The Temporary

Twelve

‘Oi, it’s Friday night!’ called Neil from the door of the office. ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to, mate?’

He was wearing an overcoat which had a strip of fur around the collar. Its attempted projection of prosperity had somehow mutinied to make Neil look even shiftier than usual and Ralph felt a smile pull at his lips.

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I’m going soon. I just want to finish something.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Neil.

He waved his hand as if across a great distance and stepped awkwardly back into the corridor while still facing the room, as though worried that some physical attack might be launched on him if he turned his back, to complement the psychological assault already being perpetrated. Ralph stretched pleasantly and looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock, later than either he or Neil had ever stayed before. Although he had clearly finished his day’s work Neil had lingered stolidly in what Ralph understood to be the spirit of competition, shielding with a clumsy, subversive hand the newspaper he was reading at his desk, as innocent and obvious as a child. From the corner of his eye Ralph had seen the broad blank of Neil’s face turn regularly on its axis in nervous observation and had rather enjoyed the clockwork motion with which he looked, paused, and then lifted his wrist to glance incomprehendingly at his watch. Finally, with a raucous and guttural clearing of the throat, Neil had risen from his desk in defeat. After he had gone Ralph felt rather guilty at keeping him, for in truth he didn’t have much to do and in any case had no interest in making a show of his industry. He was merely compelled by a new access of energy which, although it had been generated to drive a specific part of his life into action, seemed also to infuse the rest of it with secondary force.

In the days since his afternoon with Stephen a new resolve had taken him in its grip, and he felt an earnest zeal at the thought of purging shadowy corners of the habits which had been allowed to gather there unseen. In the flurry of his activity he had not yet had pause to consider what actually had been achieved by it, and although he dimly knew that the most disorderly part of himself remained untackled, the atmosphere of regeneration often gave him the mistaken impression that the opposite was true. Francine’s disappearance over the recent days deepened his sense of liberation, and a residual cowardice suggested to him that he might be spared a detailed confrontation with her merely by upholding his end of the silence.

He had stayed gradually later at the office every evening, often achieving little but a pleasant, unimplicated solitude as darkness fell beyond the windows, and the freer nature of his journey home once the clamouring rush-hour crowds had dispersed permitted him to see himself more clearly than he had for weeks. Normally recalcitrant in matters of social contact, he had recently telephoned one or two flagging friends and had spent enjoyable evenings in the pub rejuvenating their interest. His later hours at the office meant that he could travel directly to these assignations after work, and he had spent little time alone at his flat. Coming home and going directly to bed, he would occasionally feel a mild and inappropriate guilt, as if he were attempting to smuggle himself into his room unseen by some vigilant authority. It seemed then, especially if he returned in a state of drunkenness, that his flat had allied itself with Francine and was awaiting him accusatorily. In those muddled hours he had even felt once or twice as if he missed her.

Nevertheless, her telephone call late on Thursday evening had still taken him unpleasantly by surprise, particularly as his presence at home had failed to represent the trend of his many recent absences. Being found thus, he had suddenly felt unkind for the fact that he hadn’t communicated to her his change of heart. She had sounded different to him on the telephone, her voice spare with intent and acceptance, which informed him beyond doubt that at least she had read his misconduct correctly and was demanding a meeting merely to finalize its terms. She had wanted to meet the next evening, and Ralph, glad again to have reinforced his life with activity and thus protected himself from things he didn’t want to do, had said that he couldn’t.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m busy. I’m going out with some friends.’

‘You’ll have to tell them you can’t come.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Ralph gently. The swingeing ferocity of her demands, in trying to grip him, merely knocked him further from acquiescence. ‘It’s too little notice. It’s all been arranged.’

He had insisted on meeting her instead on Saturday afternoon, convinced by a sudden access of inherited wisdom that, while the inception of such romances belonged to the soft, veiling influence of the night, their termination was best performed in broad daylight. She had reluctantly agreed and the conversation came swiftly to an end.

Thinking about it now Ralph felt inexplicably sad, and a sudden consciousness of his loneliness in the empty office worsened his condition. Even through the spreading miasma of emotion, however, he could still recognize that his mistake had been at the beginning, in taking up with Francine at all, and that the palliative for his pains — the sweet oblivion of inaction, the peculiar dreaminess of lies; in short, the ease of doing nothing — which was at that moment suggesting itself would inflame rather than cure them. Once he had finished things for good, he would feel better. He did feel better, even with the flogged form of the dreadful past few weeks still on his hands. Soon he would be rid of it. The thought that he had in some way duped Francine dimmed slightly the honest allure of his future freedom. She had sounded so hurt on the telephone. It would be even worse on Saturday. For a moment he ached sentimentally for her, and then hardened as he remembered how he had learned to inflict pain — from experience! Everyone got hurt at some point. Why should she be spared? He looked at his watch and saw that half an hour had passed. He was late. He put on his coat and left the office.

