to go on country walks. She had developed an autodidact’s zeal in recent months. He thought of himself as an instinctive amateur, her as a technocrat.

‘More bookwork?’ he asked mildly, as he got into bed. She was reading Ursula Buchan’s Wall Plants and Climbers.

‘There’s nothing wrong with bookwork, Ken.’

‘As I know to my cost,’ he replied, turning out his bedside light.

This wasn’t an argument, not any more; just an admitted difference. Martha, for instance, thought that it was only sensible to follow recipes when cooking. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking the spine of a cookbook?’ – as he had once, ponderously, put it. Whereas he preferred just to glance at a recipe to give himself ideas, and then wing it. She liked guidebooks, and used a map even when walking through town; he preferred an internal compass, serendipity, the joy of getting creatively lost. This led to various quarrels in the car.

She had also pointed out to him that, when it came to sex, their positions were reversed. He had confessed to a lot of preliminary bookwork, whereas she, as she once expressed it, had learnt on the job. He’d replied that he hoped he wasn’t meant to take that literally. Not that there was anything wrong with their sex life – in his opinion, anyway. Perhaps they had what was needed in any partnership: one bookworm and one instinctivist.

As he thought about this, he found himself with what felt to him like a monster erection, which seemed to have crept up unawares. He turned on his side towards Martha, and put his left hand on her hip in a way that could be interpreted as a signal or not, depending on mood.

Aware that he was awake, Martha murmured, ‘I was wondering about a trachelospermum jasminoides, but suspect the soil’s too acid.’

‘Fair enough,’ he murmured back.

It snowed in mid-December, first a misleading light softness that turned to water as it hit the pavement, then a solid couple of inches. When Ken got home from work a thick layer of white was holding on the flat leaves of the bay tree, an incongruous sight. The next morning, he took his camera to the front door.

‘The bastards!’ he shouted back into the house. Martha came down the hall in her dressing gown. ‘Look, the bastards,’ he repeated.

Outside there was only an oak tub half full of earth.

‘I’ve heard about the rustling of Christmas trees…’

‘The neighbours did warn us,’ she replied.

‘Did they?’

‘Yes, number 47 told us we should chain it to the wall. You said you didn’t like the idea of chained trees any more than chained bears or chained slaves.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sounds a bit pompous to me.’

She put a towelling forearm through his, and they went inside again.

‘Shall we call the police?’

‘I expect it’s already heeled in somewhere in darkest Essex,’ he replied.

‘It’s not bad luck, is it?’

‘No, it’s not bad luck,’ he said firmly. ‘We don’t believe in bad luck. It was just some wide boy who saw it with snow on the leaves and was struck by a rare moment of aesthetic bliss.’

‘You’re in a very indulgent mood.’

‘Must be Christmas or something. By the way, you know that water feature you’re planning between the rose grove and the leaf display?’

‘Yes.’ She did not respond to his caricatural terminology.

‘What about mosquitoes?’

‘We keep the water circulating. That way you don’t get them.’

‘How?’

‘Electric pump. We can run a cable from the kitchen.’

‘In that case, I have only one more objection. Can we please, please, not call it a water feature? Waterfall, cascade, lily pond, miniature stream, anything but feature.’

‘Ruskin said he always worked better to the sound of running water.’

‘Didn’t it make him want to pee all the time?’

‘Why should it?’

‘Because it does with blokes. You might have to install a toilet feature next to it.’

‘You are in a sunny mood.’

Probably it was the snow, which always cheered him. But it was also that he had secretly applied for an allotment, down between the water-purifying plant and the railway line. Someone had told him the waiting list wasn’t too long.

Two days later, setting off for work, he shut the front door and stepped straight into a pile of earth.

‘The bastards!’ This time he said it to the entire street.

They had come back and taken the oak tub, leaving him the soil.

Spring was marked by a series of Saturday-morning visits to the local garden centre. Ken would drop Martha at the main entrance, then drive to the car park and spend longer than necessary lowering the back seat to make room for whatever compost, loam, peat, woodchips or gravel had been indicated by his wife’s latest reading. Then he might sit in the car a while longer, arguing that he wasn’t much help in choosing anyway. He was quite happy to pay for the loaded contents of the yellow plastic wagon that usually accompanied Martha to the cash desk. In fact, that seemed to him the perfect deal: he drove her there, sat in the car, met her at the desk and paid, then drove them home and paid again by risking a hernia lifting all the stuff out of the car and lugging it through the house to the garden.

Doubtless it was something to do with his childhood, with toxic memories of trudging round nurseries while his parents chose bedding plants. Not that Ken believed in blaming his parents at this late stage: if they’d been gourmets and wine bores, he might have ended up a teetotal vegan, but still would have taken the responsibility for that condition. Even so, there was something about a garden centre – this purveyor of rus in urbe, with its tubs and planters and trellises, its seed packets and sproutlets and shrubs, its balls of twine and wire-ties wrapped in green plastic, its slug pellets and fox-discouraging machines and watering systems and garden candles, all those verdant aisles full of hope and promise, along which processed friendly people with peeling skin and sandals waving red plastic bottles of tomato fertiliser at one another – something about all this that really got on his tits.

And it always took him back to his late adolescence, a time when for him fear and distrust of the world were about to turn into a hesitant love of it, when life was poised to lurch irretrievably in one direction or another, when, as it now seemed to him, you had a last chance to see clearly before being flung into the full business of being yourself among others, at which point things proceeded too fast for proper examination. But then, just back exactly then, he had specialised in seeing through the hypocrisy and deceit of adult life. True, his Northamptonshire village contained no obvious Rasputin or Himmler; so the great moral faultlines of humanity had to be mapped from the possibly unrepresentative sample of his parents’ friends. But this made his findings the more valuable. And it had pleased him to detect vice hidden in the seemingly innocuous, not to say beneficial, occupation of gardening. Envy, greed, resentment, the costive withholding of praise and its false overlavishing, anger, lust, covetousness and various other of the deadly sins he couldn’t quite remember. Murder? Well, why not? Doubtless some Dutchman had exterminated some other Dutchman to get his hands on a priceless corm or tuber or whatever they were called – yes, bulb – during the madness known as Tulipomania.

And on a more normal, decently English scale of evil, he had noticed how even old friends of his parents became tight-lipped and mean-spirited during a tour of the garden, with many a ‘How did you get this to flower so early?’ and ‘Where did you track that down?’ and ‘You’re so lucky with your soil.’ He recalled one stout old bat in tweed jodhpurs who spent forty minutes on an early-morning examination of his parents’ half-acre, returning to issue only the prim bulletin of ‘You evidently had the frost rather earlier than we did.’ He’d read about otherwise virtuous citizens who travelled to the great gardens of England with concealed secateurs, and poacher’s pockets in which to stow their loot. No wonder there were now security cameras and uniformed guards at some of the country’s most sylvan and pastoral locations. Plant-napping was rife, and perhaps the speed with which he’d recovered from the theft of their bay tree hadn’t been anything to do with the cheery snow and the season, but because it confirmed one of the key moral discoveries of his adolescence.

The previous evening they’d been sitting out on the recently delivered teak bench with a bottle of rosé between them. For once there was no inane music from a neighbour’s house, no wailing car alarm, no flight-path thunder; just a silence disturbed instead by some bloody noisy birds. Ken didn’t really keep up with birds, but he knew there’d been some major species-shifts: far fewer sparrows and starlings than before – not that he missed either of them; the same for swallows and stuff like that; the opposite for magpies. He didn’t know what it meant, or what was the cause. Pollution, slug pellets, global warming? Maybe that sly old thing called evolution. There’d also been an increase in parrots – unless they were parakeets – in many of London’s parks. Some breeding pair had escaped and multiplied, managing to survive the mild English winters. Now they were screaming from the tops of plane trees; he’d even noticed one clamped to a neighbour’s bird-feeder.

‘Why are those birds so bloody noisy?’ He asked in a ruminative, fake-complaining way.

‘They’re blackbirds.’

‘Is that an answer to my question?’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Care to explain to a mere country lad? Why they need to be so bloody loud?’

‘It’s territorial.’

‘Can’t you be territorial without being noisy?’

‘Not if you’re a blackbird.’

‘Hmm.’

Still, he supposed, humans were territorial too, and had tools and machinery to make the noises for them. He’d repointed the brickwork where the mortar had crumbled away, and put up trellises which heightened the party walls. He’d fixed rustic, woven-wood partitions between the various sections of the garden. He’d even paid someone to lay a winding flagged path and run an electric cable to the place where, at the turn of a switch, water would gush over large oval stones imported from some distant Scottish beach.

Also that spring he improved the soil as and where indicated. He dug where Martha asked him to dig. He began what promised to be a long campaign against ground elder. He wondered if he loved Martha just as much as ever, or if he was merely performing a husbandly routine from which others were invited to deduce how much he loved her. He was informed that he was third in the queue for an allotment. He did vocal imitations of the experts on Gardeners’ Question Time until Martha told him it really wasn’t funny any more.

He was disturbed by a knocking close to his ear. He opened his eyes. Martha had wheeled her yellow plastic wagon, stacked to the gunnels, down to the car park.

‘I even tried you on your mobile…’

‘Sorry, love. Didn’t bring it. Miles away. Have you paid?’

Martha merely nodded. She wasn’t exactly cross. She half-expected his head to go AWOL as soon as they drew into a garden centre. Ken got out of the car and eagerly took over loading the boot. Nothing too herniating this time, anyway, he thought.

Martha considered barbecues a bit vulgar. She didn’t use the word, but didn’t need to. Ken liked nothing more than the smell of meat cooking over whitened coals. She liked neither the event nor the equipment. He had suggested getting one of those small numbers – what were they called? – yes, hibachis, and actually, weren’t they Japanese inventions, and therefore appropriate to this little plot of God’s earth? Martha was faintly amused by yet another of his Japanese jokes, but unpersuaded. Eventually she allowed the acquisition of a sleek little terracotta item shaped like a miniature barrel standing on end; it was some kind of ethnic oven on special offer from the Guardian. Ken had to promise never to use barbecue lighter fuel with it.