It was past midnight by the time he got home, and as he unlocked the door to his flat he had an odd sense of a menacing delegation rising to greet him from the dark, a group of troubles whom he had kept waiting during his forgetful hours away. He was tired and he carried his sense of unease with him to bed, hoping to dissolve it with sleep. As he lay down, however, a horrible alertness visited him: every thought in his head seemed to ignite and rage until his mind was a furnace, and he lay awake in its uncomfortable heat, often unsure whether he was conscious or dreaming. He hadn’t lain thus since he was a child, and he was surprised to see how much shorter the night was now, its later hours, which once had filled him with terror, made familiar to him at parties and in late-night conversations. When the clock beside his bed began to approach three, he felt the swelling tide of sleep finally rise in him, and when he awoke it was almost with a feeling of excitement for the day ahead. As he bathed and dressed, the false promise of his arrangement with Francine continued to trick him, sending stabs of inarticulate anticipation through his stomach from which, seconds later, came more conscious trickles of dread. It was still too early to leave by the time he had readied himself, and he sat aimlessly in the sitting-room with a book, as if he were waiting at an airport. He hadn’t wanted Francine to come to the flat, and the ethereal but none the less obstructive presence of Janice had ruled out a visit to West Hampstead, so in the end Ralph had suggested a walk in Regent’s Park; a place to which he rarely went, but whose foreignness was, he felt, countermanded by the advantages of the open air. It was the least intimate of settings, and the possibilities for escape from it were unlimited. He had calculated it would take him fifteen minutes to make the journey, and he ruled his impulses sternly until the appointed time for departure so as to blockade all possible diversions.

He saw her as he came up Prince Albert Road, standing on the pavement by the entrance to the Outer Circle beside a pedestrian crossing. She was looking across the road, her posture held in that attitude of vacant stillness which he could never decide signified poise or inertia, and as he approached he saw several cars slow down to permit her to cross, their headlights empty as leering eyes, and then buck irritably on as she remained immobile. He proceeded towards the pedestrian crossing himself, but a sudden stream of traffic prevented him from going over. As he stood there stupidly, she caught sight of him and he saw her face change oddly with a kind of backstage movement, like a mask behind which a living face had briefly appeared. Seconds later she looked away again, as if pretending she hadn’t seen him, and as he waited to cross the road he found himself struck again by her beauty, by its precarious quality of aloofness which could move him either to worship or indifference. From a distance he noticed a new fragility in her features, accentuated by the black coat which she had wrapped tightly around her, pinning it with self-embracing arms. He had remembered her as robust and fully coloured, a dominating presence in which only the most obvious things survived, while paler, more delicate effects were lost. Even though only a week had passed since last he had seen her, her face seemed thin and translucent, and as he looked he saw something in it, some evidence of emotion, which hazily informed him that she had changed.

‘Just coming!’ he shouted awkwardly over the noise of passing cars, as he lunged forward into the road with one cautionary hand raised like a policeman. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, reaching the other side. He could hear himself panting, although the exercise had been mild.

‘Shall we go?’ said Francine quietly, turning to face the park. He glanced at her and saw the perilous thinness of her neck, from which it appeared her bone-china skull might at any moment tumble.

‘Right, yes,’ he replied, setting off exaggeratedly so that she would know which way they were going. ‘Sorry, that was my invisible man routine again back there.’ He laughed, but the sound came back unabsorbed from her unresponding face. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Francine.

She spoke only a trifle too wanly, but it was enough to inform Ralph that she wanted him to know that she wasn’t fine at all. Even through the beginnings of perturbation at her unstated crisis, Ralph felt himself withdraw from her, the reaction he always had when the frigid barrier of her self-consciousness rose up between them. A brief anger warmed him for the way in which she overplayed herself, like a second-rate actor too enamoured with theatre to serve the reality it shadowed: even now, when she had for once affected him merely with the eloquence of a look, her clumsy demands stood up to conduct their loud negotiations. He had forgotten how impenetrable she was, how devoid of any depths into which feelings could sink, any softness to cushion reactions. Her surfaces were hard and extensive, and the little routines she devised were embarrassingly visible to the naked eye.

‘Let’s go this way,’ he said, leading her towards a gate which gave access to the upper part of the park. As they proceeded down a small avenue of trees, the noise of traffic was muffled, and in the sudden silence Ralph realized how still the day was beneath the rigid, toneless grey of the sky. Nothing moved, no leaves flickered, and the thick, paralysed air gave him the impression that time had stopped. Once or twice, when he was younger, he had woken in the dark to a similar stillness, and had lain nervously waiting for some noise or movement to signal that the world had not ground to a halt.

‘You’re obviously not fine,’ he said finally, hating himself for being led so easily away from his purpose. ‘Is anything wrong?’