Now that summer had come, they were repaying hospitality received when the house had been in chaos. The sky was still light at eight when Marion and Alex and Nick and Anne arrived, but the day’s heat, never extreme to begin with, was already beginning to disappear. The two women guests immediately wished they’d worn tights and not overdone the summery look, thinking it unhostly of Martha to have knowingly dressed against the evening’s chill. But since they’d been invited to eat outside, eat outside was what they would do. There were jokes about mulled wine and the Blitz spirit, and Alex pretended to warm his hands on the terracotta oven, nearly knocking it over in the process.

While Ken fiddled with the chicken thighs, jabbing with a skewer to see if the juices ran clear, Martha gave their guests ‘the tour’. Since they were never more than a few yards away, Ken heard all the compliments to Martha’s ingenuity. Briefly, he found himself a disaffected teenager again, trying to assess the sincerity or hypocrisy of each speaker. Then his trellises were admired – praise he took as coming entirely from the heart. The next moment, he heard Martha explaining that the far end of the garden had been ‘just a mass of hideous brambles when we got here’.

The light was beginning to fade by the time they crouched over their pear, walnut and gorgonzola starter. Alex, who clearly hadn’t been paying attention during the tour, said, ‘Have you left a tap on somewhere?’

Ken looked at Martha but declined to take advantage. ‘It’s probably next door,’ he said. ‘Rather a shambolic household.’

Martha looked grateful, so Ken thought it would be OK to tell his story about the soil-testing kit. He span it out rather, elaborating his self-portrayal as mad chemist, and holding off the punchline as long as possible.

‘And then I came in and said to Martha, “Bad news, I’m afraid. There’s no soil in your soil.”’

There was a gratifying laugh. And Martha joined in; she knew that from now on this was going to be one of his stories.

Feeling himself in credit, Ken decided to light the garden candles, yard-high towers of wax which blazed away and made him think vaguely of Roman triumphs. He also took the opportunity to turn off what he would always, in his own mind, refer to as the water feature.

It was now on the colder side of chilly. Ken poured more red wine, and Martha offered a move indoors, which everyone politely refused.

‘Where’s all this global warming when you need it?’ asked Alex cheerily.

Then they talked about patio heaters – which really gave out a blast but were so unecological that it was antisocial to buy one – and carbon footprints, and the sustainability of fish stocks, and farmers’ markets, and electric cars versus biodiesel, and wind farms and solar heating. Ken heard a mosquito fizz warningly at his ear; he ignored it, and didn’t even wince when he felt it bite. He sat there and enjoyed being proved right.

‘I’ve got an allotment,’ he announced. The marital coward’s ploy of breaking news in front of friends. But Martha didn’t indicate either surprise or disappointment, merely joined in the raising of glasses to Ken’s laudable new hobby. He was asked about its cost and location, the condition of its soil, and what he intended to grow there.

‘Blackberries,’ said Martha before he could answer. She was smiling at him tenderly.

‘How did you guess?’

‘When I was sending off the Marshalls catalogue.’ She had asked him to confirm her arithmetic; not that she wasn’t competent to add up, but there were a lot of small sums often ending in 99p, and anyway, this was the sort of thing Ken did in their marriage. Like write the cheque too, which he had done after making a couple of additions to the order. Then he’d taken it back to Martha, because she was the Keeper of the Stamps in their marriage. ‘And I noticed you’d ordered two blackberry bushes. A variety called Loch Tay, I seem to remember.’

‘You’re a terror for names,’ he said, looking across at her. ‘A terror and a wiz.’

There was a short silence, as if something intimate had been mistakenly disclosed.

‘You know what we could plant on the allotment,’ Martha began.

‘What’s this we shit, Paleface?’ he responded before she could continue. It was one of their marital jokes, always had been; but one apparently unfamiliar to these particular friends, who couldn’t tell if this was a vestigial quarrel. Nor could he, for that matter; he often couldn’t nowadays.

As the silence continued, Marion said into it, ‘I don’t like to mention this, but the bugs are biting.’ She had one hand down by her ankle.

‘Our friends don’t like our garden!’ Ken shouted, in a voice intended to assure everyone that no quarrel was likely. But there was something hysterical in his tone, a signal for their guests to make sly marital eye contact, decline a range of teas and coffees, and prepare their final compliments.

Later, from the bathroom, he called, ‘Have we got some of that H^c45 stuff?’

‘Have you been bitten?’

He pointed to the side of his neck.

‘Christ, Ken, there are five of them. Didn’t you feel it?’

‘Yes, but I wasn’t going to say. I didn’t want anyone criticising your garden.’

‘Poor thing. Martyr. They must bite you because you’ve got sweet flesh. They leave me alone.’

In bed, too tired for reading or sex, they idly summarised the evening, each encouraging the other to the conclusion that it had been a success.

‘Oh bugger,’ he said. ‘I think I left a piece of chicken in the barrel thingy. Maybe I’d better go down and bring it in.’

‘Don’t bother,’ she said.

They slept late into Sunday morning, and when he drew the curtain a few inches to check the weather, he saw the terracotta oven on its side, the lid in two pieces.

‘Bloody foxes,’ he said quietly, not sure if Martha was awake or not. ‘Or bloody cats. Or bloody squirrels. Bloody nature anyway.’ He stood at the window, uncertain whether to get back into bed, or go downstairs and slowly start another day.

At Phil & Joanna’s 3: Look, No Hands

FOR ONCE, IT was warm enough to eat outside, around a table whose slatted top was beginning to buckle. Candles in tin lanterns had been lit from the start, and were now becoming useful. We had talked about Obama’s first hundred days and more, his abandonment of torture as an instrument of state, British complicity in extraterritorial rendition, bankers’ bonuses, and how long it would be to the next general election. We had tried comparing the threatened swine-flu outbreak to the avian flu that never arrived, but lacked anyone approaching an epidemiologist. Now, a silence fell.

‘I was thinking… last time we all foregathered -’

‘Before this groaning board -’

‘Set before us by – quick, give me some clichés…’

‘Mine host.’

‘A veritable Trimalchio.’

‘Mistress Quickly.’

‘No good. So – Phil and Joanna, let’s call them that, the epitomes of hostliness.’

‘That tongue, by the way…’

‘Was it tongue? You said it was beef.’

‘Well, it was. Tongue is beef. Ox tongue, calves’ tongue.’

‘But… but I don’t like tongue. It’s been in a dead cow’s mouth.’

‘And last time we were here, you were telling us about sending valentines, you two… married turtle doves. And about the friend of yours who was going to have her stomach stapled for when her husband came home.’

‘It was liposuction, actually.’

‘And someone asked, was that love or vanity?’

‘Female insecurity, I think was the alternative.’

‘Point of information. Was this before her bloke had his radical testoctomy or whatever it’s called?’

‘Oh, ages before. And anyway, she didn’t have it done.’

‘Didn’t she?’

‘I thought I told you that.’

‘But we talked about – what was that phrase of Dick’s? – posterior intromission.’

‘Well, she didn’t have it done. I’m sure I said.’

‘And – to return to my point – someone asked if any of us felt up to making love after getting home from here.’

‘A question which went very largely unanswered.’

‘Is that where you’re taking us, David, with this Socratic preface?’

‘No. Maybe yes. No, not exactly.’

‘Lead on, Macduff.’

‘This feels to me like when you have a collection of blokes round a table and someone mentions how the size of your tackle is directly related… Dick, why are you putting your hands out of sight?’

‘Because I know the end of the sentence. And because, frankly, I don’t want to embarrass anyone by obliging them to deduce the magnificence of my, as you put it, tackle.’

‘Sue, a question. The class has in its last lesson been taught the difference between a simile and a metaphor. Now, which grammatical term would you say best described the comparison between the size of a man’s hands and the size of his tackle?’

‘Is there a grammatical term called boasting?’

‘There’s that term for comparing the smaller to the greater. The part to the whole. Litotes? Hendiadys? Anacoluthon?’

‘They all sound like Greek holiday resorts to me.’

‘As I was trying to say, we don’t talk about love.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…’

‘So that’s my point.’

‘A friend of mine once said he didn’t think it was possible to be happy for longer than two weeks at any one stretch.’

‘Who was this miserable bastard?’

‘A friend of mine.’

‘Very suspicious.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, a friend of mine – anyone remember Matthew? Yes, no? He was a great coureur de femmes.’

‘Translation, please.’

‘Oh, he fucked for England. Amazing energy. And constant… interest. Anyway, there was a time when – how shall I put this – well, when women started using their hands, their fingers, on themselves while they were having sex.’

‘When exactly would you date this to?’

‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP?’

‘No, since you ask. Later. Seventies, more like…’

‘And Matthew noticed this… sociodigital change sooner than most, being more diligent in the fieldwork, and he decided to raise it with a woman he knew – not a girlfriend or an ex, but someone he could always talk to. A confidante. And so, over a drink, he said to her casually, “A friend of mine told me the other day that he’d noticed women using their hands more when having sex.” And this woman replied, “Well, your friend must have a really small dick. Or not be much good at using it.”’

‘Collapse of stout party, eh?’

‘He died. Youngish. Brain tumour.’

‘A friend of mine -’

‘Is that “a friend of mine” or “a friend of mine”?’

‘Will. Remember him? He got cancer. He was a great drinker, a great smoker and a great womaniser. And I remember where the cancer had reached by the time they discovered it: liver, lungs, urethra.’

‘The grammatical term for that is: poetic justice.’

‘But it was weird, wasn’t it?’

‘Are you saying Matthew died of a brain tumour because he fucked a lot? How does that work?’

‘Maybe he had sex on the brain.’

‘The worst place to have it, as one sage remarked.’

‘Love.’

‘Bless you. Gesundheit.’

‘I read somewhere that in France, when a chap’s flies were undone, another chap’s polite way of drawing attention to it was to say, “Vive l’Empereur.” Not that I’ve ever heard anyone say it. Or really understood it.’

‘Maybe the end of your knob is meant to look like the top of Napoleon’s head.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Or that hat he always wears in cartoons.’

‘I hate that word “knob”. I hate it even more as a verb than a noun. “He knobbed her.” Eurch.’

‘Love.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘…’

‘Good. I’m glad I’ve got your attention. It’s what we don’t talk about. Love.’

‘Whoa. Steady on, old chap. Mustn’t frighten the horses and all that.’

‘Larry will bear me out. As our resident alien.’

‘You know, when I first came over here, the things I noticed most were how you were always making jokes, and how often you use the C-word.’

‘Don’t you use the C-word in America?’

‘I guess we certainly avoid it in the presence of women.’

‘How very peculiar. And richly ironic, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘But Larry, you prove my point. We make jokes instead of being serious, and we talk about sex instead of talking about love.’

‘I think jokes are a good way of being serious. Often the best way.’

‘Only an Englishman would think that, or say that.’

‘Are you wanting me to apologise for being English, or something?’

‘Don’t get so defensive.’

‘Are you calling me a cunt by any chance?’

‘Men talk about sex, women talk about love.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘Well, why hasn’t a woman spoken in the last however many minutes?’

‘I was wondering if the size of a woman’s hands was related to the amount she has to use them in bed with her husband.’

‘Dick, shut the fuck up.’

‘Boys. Shh. Neighbours. Voices carry much more at this time of night.’

‘Joanna, tell us what you think.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I asked.’

‘Very well. I don’t think there was a time – not in my life, anyway – when men and women sat around in a group talking about love. It’s true we talk about sex a lot more – or rather, we listen to you talk about sex a lot more. I also think – well, it’s practically a cliché now – that if women knew how men talked about them behind their backs they wouldn’t find it very elevating. And if men knew how women talked about them behind their backs -’

‘It’d be dick-shrivelling.’

‘Women can fake it, men can’t. It’s the law of the jungle.’

‘The law of the jungle is rape, not faked orgasm.’

‘A human being is the only creature which can reflect upon its own existence, conceive of its own death, and fake orgasm. We’re not God’s special ones for nothing.’

‘A man can fake orgasm.’

‘Really? Willing to share the secret?’

‘A woman doesn’t always know if a man has come. From internal feeling, I mean.’

‘That’s another hands-under-the-table moment.’

‘Well, a man can’t fake erection, anyway.’

‘The cock never lies.’

‘The sun also rises.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘Oh, both sound like book titles. Only one is.’

‘Actually, the cock does lie.’

‘Are we sure we want to go there?’

‘First-night nerves. It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s just that your cock lets you down. It lies.’

‘Love.’

‘An old friend of ours – she’s a New Yorker – worked as a lawyer for years and years – decided to retrain by going to film school. She was in her fifties already. And she found herself surrounded by kids thirty years younger than her. And she used to listen to them, and sometimes they confided in her about their lives, and you know what she concluded? That they didn’t think twice about going to bed with someone, but they were really, really scared of getting close, or of anyone getting close to them.’

‘The point being?’

‘They were afraid of love. Afraid of… dependency. Or having someone dependent on them. Or both.’

‘Afraid of pain.’

‘Afraid of anything that would interfere with their careers, more like. You know, New York…’

‘Maybe. But I think Sue’s right. Afraid of pain.’

‘Last time – or the time before – someone was asking if there was cancer of the heart. Of course there is. And it’s called love.’

‘Do I hear distant drums and ape-calls?’

‘My condolences to your spouse.’

‘Come on. Stop being facetious. Stop thinking about who you’re married to or who you’re sitting next to. Think about what love’s been like in your life, and think about it in other people’s lives.’

‘And?’

‘Pain.’

‘No gain without pain, as they say.’

‘I’ve known pain where there’s no gain. In most cases, actually. “Suffering ennobles” – I’ve always known that was a moralistic lie. Suffering diminishes the individual. Pain degrades.’

‘Well, I’ve been hurt – I am in pain – because last time we were here I was telling you in a very discreet way about my home bum-cancer screening…’

‘Which you said you did on St Valentine’s Day.’

‘And no bugger or C-word here has actually had the courtesy to enquire if I got the result.’

‘Dick, did you get the result?’

‘Yes, a letter from someone whose job title beneath the illegible signature was, if you can credit it, Hub Director.’

‘We won’t go there.’

‘And he was writing to say that my result was normal.’

‘A-ha.’

‘That’s great, Dick.’

‘And then – new paragraph – the letter went on to say, and I quote from memory – though, what else might one quote from? – that, quote, no screening test is one hundred per cent accurate, so a normal result does not guarantee that you do not have, or will never develop, bowel cancer.’

‘Well, they couldn’t guarantee, could they?’

‘It’s all about getting sued.’

‘Everything’s about getting sued nowadays.’

‘Hence, for example, the prenup – to get us back on track a bit. Larry, would you say the prenup is a proof of love or of insecurity?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve never signed one. I guess it’s usually lawyers protecting family money. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with how you feel, it’s just social protocol. Like pretending you believe all the words of the marriage service.’

‘I did. Every single one.’

‘“With my body I thee roger” – ah, now that takes me back. Oh dear, Joanna’s looking a little balefully at me again.’

‘Cancer of the heart, not the bum, is the topic.’

‘You’re maintaining Love is Pain, are you, Joanna?’

‘No. I’m just thinking of a few people – men, yes they are all men, actually – who’ve never been hurt by love. Who are, in fact, incapable of being hurt by love. Who set up a system of evasion and control that guarantees they’ll never get hurt.’

‘Is that so unreasonable? It sounds like the emotional equivalent of a prenup.’

‘It may be reasonable, but that confirms my point. Some men can do the whole thing – sex, marriage, fatherhood, companionship – and not feel any real pain. Frustration, embarrassment, boredom, anger… and that’s it. Their idea of pain is when a woman doesn’t repay dinner with sex.’

‘Who said men were more cynical than women?’

‘I’m not being cynical. We can all name a couple of people like that.’

‘You mean you’re not in love unless you’re in pain?’

‘Of course I don’t mean that. I just mean that, well, it’s like jealousy. Love can’t exist without the possibility of jealousy. If you’re lucky, you may never feel it, but if the possibility, the capacity to feel it, isn’t there, then you aren’t in love. And it’s the same with pain.’

‘So Dick wasn’t off the point after all?’

‘…?’

‘Well, he doesn’t have bum cancer, except there’s a possibility he might, either now or in the future.’

‘Thank you. Vindicated. I knew I knew what I was really talking about.’

‘You and the Hub Director.’

‘You’re talking about Pete, aren’t you?’

‘Who’s Pete? The Hub Director?’

‘No, Pete’s the no-pain guy.’

‘Pete’s one of those counters. You know, how many women. He could name the day he hit double figures, name the day it was fifty.’

‘Well, we’re all counters.’

‘Are we?’

‘Yes, I remember very well getting to two.’

‘There were quite a lot of halves with me, if you know what I mean.’

‘All too well. Now there’s pain for you.’

‘No, that’s what Pete would call pain. It’s just hurt pride. He does hurt pride and high anxiety. That’s as close as he gets to pain.’

‘Sensible guy. What’s not to like? Did he ever marry?’

‘Twice. Out of both of them now.’

‘And?’

‘Embarrassment, a certain self-pity, weariness. But nothing stronger.’

‘So according to you he’s never loved?’

‘Indeed.’

‘But he wouldn’t say that. He’d say he’d been in love. More than once.’

‘Yes, he’d probably say dozens of times.’

‘“It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.”’

‘I’ll never live down saying that, will I?’

‘Well, maybe it’s good enough.’

‘What is?’

‘To believe you’ve been in love, or are in love. Isn’t that just as good?’

‘Not if it isn’t true.’

‘Hang on. Isn’t there a bit of rank-pulling going on here? “Only we’ve been in love because only we’ve suffered.”’

‘I wasn’t saying that.’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘Do you think women love more than men?’

‘More – in the sense of more often or more intensely?’

‘Only a man could ask that question.’

‘Well, that’s what I am – a poor fucking man.’

‘Not after dinner at Phil and Joanna’s, you aren’t. As we noted.’

‘Did we?’

‘Oh God, I hope you’re not going to make us all go home and try to get it on to prove -’

‘I hate “get it on” as well.’

‘I remember one of those American TV shows – you know, we solve your emotional and sexual problems by putting you in front of a studio audience and making a spectacle out of you, and sending the audience home feeling very glad they aren’t you.’

‘That’s an extremely British denunciation.’

‘Well, I remain British. Anyway, there was this woman, talking about how her marriage or relationship wasn’t working, and of course they got on to sex right away, and one of the so-called experts, some glib TV counsellor, actually asked her, “Do you have big orgasms?”’

‘Ker-pow. Straight for the G-spot.’

‘And she looked at this therapist, and said, with actually rather a fetching modesty, “Well, they seem big to me.”’

‘Bravo. And so say all of us.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying we shouldn’t necessarily feel superior to Pete.’

‘Do we? I don’t. And if he’s passed the fifty mark, I doff my cap.’

‘Do you think Pete gets off with women because he can’t get on with them?’

‘No, I just think he has a low boredom threshold.’

‘If you’re in love, you don’t have a boredom threshold.’

‘I think you can be in love and bored.’

‘Do I fear another hands-under-the-table moment?’

‘Don’t be so defensive.’

‘Well, I am. I come here to gorge myself on your delicious food and wine, not to be water-boarded like this.’

‘Sing for your supper.’

‘“And you’ll get breakfast…”’

‘What I’m saying, in defence of this Pete whom I’ve never met, is merely, perhaps he’s loved, or been in love, as much as his constitution allows, and why feel superior to him just because of that?’

‘There are some people who wouldn’t fall in love if they hadn’t read about it first.’

‘Spare us your Froggy wisdom for one night.’

‘Is it safe to take our hands out from under the table now?’

‘It’s never safe. That’s the whole point.’

‘What is the point, by the way?’

‘Let me summarise. For those unable to keep up. This house is agreed that the British use the C-word far too liberally, that men talk about sex because they can’t talk about love, that women and the Frogs understand love better than Englishmen, that love is pain, and that any man who’s had more women than me, apart from being a lucky cunt, doesn’t really understand women.’

‘Brilliant, Dick. I second the motion.’