Francine didn’t reply, and as her silence wrapped itself around him Ralph felt a strangling panic at his throat. He could feel her coat brushing against him as they walked, and her proximity struck him just then as more impertinent, more inappropriate, than even their sexual closeness had been. Thinking of that, his memories of it were barely visible. It was as if it had never happened, a renegade adventure of bodies, a desertion of consciousness by flesh. It had left no traces in his thoughts. He felt their limbs locked in brutal conversation as they walked, while his mouth — and the realization seemed suddenly awful to him, bothered him more than anything else — had nothing to say to her.

‘Francine?’ He stopped and faced her, not daring to put a hand on her arm. ‘What’s wrong?’

Her eyes evaded him, but the sulky fall of her face told him that he was to be presented with a complaint. He groaned silently with the burden of her dissatisfaction, so much heavier now that he was on the brink of shrugging it off, and wondered what was stopping him from just leaving her there and then.

‘Why do you care?’ she said.

‘Of — of course I care,’ he replied. He had an odd sensation of not knowing which words were at his lips until he heard them. ‘I want us to be friends.’

‘I get it!’ she said. He heard rather than saw that she was angry, for her face was curiously expressionless, except her mouth, which, loosened from its fine circumference, reminded him for a moment of Roz’s. ‘Don’t worry, I get it!’

‘Francine, you don’t understand,’ he began, seeing his mark but suddenly afraid to drive his point home on it. He felt a frantic urge to retract. ‘It’s not like that at all, please don’t be upset. It’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me—’

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said loudly over him. ‘I’m pregnant.’

She said it again, although he had heard her clearly, and for a moment Ralph didn’t feel anything at all. The silence of the park thronged around him like an invisible crowd and everything appeared suddenly rather deadened and remote, eroded until he experienced the most luminous solitude he had ever felt. His skin was very warm. For a delirious few seconds it seemed as if his body was not going to produce a reaction. He gazed curiously at Francine, trying to see her and thus tell himself at least that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life; but it was as if there were nothing beyond him but empty space, while inside him the whole world was contained. Her face was the face of a statue or a portrait in a frame, and as he looked at it he had a feeling of something else trying to communicate with him through it, of having been singled out by a hidden intelligence for the bestowal of some great secret. Significance moved across his thoughts, at large. Moments later it struck him that Francine seemed to be growing impatient, and it was then that he understood what was being expected of him. She was telling him something she thought he should know, returning what belonged to him like a wallet dropped in the street. She expected him to take charge. Faster than he would have thought possible, a torrent of fear tore through and drenched him.

‘I’m completely sure,’ she said, watching him as nervously as if she were lying. ‘I found out yesterday. I did a test.’

Ralph felt an awful laughter well up in him for the way in which she recited her answers, regardless of his failure to question her. Astonishing, inappropriate reactions were beginning to dance in him like broken puppets. Beneath the patina of personal novelty, the well-worn nature of the scene engendered in him an uncontrollable resistance to its clichés. He understood that he must do something, and the only quandary that offered itself up for resolution was his embarrassment at being in the park. Francine stood before him, tense with requirements.

‘We’d better go home,’ he said, taking her arm and guiding her back to the gate.

*

On the bus to work on Monday morning, Ralph found himself wishing that the unusually rapid stream of cars which rushed past the vehicle, quickly dividing and re-forming like water flowing around a rock, would tangle and clog to obstruct their progress. The journey constituted the first real opportunity for reflection which he had been permitted — not that he hadn’t been able to think in Francine’s presence over the weekend, for she had been silently expectant for most of it, but he had known that his meditations would take a different, although unguessable, form once he was alone — but the speed with which he was hurtling towards the Holloway Road gave him an odd sensation of falling, and he found himself gripping his seat with little thought for anything but his survival.

There wasn’t that much to think about in any case, he supposed, and even the small freedoms of consciousness which he had so far allowed himself merely reinforced his greater physical imprisonment. He had been called up, and the incontestable nature of his conscription summoned deep mechanisms of acceptance to quell the cunning instincts of evasion. The trajectory of his responsibilities was long, its demarcation unmistakable, and although he had sufficient memory of small desertions in the past to know that the stuff of self-interest was within him, escape from the current crisis required a crime larger than he was able to commit. It was easy, having been so comprehensively caught, then to detect the seeds of a harder salvation in his predicament. It offered a strange security from fear, the potential for absolution from himself, and having recognized the face of his enemy it was but a short step to believing that everything he had ever done — things, indeed, which had been done before he even existed! — had brought this moment upon him.