‘You second Dick’s motion? You must be the Hub Director.’

‘Oh, shut up, boys. I thought that was a very male summary.’

‘Would you like to give us a female summary?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Are you implying that summarising is a contemptible male trait?’

‘Not especially. Though my summary might mention how passive-aggressive men get when talking about subjects which make them feel unsure of themselves.’

‘“Passive-aggressive”. I hate that word, or phrase, or whatever it is. I would guess it has a ninety to ninety-five per cent female use. I don’t even know what it means. Or rather, what it’s meant to mean.’

‘What did we say before we said “passive-aggressive”?’

‘How about “well mannered”?’

‘“Passive-aggressive” indicates a psychological condition.’

‘So does “well mannered”. And a very healthy one too.’

‘Does anyone seriously think – if we were to pass the metaphorical port at this stage and the ladies were to retire – that they’d sit around talking about love and we’d sit around talking about sex?’

‘When I was a boy, before I knew anything about girls, I used to look forward to them equally.’

‘You mean, boys and girls?’

‘Cunt. No, love and sex.’

‘Voices. Keep them down.’

‘Is there anything to match that, do you think, in the field of human emotional endeavour? The force of longing for sex and love when you haven’t had either?’

‘I remember it all too well. Life just seemed… impossible. Now that was pain.’

‘And yet it didn’t turn out so badly. We’ve all had love and sex, sometimes even at the same time.’

‘And now we’re going to put on our coats and go home and have one or the other and next time there will be a show of hands.’

‘Or a hiding of hands.’

‘Boys never stop being boys, do they?’

‘Does that qualify as passive-aggressive?’

‘I can do active-aggressive if you’d prefer.’

‘Leave it, sweetie.’

‘You know, this is one evening when I don’t want to be the first to go.’

‘Let’s all go together, then Phil and Joanna can discuss us while they clear up.’

‘Actually, we don’t do that.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No, we have a ritual. Phil clears, I stack the dishwasher. We put on some music. I wash up the stuff that won’t go in the dishwasher, Phil dries. We don’t discuss you.’

‘What charming hosts. A veritable Trimalchio and Mistress Quickly.’

‘What Jo means is, we’re all talked out. We discuss you tomorrow, over breakfast. And lunch. And, in this instance, probably dinner as well.’

‘Phil, you old bastard.’

‘I trust no one’s driving.’

‘I don’t trust anyone’s driving either. Only my own.’

‘You’re not really?’

‘I’m not a complete idiot. We’re all walking or cabbing it.’

‘Actually, we’re going to stand on the pavement discussing you two for a while.’

‘Was that really tongue, by the way?’

‘Sure.’

‘But I don’t like tongue.’

After he had closed the front door, Phil put on some Madeleine Peyroux, kissed his wife on the apron string round the back of her neck, went upstairs to a darkened bedroom, cautiously approached the window, saw the others standing on the pavement, and watched them until they dispersed.

Trespass

WHEN HE AND Cath broke up, he thought about joining the Ramblers, but it seemed too obviously sad a thing to do. He imagined the conversation:

‘Hi, Geoff. Sorry to hear about you and Cath. How’re you doing?’

‘Oh, fine, thanks. I’ve joined the Ramblers.’

‘Good move.’

He could see the rest of it too: getting the magazine, studying the open-to-all invitation – meet 10.30, Saturday 12th, in car park immed. SE of Methodist Chapel – cleaning his boots the night before, cutting an extra sandwich just in case, maybe taking an extra tangerine as well, and turning up at the car park with (despite all his warnings to himself) a hopeful heart. A hopeful heart waiting to be bruised. And then it would be a case of getting through the walk, saying cheery farewells, and going home to eat the leftover sandwich and tangerine for his supper. Now that would be sad.

Of course, he carried on walking. Most weekends, in most weathers, he’d be out with his boots and pack, his water bottle and his map. Nor was he going to keep away from all the walks he’d done with Cath. They weren’t ‘their’ walks, after all; and if they were, he’d be reclaiming them by doing them by himself. She didn’t own the circuit from Calver: along the Derwent, through Froggatt Woods to Grindleford, perhaps a diversion to the Grouse Inn for lunch, then along past the Bronze Age stone circle, lost in summer months amid the bracken, all leading to the grand surprise of Curbar Edge. She didn’t own that, nobody did.

Afterwards, he made a note in his walking log. 2 hrs 45 mns. With Cath it used to take 3 hrs 30 mns, and an extra 30 mns if they went to the Grouse for a sandwich. That was one of the things about being single again: you saved time. You walked quicker, you got home and drank a beer quicker, you ate your supper quicker. And then the sex you had with yourself, that was quicker too. You gained all this extra time, Geoff thought – extra time in which to be lonely. Stop that, he said to himself. You aren’t allowed to be a sad person; you’re only allowed to be sad.

‘I thought we were going to get married.’

‘That’s why we aren’t,’ Cath had replied.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Will you please explain?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that’s the whole point. If you can’t see, if I have to explain – that’s why we’re not getting married.’

‘You’re not being logical.’

‘I’m also not getting married.’

Forget it, forget it, it’s gone. On the one hand, she liked you making the decisions; on the other hand, she found you controlling. On the one hand, she liked living with you; on the other, she didn’t wan’t to go on living with you. On the one hand, she knew you’d be a good father; on the other, she didn’t want to have your children. Logic, right? Forget it.

‘Hello.’ He surprised himself. He didn’t say hello to women he didn’t know in the lunch queue. He only said hello to women he didn’t know on walking paths, when you got a nod or a smile or a lifted trekking pole in reply. But – actually, he did know her.

‘You’re from the bank.’

‘Right.’

‘Lynn.’

‘Very good.’

A small moment of genius, remembering her plastic name-tag through the bullet-proof glass. And she was having the vegetarian lasagne as well. Did she mind…? No, fine. There was only one free table. And it was just sort of easy. He knew she worked in the bank, she knew he taught at the school. She’d moved to the town a couple of months previously, and no, she hadn’t been up to the Tor yet. Would she be OK in trainers?

The next Saturday she wore jeans and a sweater; she seemed half-amused, half-alarmed as he got his boots and pack out of the car and pulled on his scarlet mesh-lined Gore-tex jacket.

‘You’ll need water.’

‘Will I?’

‘Unless you don’t mind sharing.’

She nodded; they set off. As they climbed out of the town, the view broadened to include both her bank and his school. He let her set the pace. She walked easily. He wanted to ask how old she was, whether she went to the gym, and say how she looked taller than when sitting down behind the glass. Instead, he pointed out the ruins of an old slate-works and the rare breed of sheep – Jacobs, were they? – that Jim Henderson had been farming since people down south started wanting lamb that didn’t taste like lamb, and were happy to pay for it.

Halfway up it began to drizzle, and he grew anxious about her trainers on the wet shale near the top. He stopped, unzipped his pack, and gave her a spare waterproof. She took it as if it was quite normal that he’d brought it. He liked that. She also didn’t ask whose it was, who’d left it behind.

He passed her the water bottle; she drank and wiped the rim.

‘What else have you got in there?’

‘Sandwiches, tangerines. Unless you want to turn back.’

‘As long as you haven’t got a pair of those awful plastic trousers.’

‘No.’

He did, of course. And not just his own, but a pair of Cath’s he’d brought for her. Something in him, something bold and timid at the same time, wanted to say, ‘Actually, I’m wearing North Cape Coolmax boxers with the single-button fly.’

After they started sleeping together, he took her to The Great Outdoors. They got her boots – a pair of Brasher Supalites – and, as she stood up in them, walked tentatively to a mirror and back, then did a little tap dance, he thought how incredibly sexy small female feet could look in walking boots. They got her three pairs of ergonomic trekking socks designed to absorb pressure peaks, and she widened her eyes at the idea of socks having a left and a right like shoes. Three pairs of inner socks too. They got her a day-pack, or a day-sack, as the hunky assistant preferred to call it, by which point Geoff felt the fellow beginning to get out of line. He’d shown Lynn how to position the hip belt, tighten the shoulder straps and adjust the top tensioners; now he was patting the pack and juggling it up and down in far too intimate a way.

‘And a water bottle,’ Geoff said firmly, to cut all that off.

They got her a waterproof jacket in a dark green that set off the flame of her hair; then he waited and let Hunk suggest waterproof trousers and get laughed at in reply. At the cash desk he handed over his credit card.

‘No, you can’t.’

‘I’d like to. I’d really like to.’

‘But why?’

‘I’d like to. Must be your birthday soon. Well, some time in the next twelve months. Got to be.’

‘Thank you,’ Lynn said, but he could tell she was a bit edgy about it. ‘Will you wrap them up again for my birthday?’

‘I’ll do more than that. I’ll clean your Brashers specially. Oh yes,’ he said to the cashier, ‘and we’d better have some polish. Classic Brown, please.’

Before they went walking next, he dubbined her boots to make the leather supple and strengthen the waterproofing. As he slipped his hand inside the fresh-smelling Brashers, he noted again, as he had in the shop, that she took half a size smaller than Cath. Half a size? It felt like a full size to him.

They did Hathersage and Padley Chapel; Calke Abbey and Staunton Harold; Dove Dale as it narrows and deepens to Milldale; Lathkill Dale from Alport to Ricklow Quarry; Cromford Canal and the High Peak Trail. They climbed out of Hope to Lose Hill, then along what he promised her was the most scenic ridge walk in the entire Peak District, until they came to Mam Tor, where the paragliders gathered: huge men who sweated up the hill with vast packs on their backs, then spread out their canopies like laundry on the grassy slope and waited for the upcurrent to lift them off their feet and into the sky.

‘Isn’t that thrilling,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to do that?’

Geoff thought of men in hospital wards with broken backs, of paraplegics and quadriplegics. He thought of mid-air collisions with light aircraft. He thought of not being able to control the wind and getting carried higher and higher into the cloud, of coming down in unknown landscape, of getting lost and scared and peeing yourself. Of not having your boots on a path and a map in your hand.

‘Sort of,’ he replied.

For him, freedom lay on the ground. He told her about the trespass on Kinder Scout in the 1930s: how walkers and hikers had come out from Manchester in their hundreds to the Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moors to protest against lack of access to the countryside; how it had been a peaceful day except when a drunken gamekeeper shot himself with his own gun; how the trespass had led to the creation of national parks and registered rights of way; and how the man who’d led it had died recently, but there was still one survivor, now 103, living in a Methodist old people’s home not far away. Geoff thought his story soared better than any bloody paraglider.

‘They just went trampling across his land like that?’

‘Not trampling. Tramping, perhaps.’ Geoff was pleased with this emendation.

‘But it was his land?’

‘Technically, yes. Historically, perhaps not.’

‘Are you a socialist?’

‘I’m in favour of the right to roam,’ he said cautiously. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong now.

‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t mind. Either way.’

‘What are you?’

‘I don’t vote.’

Emboldened, he said, ‘I’m Labour.’

‘I thought you would be.’

In his walking log, he noted the routes they took, the date, the weather, the duration, ending with an L in red for Lynn. As opposed to a blue C for Cath. Times were about the same, regardless of the initial.

Should he get her a trekking pole? He didn’t want to push it – she’d refused all offers of a walking hat, despite having the pros and cons explained to her. Not that there were any cons. Still, better a bare head than a baseball cap. He really couldn’t take a walker in a baseball cap seriously, male or female.

He could get her a compass. Except he already had one himself, and rarely consulted it. If ever he broke his ankle, and had to tell her through the pain to set off across the moor using that tumbledown sheepfold as a reference point and keep heading NNE – showing her how to turn the instrument and set a course – then she could have his for the purpose. No, one compass between two, that was right, somehow. Symbolic, you could say.

They did the Kinder Downfall circuit: Bowden Bridge car park, the reservoir, pick up the Pennine Way to the Downfall, fork right at Red Brook and down past Tunstead House and the Kinderstones. He told her about the average rainfall, and how when it froze the Downfall turned into a cascade of icicles. One of the sights for the winter walker.

She didn’t answer. Well, anyway, they’d have to get her a fleece if they were going up two thousand feet in winter. He still had the issue of Country Walking with the fleece test in it.

In the car park he looked at his watch.

‘Are we late for something?’

‘No, just checking. Four and a quarter.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘It’s good because I’m with you.’

It was also good because four and a quarter is what it used to take him and Cath, and say what you will, Cath was one pretty fit walker.

Lynn lit a Silk Cut, as she did at the end of every walk. She didn’t smoke much, and he didn’t really mind, even if he thought it was a pretty stupid habit. Just when she’d done her cardiovascular system a power of good… Still, he knew from being a teacher that there were times when you had to confront, and times when you took a less direct route.

‘We could go up again after Christmas. In the New Year.’ Yes, he could get her the fleece as her present.

She looked at him, and took a deep puff on her cigarette.

‘If the weather got cold enough, that is. For the icicles.’

‘Geoff,’ she said. ‘You’re on my space.’

‘I just -’

‘You’re on my space.’

‘Yes, Miss Duke of Devonshire.’

But she didn’t think that was funny, and they drove home mainly in silence. Perhaps he’d walked her too hard. It was a bit of a stiff pull, a thousand feet or more.

He’d put the pizzas in the oven, laid the table, and was just pulling the tab on his first beer when she said,

‘Look, it’s June. We met in – February?’

‘Jan 29,’ he replied, automatically, as he did when a pupil mistakenly guessed 1079 for the Battle of Hastings.

‘January the 29th,’ she repeated. ‘Look, I don’t think I can do Christmas.’

‘Of course. You’ve got family.’

‘No, I don’t mean I’ve got family. Of course I’ve got family. I mean, I can’t do Christmas.’

When Geoff was faced with what, despite principled beliefs to the contrary, he nonetheless could only regard as gross female illogicality, he tended to go silent. One minute you were steaming along a track, the weight on your shoulders barely noticeable, and then suddenly you were in a pathless scrubland with no waymarks, the mist descending and the ground boggy beneath your feet.

But she didn’t go on, so he tried helping her. ‘Don’t much like Christmas myself. All that eating and drinking. Still -’

‘Who knows where I’ll be at Christmas.’

‘You mean, the bank might transfer you?’ He hadn’t thought of that.

‘Geoff, listen. We met in January, as you pointed out. Things are… fine. I’m having a nice time, a nice enough time…’

‘Gotcha. Right.’ It was that stuff again, that stuff he didn’t seem to be getting any better at. ‘No, course not. Didn’t mean. Anyway, I’ll turn the oven up. Crispy base.’ He took a swig of his beer.

‘It’s just -’

‘Don’t say it. I know. I get you.’ He was going to add ‘Miss Duke of Devonshire’ again, but he didn’t, and later, thinking it over, he guessed it wouldn’t have helped.

In September, he persuaded her to take a day’s leave so they could do the circuit from Calver. It was best to avoid the weekend, when every hiker and rock climber would be crawling over Curbar Edge.

They parked in the cul-de-sac next to the Bridge Inn and set off, passing Calver Mill on the other side of the Derwent.

‘Richard Arkwright is supposed to have built that,’ he said. ‘1785, I think.’

‘It’s not a mill any more.’

‘No, well, as you see. Offices. Maybe residential. Or a bit of both.’

They followed the river, past the thrashing weir, through Froggatt and then Froggatt Woods to Grindleford. As they came out of the woods, the autumn sun, though weak, made him glad of his hat. Lynn still refused to buy one, and he supposed he wouldn’t mention it again until the spring. She’d taken a tan these summer months, and her freckles showed more than when he’d first met her.

There was a sharp climb out of Grindleford, which she took without a murmur; then he led the way across a field to the Grouse Inn. They sat up at the bar for a sandwich. Afterwards, the barman muttered, ‘Coffee?’ She said ‘Yes’ and he said ‘No.’ He didn’t believe in coffee on a walk. You just needed water against dehydration. Coffee was a stimulant and the whole… theory was that the walk should be stimulating enough without any assistance. Alcohol: stupid. He’d even come across hikers smoking joints.

He told her some of this, which may have been a mistake, because she said, ‘I’m only having a coffee, right?’ – and then lit up a Silk Cut. Not waiting till the end of the walk. She looked at him.

‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You don’t need to.’

Geoff sighed. ‘I forgot to point out the signpost as we got to Grindleford. It’s antique. Nearly a hundred years old. Not many left in the Peak District.’

She blew smoke at him, rather deliberately, it seemed.

‘And, all right, I also read somewhere that low-tar cigarettes are in fact just as bad for you because they make you inhale more deeply to get the nicotine, so actually you’re taking more of the toxins into your lungs.’

‘Then I may as well switch back to Marlboro Lights.’

They retraced their steps, picked up the path again, crossed a road and took a left by the sign for the Eastern Moors Estate.

‘Is this where the Bronze Age circle is?’

‘I think so.’

‘What does that mean?’

Fair enough. But also, there’s no point in not being yourself, is there? He was thirty-one, he had his opinions, he knew stuff.

‘The circle is coming up on the left-hand side. But I don’t think we should look at it this time.’

‘This time?’

‘It’s in the bracken.’

‘You mean you can’t see it properly.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Well, yes, you do see it better at other times of the year. What I mean is that between August and October it’s inadvisable to walk in bracken. Or downwind of it, for that matter.’

‘You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?’

‘Since you ask. If you walk in bracken for ten minutes, you’re liable to ingest anything up to fifty thousand spores. They’re too large to go into your lungs, so they go into your stomach. Tests have found them to be carcinogenic to animals.’

‘Lucky cows don’t smoke as well.’

‘There are also ticks that transmit Lyme disease, which…’

‘So?’

‘So if you have to walk in bracken, you tuck your trousers into your socks, roll your sleeves down, and wear a face mask.’

‘A face mask?’

‘Respro make one.’ Well, she’d asked, and she was getting the bloody answer. ‘It’s called the Respro Bandit face scarf.’

When she was sure he’d finished, she said, ‘Thank you. Now lend me your handkerchief.’

She tucked her trousers in, rolled her sleeves down, tied his hankie bandit-style around her face, and tramped off into the bracken. He waited upwind. Another thing you could do was get some Bug Proof, and put it on your trousers and socks. It killed the ticks on contact. Not that he’d tried it. Yet.

When she returned they set off in silence along the gritstone edge which was either called Froggatt Edge or Curbar Edge, or both, he didn’t care either way for the moment. The turf was springy up here, and reached right to the point where the ground dropped away sheer for what looked like several hundred feet. It was always a surprise: without any sense of having climbed much, you found yourself startlingly high, miles above the sunlit valley with its tiny villages. You didn’t need to be a bloody paraglider to get a view like this. There had been quarries around here, from which many of the country’s millstones came. But he didn’t tell her that.

He loved this spot. The first time he came here, he was looking down at the valley, no one visible for miles, and all of a sudden a helmeted face popped up at his feet, and a bearded climber was hauling himself from nowhere up on to the turf. Life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Edge climbers, potholers, paragliders. People thought that if you were up in the air, you were as free as a bloody bird. Well, you weren’t. There were rules there too, like everywhere. Lynn, in his opinion, was standing too close to the edge.

Geoff didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for that matter, feel anything. Puzzled, of course, but that would pass. He set off again, unconcerned whether she was following or not. Another half-mile of this high upland, then a sharpish descent back to Calver. He had begun thinking about next week’s work when he heard her scream.

He ran back, his pack thumping, the water in his bottle audibly sloshing.

‘Christ, are you OK? Is it your foot? I should have told you about the rabbit holes.’

But she just looked at him, expressionlessly. In shock, probably.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’

‘Did you twist your ankle?’

‘No.’

He looked down at her Brasher Supalites: bracken caught in the eyelets, and the morning’s shine gone from them. ‘Sorry – don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you screamed.’

‘Because I felt like it.’

Ah, missing waymarks again. ‘And… why did you feel like it?’

‘Because I did.’

No, he must have misheard, or misunderstood, or something. ‘Look, sorry, maybe I walked you too hard -’

‘I’m fine, I said.’

‘Was it because -’

‘I told you, I felt like it.’

They walked away from the gritstone edge and then down, in silence, to where they’d left the car. As he began unlacing his boots, she lit a cigarette. Well, he was sorry, but he was going to get to the bottom of it.

‘Was it something to do with me?’

‘No, it was something to do with me. I’m the one who screamed.’

‘Do you feel like doing it again? Now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, if you felt like screaming again, now, what would it feel like?’

‘Geoff, it would feel like wanting to scream again, now.’

‘And when do you think you’ll do it again?’

She didn’t answer that, and neither of them was surprised. She stamped out her Silk Cut beneath a Supalite, and began to undo the laces, flicking bits of bracken on to the tarmac.

‘4 hrs inc lunch Grouse,’ he wrote in his walking log. ‘Weather fine.’ He added a red L in the final column, beneath a constant vertical of red Ls. In bed, that night, he slept diagonally, and jolly good luck to him, he thought. The next morning, over breakfast, he leafed through a copy of Country Walking and filled out the application form to join the Ramblers. It said he could pay either by cheque or direct debit. He thought about this for a while, and chose direct debit.

At Phil & Joanna’s 4: One in Five

IT WAS LATE October, but Phil was determined to light a fire with some apple logs they’d brought back from the country. The chimney, rarely used, didn’t draw fully, and from time to time aromatic smoke drifted back into the room. We had talked yet again about bankers’ bonuses and Obama’s continuing troubles, and the fact that the Mayor of London didn’t seem to have decommissioned any bendy buses, so were almost relieved to get on to the subject of Joanna’s new maplewood work surface.

‘No, it’s good-looking and really hard-wearing.’

‘Like the rest of us.’

‘Do you have to oil it a lot?’

‘There’s a formula: once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year, and thereafter whenever you feel like it.’

‘Sounds like the formula for married sex.’

‘Dick, you beast.’

‘No wonder you got married so often, my friend.’

‘Which reminds me -’

‘Don’t you think those are the three most sinister words in the English language – “Which reminds me”?’

‘… are we going to report on the homework we were set last time?’

‘Homework?’

‘Whether you made the beast with two backs when you got home.’

‘Were we meant to? I don’t remember.’

‘Oh, let’s skip this.’

‘Yes, do you mind if we have a moratorium on sex-talk just for one evening?’

‘Only if you first answer the following question. Do you think – present company excepted – that people lie more about sex than about anything else?’

‘Is that supposed to be the case?’

‘There’s good anecdotal evidence, I’d say.’

‘And, I think, scientific evidence.’

‘You mean, people admitting to social surveys that they’d lied about sex in previous surveys?’

‘There’s no one else present, after all.’

‘Not unless you go dogging.’

‘Dogging?’

‘Don’t you have that in the States, Larry? A couple doing it in the car in a lay-by or somewhere public, so that other people can creep up and watch. It’s an old English custom, like morris dancing.’

‘Well, maybe in West Virginia…’

‘OK, that’s enough, boys.’

‘The wider point is, how would we know if they were telling the truth?’

‘How do we know anything’s true?’

‘Is that a high-philosophical question?’

‘More a low-practical one. In general. How do we know exactly? I remember some intellectual on the radio discussing the start of the Second World War, and coming to the conclusion that all you could say for certain was, “Something happened.” I was very struck by that.’

‘Oh, come on. We’ll be in Did Six Million Die? territory at this rate. Or, the moon-landing shots were faked because of that supposedly impossible shadow. Or, 9/11 was planned by the Bush administration.’

‘Well, only fascists question the first and only nutters believe the second.’

‘And the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have been planned by the Bush administration because they didn’t go wrong.’

‘Larry goes native – a joke, and a cynical one at that. Congratulations.’

‘When in Rome…’

‘No, what I’m talking about is why we, as non-fascist non-nutters, believe what we believe.’

‘Believe what?’

‘Anything from two plus two equals four to God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.’

‘But we don’t believe all’s right with the world or that God’s in his heaven. On the contrary.’

‘Then why do we believe the contrary?’

‘Either because we’ve worked it out for ourselves or because experts tell us it’s the case.’

‘But why do we believe the experts we believe?’

‘Because we trust them.’

‘Why do we trust them?’

‘Well, I trust Galileo more than the Pope, so I believe the earth goes round the sun.’

‘But we don’t trust Galileo himself, for the simple reason that we’ve none of us read his proof. I’m assuming that’s the case. So who or what we’re trusting is a second level of experts.’

‘Who probably know even more than Galileo.’

‘Here’s a paradox. We all of us read a newspaper, and most of us believe most of what our newspaper tells us. But at the same time every survey says that journalists are generally regarded as untrustworthy. Down there at the bottom with estate agents.’

‘It’s other people’s newspapers that are untrustworthy. Ours are reliable.’

‘Some genius once wrote that any sentence beginning “One in five of us believes or thinks such-and-such” is automatically suspect. And the sentence that is least likely to be true is one beginning “Perhaps as many as one in five…”’

‘Who was this genius?’

‘A journalist.’

‘You know that thing about surveillance cameras? How Britain’s supposed to have more of them per head of population than anywhere else in the world? We all know that, don’t we? So, there was a rebuttal in the paper by a journalist who said it was all hooey and paranoia, and went on to prove it, or try to. But he didn’t prove it to me because he’s one of those journalists I always disagree with anyway. So I refused to believe he could be right about this. And then I wondered if I didn’t believe him because I want to live in a country with the largest amount of surveillance cameras. And then I couldn’t work out whether that was because it made me feel safer, or because I somehow rather enjoyed feeling paranoid.’

‘So where is the point or the line at which reasonable people stop assuming truth and start doubting it?’

‘Isn’t there usually an accumulation of evidence leading to doubt?’

‘Like, the husband is always the first to suspect and the last to know.’

‘Or the wife.’

‘Mutatis mutandis.’

‘In propria persona.’

‘That’s another thing about the British. Well, your kind of British. The Latin you speak.’

‘Do we?’

‘I guess we do. Homo homini lupus.’

‘Et tu, Brute.’

‘And in case you think we’re showing off our education, we aren’t. It’s more despair. We’re probably the last generation to have these phrases at our disposal. They don’t have classical references in the Times crossword any more. Or Shakespeare quotations. When we’re dead, no one will say things like “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” any more.’

‘And that’ll be a loss, will it?’

‘I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.’

‘Neither can I. ’

‘Who was that British general in some Indian war who captured the province of Sind and sent a one-word telegram back to HQ? It simply said: “Peccavi ”… Ah, a few blank faces. Latin for “I have sinned.”’

‘Personally, I’m extremely glad those days are over.’

‘You’d probably prefer “mission accomplished” or whatever they say.’

‘No, I just hate imperialist jokes about killing people.’

‘Pardon my Latin.’

‘Right. So moving swiftly back to Galileo. The earth going round the sun is something that’s been proved as much as anything can be. But what about, say, climate change?’

‘Well, we all believe in that, don’t we?’

‘Do you remember when Reagan said trees gave off carbon emissions, and people hung signs round the trunks of redwoods saying “Sorry” and “It’s all my fault”?’

‘Or “Peccavi ”.’

‘Indeed.’

‘But Reagan believed anything, didn’t he? Like, he’d liberated some concentration camp in the war when all he’d done was stay in Hollywood and make patriotic films.’

‘Mind you, Bush made Reagan look good – almost classy.’

‘Someone said of Reagan that he was simple but not simple-minded.’

‘That’s not bad.’

‘Yes it is. It’s sophistry, it’s a spin doctor’s formula. Hear it from me: simple is simple-minded.’

‘So we all believe in climate change?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure.’

‘But do we, for instance, believe that there’s plenty of time for scientists to find a solution, or that we’ve reached a tipping point and in two, five or ten years it’ll be too late, or that we’ve already passed that tipping point and we’re going to hell in a handcart?’

‘The middle one, don’t we? That’s why we all try to reduce our carbon footprint, and insulate our houses better, and recycle.’

‘Is recycling to do with global warming?’

‘Need you ask?’

‘Well, I only ask because we’ve been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.’

‘I sometimes think, when we’re driving through central London in the evening and see all these office blocks with lights blazing away, that it’s a bit bloody pointless worrying about leaving the telly and the computer on standby.’

‘Every little makes a difference.’

‘But every big makes a bigger difference.’

‘Did you see that terrifying statistic the other month – that something like seventy per cent of passengers on flights in India were first-time fliers using budget airlines?’

‘As they have every right to. We did. We still do, most of us, don’t we?’

‘Are you saying that out of some sense of fair play we have to let everyone else become as filthy and polluting and carbon-emitting as we’ve been, and only then do we have the moral right to suggest they stop it?’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying they can hardly be expected to take lessons from us of all people.’

‘Do you know what I think is the most disgusting thing, morally, in the last twenty years or whatever. Emissions trading. Isn’t that a disgusting idea?’

‘All together now…’

‘“It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.”’

‘Beasts, all of you. But especially you, Dick.’

‘One thing really annoys me. You sort out all your recycling and put it in separate boxes, and then they come round with the van and throw it in higgledy-piggledy, mixing it all up again.’

‘But if we think we are at the tipping point, what chance do we believe we have of the world agreeing?’

‘Perhaps as much as one chance in five?’

‘Self-interest. That’s what makes things tick. People will recognise it’s in their own interest. And that of subsequent generations.’

‘Subsequent generations don’t vote for today’s politicians.’

‘What has posterity ever done for me, as someone asked.’

‘But politicians know that most voters care about subsequent generations. And most politicians are parents.’

‘I think one problem is that even if we accept self-interest as a useful guiding principle, there’s a gap between what your actual self-interest is and what you perceive it to be.’

‘Also between short- and long-term self-interest.’

‘Wasn’t it Keynes?’

‘Wasn’t what?’

‘Said that thing about posterity.’

‘It’s usually him or Oliver Wendell Holmes or Judge Learned Hand or Nubar Gulbenkian.’

‘I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.’

‘Did you see that French champagne houses are thinking of relocating to England because soon it’ll be too warm for their grapes?’

‘Well, in Roman times -’

‘There were vineyards along Hadrian’s Wall. You’re always telling us that, Mr Wine Bore.’

‘Am I? Well, it bloody bears repeating, because maybe it proves that it’s just the great cycle of nature coming round again.’

‘The great recycle of nature.’

‘Except we know it isn’t. Did you see that map of global warming in the paper the other day? It said a four-degree rise would be utterly disastrous – no water in most of Africa, cyclones, epidemics, rising sea levels, the Netherlands and south-east England under water.’

‘Can’t we rely on the Dutch to sort something out? They did before.’

‘What timespan are we actually talking about?’

‘If we don’t agree now, we could have a four-degree rise by 2060.’

‘Ah.’

‘You know – I expect you’ll all beat me up for this – but there are times when it feels almost glamorous to be part of the last generation.’

‘What last generation?’

‘The last to use Latin tags. Sunt lacrimae rerum.’

‘Well, looking at the human animal and its historical track record, it’s perfectly possible we shan’t get out of this one. So – the last generation to have been truly careless, truly without care.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that. What about 9/11 and terrorism and Aids and…’

‘Swine flu.’

‘Yes, but they’re all local, and in the long run minor.’

‘In the long run we are all dead – now that was Keynes.’

‘What about dirty bombs and nuclear war in the Middle East?’

‘Local, local. What I was talking about was a sense that it’s all out of control, all too late, nothing we can do about it…’

‘Way past the tipping point…’

‘… and just as, in the past, people looked ahead and posited the rise of civilisation, the discovery of new continents, the understanding of the universe’s secrets, now we are looking at a vista of grand reversal and inevitable, spectacular decline, when homo will become a lupus to homini again. As in the beginning, so it was in the end.’

‘Blimey, you are in apocalyptic mode.’

‘But you said glamorous. What’s glamorous about the world burning up?’

‘Because you, we, had the world before it did so, or before we realised that it would do so. We’re like that generation which knew the world before 1914, only to the power of a thousand. From now on it’s all about – what’s that phrase? – managed decline.’

‘So you don’t recycle?’

‘Of course we do. I’m a good boy, like everyone else. But I quite see Nero’s point. May as well fiddle while Rome burns.’

‘Do we believe he did? Isn’t it like those famous sayings that nobody ever said?’

‘Is it? Weren’t there eyewitness accounts of Nero fiddling? Suetonius, as it were?’

‘Res ipsa loquitur.’

‘Tony, that’s enough.’

‘I didn’t know they had violins in Ancient Rome.’

‘Joanna, at last a pertinent observation.’

‘Isn’t Stradivarius an old Roman name? Sounds like one.’

‘Isn’t it amazing how much we don’t know?’

‘Or how much we know but how little we believe.’

‘Who was it said they had strong opinions weakly held?’

‘Give up.’

‘I don’t know either, I just remembered it.’

‘You know, our council has actually started to employ recycling snoopers. Can you imagine that?’

‘Not until you tell us what they do.’

‘They come round looking at your recycling bins and check if you’re recycling enough of something -’

‘They actually come on to your property? I’d sue the buggers for trespass.’

‘… and then if, say, they find you haven’t put out enough tins, they’ll shove a leaflet through the door explaining how to pull your socks up.’

‘Bloody cheek. Why not spend the money on extra nurses or something?’

‘That’s what it’ll come to in Apocalyptic Britain. Snoopers breaking down your front door to see if you’ve left your telly on standby.’

‘They wouldn’t find many tins in our recycling, because we hardly buy any. Most of it’s far too high in salt and preservatives and so on.’

‘Ah, but when the snoopers get to work on you, you’ll be buying tins and chucking away the contents so you can keep up your recycling quota.’

‘Couldn’t they replace snoopers with extra surveillance cameras?’

‘Aren’t we getting off the point?’

‘What’s new about that?’

‘Stradivari.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Stradivarius is the instrument, Stradivari the maker.’

‘Fine by me. Absolutely fine.’

‘When I was young, I used to hate the way the world was governed by old men, because they were obviously out of touch and mired in history. Now the politicians are all so bloody young they’re out of touch in a different way, and I don’t so much hate it as fear it, because they can’t possibly understand enough about the world.’

‘When I was young, I liked short books. Now I’m older, and there’s less time left, I find I prefer long books. Can anyone explain that?’

‘Animal self-delusion. One part of you pretending that there’s more time than there really is.’

‘When I was young and started listening to classical music, I used to prefer the fast movements and was bored by the slow movements. I just wanted them to be over. Now it’s the opposite. I prefer slow movements.’

‘That’s probably connected to the blood slowing down.’

‘Does the blood slow down? Just out of interest.’

‘If it doesn’t, it ought to.’

‘Another thing we don’t know.’

‘If it doesn’t, it’s still a metaphor and, as such, true.’

‘If only global warming were a metaphor.’

‘Slow movements are more moving. That’s what it’s about. The others have noise, excitement, initiation, conclusion. Slow movements are pure emotion. Elegiac, a sense of time passing, inevitable loss – that’s slow movements for you.’

‘Does Phil know what he’s talking about?’

‘I always know what I’m talking about at this time of night.’

‘But why should we be more moved now? Are our emotions deeper?’

‘Back then you were exhilarated and excited by the fast movements.’

‘Are you saying that the pool of emotions remains the same size, but pours out in different directions at different times?’

‘I might be saying that.’

‘But surely we had our strongest emotions when we were young – falling in love, getting married, having children.’

‘But now perhaps we have longer emotions.’

‘Or our strongest emotions are of a different kind now – loss, regret, a sense of things ending.’

‘Don’t be so gloomy. Wait till you have grandchildren. They’ll surprise you.’

‘ “All of the pleasure and none of the responsibility.”’

‘Not that one again.’

‘I did put it in quotes.’

‘And a sense of life’s continuance that I didn’t get so much with my own children.’

‘That’s because your grandchildren haven’t disappointed you yet.’

‘Oh, don’t say that.’

‘OK, I didn’t say that.’

‘So do we think there’s any hope for the planet? Given global warming, a failure to identify true self-interest, and the politicians being as young as policemen?’

‘The human race has got itself out of scrapes before.’

‘And the young are more idealistic than we were. Or at least are.’

‘And Galileo is still winning against the Pope. That’s a kind of metaphor.’

‘And I still haven’t got bum cancer. That’s a kind of fact.’

‘Dick, something to finally tip the balance. The world is now a positive place to live in.’

‘We’re all going to be just a bit warmer.’

‘And who’ll miss the Netherlands? As long as they move the Rembrandts to higher ground.’

‘And a lot poorer because the bankers have stolen our money.’

‘And we’ll all have to become vegetarians because meat production adds to global warming.’

‘And we shan’t be able to travel as much, except on foot or on horse.’

‘“Shanks’s pony” – people will start saying that again.’

‘You know, I’ve always envied those times when even people who could afford to travel abroad did so only once in their lifetime. Not to mention the poor pilgrim with his stick and his scallop-shell badge making the one pilgrimage of his entire life.’

‘You’re forgetting we’re on the side of Galileo around this table.’

‘Then you can go on a pilgrimage to see his telescope in Florence or wherever they keep it. Unless the Pope burnt it.’

‘And we’ll go back to growing more of our own food, which will be healthier.’

‘And repairing things like we used to.’

‘And making our own entertainment, and holding real conversations over family meals, and showing proper respect to Grandma in the corner knitting socks for the new arrival and telling us tales of olden times.’

‘We don’t want to go that far.’

‘Good, as long as we can still watch telly, and nuclear families are optional.’

‘What about using barter instead of money?’

‘At least that would screw the bankers.’

‘Don’t count on it. They’d soon find a way to make themselves indispensable. There’ll be a futures market in rainfall or sunshine or whatever.’

‘There already is, my friend.’

‘Remember how they used to say, “The poor are always with us”?’

‘So?’

‘Well, it ought to have been “The rich are always with us”, “The bankers are always with us”.’

‘I’ve just realised why it’s called the nuclear family.’

‘Because it’s fissile and always likely to explode and irradiate people.’

‘But I was going to say that.’

‘Too late.’

‘Hmm, the smell of that apple wood…’

‘Question: which of our five senses could we most easily do without?’

‘Too late for guessing games.’

‘We’ll answer that next time.’

‘Talking of which…’

‘Lovely food.’

‘That was the best.’

‘And no one mentioned the C-word.’

‘Or gave us sexual homework.’

‘Let me give you a toast instead.’

‘We don’t do toasts around this table. House rules.’

‘It’s all right, it isn’t to anyone present. I just give you: the world in 2060. May they have as much pleasure as we do.’

‘The world in 2060.’

‘The world.’

‘Pleasure.’

‘Do you think people will still lie about sex in 2060?’

‘Perhaps as many as one in five will.’

‘It was A. J. P. Taylor, by the way.’

‘Who was?’

‘Who said he had strong opinions weakly held.’

‘Well, I raise a silent glass to him as well.’

There was the usual shuffling, and putting on of coats, and hugging and kissing, and then we trooped out, heading down towards the minicab office and the Underground.

‘Loved the smell of that fire,’ said Sue.

‘And we didn’t have to eat anything from a dead cow’s mouth,’ said Tony.

‘Odd to think we’ll all be dead by 2060,’ said Dick.

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that,’ said Carol.

‘Someone has to say the things other people don’t,’ said David.

‘I’ll see you guys,’ said Larry. ‘I’m heading this way.’

‘See you,’ we mostly replied.

Marriage Lines

THE TWIN OTTER was only half full as they took off from Glasgow: a few islanders returning from the mainland, plus some early-season weekenders with hiking boots and rucksacks. For almost an hour they flew just above the shifting brainscape of the clouds. Then they descended, and the jigsaw edges of the island appeared below them.

He had always loved this moment. The neck of headland, the long Atlantic beach of Traigh Eais, the large white bungalow they ritually buzzed, then a slow turn over the little humpy island of Orosay, and a final approach to the flat, sheeny expanse of Traigh Mhòr. In summer months, you could usually count on some boisterous mainland voice, keen perhaps to impress a girlfriend, shouting over the propellor noise, ‘Only commercial beach landing in the world!’ But with the years he had grown indulgent even about that. It was part of the folklore of coming here.

They landed hard on the cockle beach and spray flew up between the wing struts as they raced through shallow puddles. Then the plane slewed side on to the little terminal building, and a minute later they were climbing down the rickety metal steps to the beach. A tractor with a flatbed trailer was standing by to trundle their luggage the dozen yards to a damp concrete slab which served as the carousel. They, their: he knew he must start getting used to the singular pronoun instead. This was going to be the grammar of his life from now on.

Calum was waiting for him, looking past his shoulder, scanning the other passengers. The same slight, grey-haired figure in a green windcheater who met them every year. Being Calum, he didn’t ask; he waited. They had known one another, with a kind of intimate formality, for twenty years or so. Now that regularity, that repetition, and all it contained, was broken.

As the van dawdled along the single-track road, and waited politely in the passing bays, he told Calum the story he was already weary with repeating. The sudden tiredness, the dizzy spells, the blood tests, the scans, hospital, more hospital, the hospice. The speed of it all, the process, the merciless tramp of events. He told it without tears, in a neutral voice, as if it might have happened to someone else. It was the only way, so far, that he knew how.

Outside the dark stone cottage, Calum yanked on the handbrake. ‘Rest her soul,’ he said quietly, and took charge of the holdall.

The first time they had come to the island, they weren’t yet married. She had worn a wedding ring as a concession to… what? – their imagined version of island morality? It made them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time. Their room at Calum and Flora’s B & B had whitewashed walls, rain drying on the window, and a view across the machair to the sharp rise of Beinn Mhartainn. On their first night, they had discovered a bed whose joints wailed against any activity grosser than the minimum required for the sober conception of children. They found themselves comically restricted. Island sex, they had called it, giggling quietly into each other’s bodies.

He had bought new binoculars especially for that trip. Inland, there were larks and twites, wheatears and wagtails. On the shoreline, ringed plovers and pipits. But it was the seabirds he loved best, the cormorants and gannets, the shags and fulmars. He spent many a docile, wet-bottomed hour on the clifftops, thumb and middle finger bringing into focus their whirling dives, and their soaring independence. The fulmars were his favourites. Birds which spent their whole lives at sea, coming to land only to nest. Then they laid a single egg, raised the chick, and took to the sea again, skimming the waves, rising on the air currents, being themselves.

She had preferred flowers to birds. Sea pinks, yellow rattle, purple vetch, flag iris. There was something, he remembered, called self-heal. That was as far as his knowledge, and memory, went. She had never picked a single flower here, or anywhere else. To cut a flower was to speed its death, she used to say. She hated the sight of a vase. In the hospital, other patients, seeing the empty metal trolley at the foot of her bed, had thought her friends neglectful, and tried to pass on their excess bouquets. This went on until she was moved to her own room, and then the problem ceased.

That first year, Calum had shown them the island. One afternoon, on a beach where he liked to dig for razor clams, he had looked away from them and said, almost as if he was addressing the sea, ‘My grandparents were married by declaration, you know. That was all you needed in the old days. Approval and declaration. You were married when the moon was waxing and the tide running – to bring you luck. And after the wedding there’d be a rough mattress on the floor of an outbuilding. For the first night. The idea was that you begin marriage in a state of humility.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Calum,’ she had said. But he felt it was a rebuke – to their English manners, their presumption, their silent lie.

The second year, they had returned a few weeks after getting married. They wanted to tell everyone they met; but here was one place they couldn’t. Perhaps this had been good for them – to be silly with happiness and obliged into silence. Perhaps it had been their own way of beginning marriage in a state of humility.

He sensed, nevertheless, that Calum and Flora had guessed. No doubt it wasn’t difficult, given their new clothes and their daft smiles. On the first night Calum gave them whisky from a bottle without a label. He had many such bottles. There was a lot more whisky drunk than sold on this island, that was for sure.

Flora had taken out of a drawer an old sweater which had belonged to her grandfather. She laid it on the kitchen table, ironing it with her palms. In the old days, she explained, the women of these islands used to tell stories with their knitting. The pattern of this jersey showed that her grandfather had come from Eriskay, while its details, its decorations, told of fishing and faith, of the sea and the sand. And this series of zigzags across the shoulder – these here, look – represented the ups and downs of marriage. They were, quite literally, marriage lines.

Zigzags. Like any newly married couple, they had exchanged a glance of sly confidence, sure that for them there would be no downs – or at least, not like those of their parents, or of friends already making the usual stupid, predictable mistakes. They would be different; they would be different from anyone who had ever got married before.

‘Tell them about the buttons, Flora,’ said Calum.

The pattern of the jersey told you which island its owner came from; the buttons at the neck told you precisely which family they belonged to. It must have been like walking around dressed in your own postcode, he thought.

A day or two later, he had said to Calum, ‘I wish everyone was still wearing those sweaters.’ Having no sense of tradition himself, he liked other people to display one.

‘They had great use,’ replied Calum. ‘There was many a drowning you could only recognise by the jersey. And then by the buttons. Who the man was.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Well, no reason for it. For you to know. For you to think.’

There were moments when he felt this was the most distant place he had ever come to. The islanders happened to speak the same language as him, but that was just some strange, geographical coincidence.

This time, Calum and Flora treated him as he knew they would: with a tact and modesty he had once, stupidly, Englishly, mistaken for deference. They didn’t press themselves upon him, or make a show of their sympathy. There was a touch on the shoulder, a plate laid before him, a remark about the weather.

Each morning, Flora would give him a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper, a piece of cheese and an apple. He would set off across the machair and up Beinn Mhartainn. He made himself climb to the top, from where he could see the island and its jigsaw edges, where he could feel himself alone. Then, binoculars in hand, he would head for the cliffs and the seabirds. Calum had once told him that on some of the islands, generations back, they used to make oil for their lamps from the fulmars. Odd how he had always kept this detail from her, for twenty years and more. The rest of the year round, he never thought of it. Then they would come to the island, and he would say to himself, I mustn’t tell her what they did with the fulmars.

That summer she had nearly left him (or had he nearly left her? – at this distance, it was hard to tell) he had gone clam-digging with Calum. She had left them to pursue their sport, preferring to walk the damp, wavy line of the beach from which the sea had just retreated. Here, where the pebbles were barely bigger than sand grains, she liked to search for pieces of coloured glass – tiny shards of broken bottle, worn soft and smooth by water and time. For years he had watched the stooped walk, the inquisitive crouch, the picking, the discarding, the hoarding in the cupped left palm.

Calum explained how you looked for a small declivity in the sand, poured a little salt into it, then waited for the razor clam to shoot up a few inches from its lair. He wore an oven glove on his left hand, against the sharpness of the rising shell. You had to pull quickly, he said, seizing the clam before it disappeared again.

Mostly, despite Calum’s expertise, nothing stirred, and they moved on to the next hollow in the sand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her wandering further along the beach, her back turned to him, self-sufficient, content with what she was doing, not giving him a thought.

As he handed Calum more salt, and saw the oven glove poised in anticipation, he found himself saying, man to man, ‘Bit like marriage, isn’t it?’

Calum frowned slightly. ‘What’s your meaning?’

‘Oh, waiting for something to pop out of the sand. Then it turns out either there’s nothing there, or something that cuts your hand open if you aren’t bloody careful.’

It had been a stupid thing to say. Stupid because he hadn’t really meant it, more stupid because it was presumptuous. Silence told him that Calum found such talk offensive, to himself, to Flora, to the islanders generally.

Each day he walked, and each day soft rain soaked into him. He ate a sodden sandwich, and watched the fulmars skimming the sea. He walked to Greian Head and looked down over the flat rocks where the seals liked to congregate. One year, they had watched a dog swim all the way out from the beach, chase the seals off, and then parade up and down its rock like a new landowner. This year there was no dog.

On the vertiginous flank of Greian was part of an unlikely golf course where, year after year, they had never seen a single golfer. There was a small circular green surrounded by a picket fence to keep the cows off. Once, nearby, a sudden herd of bullocks had rushed at them, frightening her silly. He had stood his ground, waved his arms wildly, instinctively shouted the names of the political leaders he most despised, and somehow not been surprised that it had calmed them down. This year, there were no bullocks to be seen, and he missed them. He supposed they must have long gone to slaughter.

He remembered a crofter on Vatersay telling them about lazy beds. You cut a slice of turf, placed your potatoes on the open soil, relaid the turf upside down on top of them – and that was it. Time and rain and the warmth of the sun did the rest. Lazy beds – he saw her laughing at him, reading his mind, saying afterwards that this would be his idea of gardening, wouldn’t it? He remembered her eyes shining like the damp glass jewellery she used to fill her palm with.

On the last morning, Calum drove him back to Traigh Mhòr in the van. Politicians had been promising a new airstrip so that modern planes could land. There was talk of tourist development and island regeneration, mixed with warnings about the current cost of subsidy. Calum wanted none of it, and nor did he. He knew that he would need the island to stay as still and unchanging as possible. He wouldn’t come back if jets started landing on tarmac.

He checked in his holdall at the counter, and they went outside. Hanging over a low wall, Calum lit a cigarette. They looked out across the damp and bumpy sand of the cockle beach. The cloud was low, the windsock inert.

‘These are for you,’ said Calum, handing him half a dozen postcards. He must have bought them at the café just now. Views of the island, the beach, the machair; one of the very plane waiting to take him away.

‘But…’

‘You will be needing the memory.’

A few minutes later, the Twin Otter took off straight out across Orosay and the open sea. There was no farewell view of the island before that world below was shut out. In the enveloping cloud, he thought about marriage lines and buttons; about razor clams and island sex; about missing bullocks and fulmars being turned into oil; and then, finally, the tears came. Calum had known he would not be coming back. But the tears were not for that, or for himself, or even for her, for their memories. They were tears for his own stupidity. His presumption too.

He had thought he could recapture, and begin to say farewell. He had thought that grief might be assuaged, or if not assuaged, at least speeded up, hurried on its way a little, by going back to a place where they had been happy. But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach him many other things as well. This was just the first of them.