It seemed to him that Francine had reached the same conclusions, although by a blunter route. They hadn’t talked about it much over the weekend — hadn’t talked about anything at all, in fact — but her stolid, automatic presence in his flat bespoke intransigent atavisms to which he dared not even suggest modern solutions. He had tried to detect the surface movements of consciousness beneath her veiled expression, but had seen nothing beyond the certain obstinacy of a claimant, a look of stubborn patience which had filled him with apprehension. It had shamed him to wonder, as he had done once or twice with fantastical desperation, if she might at any moment reveal her intention to dismiss him from his duties, but by the end of the weekend it had become clear to him that she saw nothing in the tenuous nature of their experiment with each other which should invalidate its result. Her aspect, in fact, was more accusatory than troubled, and when finally he had asked her, late on Sunday night, what she was going to do, she had fixed him with a look of such disdain — almost of hatred, in fact — that a terrible panic had beaten like wings about his head as he watched her.

‘What do you mean, what am I going to do?’

Over the course of the weekend Ralph had read a whole lexicon of new expressions in Francine’s face, and he wondered if her features would learn them, would progress with them from her pristine prettiness to something more complex.

‘I only meant that I wanted it to be your decision,’ he had replied. A note of weariness crept into his voice.

‘Don’t think you’re getting out of this!’ she shrieked, sitting up in her chair.

‘Of course I’m not.’ He was horrified, but he forced himself to sit down beside her and place an arm around her shoulders. He was surprised to realize that it almost repelled him to touch her. ‘I don’t want to get out of it. All I’m saying is that you should choose, and whatever you choose is fine by me.’

The implication of his words was appalling, and for once he was grateful for Francine’s lack of expertise in meaning. She pursued him no further, and although Ralph was too frightened to ask her whether she intended to go home, she soon made it clear that she didn’t by telling him she was going to bed. He had sat up late on his own, tempted to fall asleep in his chair and pretend in the morning that he had done so by accident. In the end he had dozed for a while, and when he awoke after an hour with a stiff neck he forgot for a moment what he was doing there and endured a few seconds of dreadful confusion. Often, when he took himself by surprise by coming to in this manner, he even found it difficult to remember into which phase of his life he was surfacing; and he sometimes feared that his dreamlike grasp of things could be loosed by one of these sleepy interludes, returning him to the custody of a past he had thought escaped or, worse still, to a future he was attempting to flee. On this occasion he recalled the presence of someone in his bedroom and thought for a while that it was his mother, before the memory of Francine opened a door on reality and let the cold wind of her revelation rush in. He stood up and switched off the lights, and when he entered the bedroom the anonymous huddle of her form beneath the blankets filled him again with confusion. She didn’t stir as he lay down on the bed, not bothering to undress, but he heard her say something. It sounded like a name, ‘Mark’ or ‘Mike’, but when he said ‘What?’ she didn’t reply and he knew she must be asleep.

The bus stopped and Ralph got off. His head hurt, and fatigue lent the crowded pavement and grey, busy road a ghostly quality which made him walk carefully lest the ground should disappear beneath him. A small boy stood by the door to his office building, and as Ralph approached he turned and stared; not a rude or hostile stare, but more of an innocent, inquisitive look, as if in expectation of something. He hadn’t thought much about the notion of a child, but gazing into this boy’s dark, open eyes the singularity of what he had engendered broke from a crowd of possibilities and appeared to come and stand by his side. He stopped by the door, close to the boy now, and felt an inexplicable urge to take him inside off the street and perhaps take care of him for the day. The boy was still looking at him, but a woman’s shout from further down the pavement turned his head.

‘Rick! Rick!’

Ralph saw a young girl thundering towards them, a pram in front of her. Tails of hair flew about her face and her mouth was an angry rip.

‘You come away from there!’ she yelled. A stream of passers-by backed up around her and stared. She put out an arm without slowing her progress, as if with the intention of hooking the boy up as she passed. Ralph felt him flinch beside him.

‘I thought he was on his own,’ he said to the woman.

She stopped and grabbed the boy’s hand, yanking him towards her.

‘You leave him alone,’ she said, thrusting the fist of her face at Ralph. The boy still looked impassively at Ralph, his manacled arm raised above his head. ‘You dirty bugger.’

‘Really, I think that’s quite unnecessary,’ said Ralph stiffly, but the woman had already turned and continued her furious progress up the road. As he watched, he saw her let go of the boy’s arm for a moment and slap him hard across the backs of his legs, before seizing his hand again. He dangled for a moment, losing his balance, and then scuttled after her.

Roz was at her desk, her finger already clicking, and Ralph could hear the tinny acoustics of warfare buzz from the screen as he sat down.

‘Hello,’ he said loudly. ‘Nice weekend?’

‘Hello,’ said Roz. Her eyes didn’t move.

She had ceased to exchange pleasantries with him since his admission of treachery, and although Ralph had thought at first that the remission of her interest would improve things at the office, the sense of invisibility it forced upon him actually made his days less bearable than ever. He thought of describing for her the scene which had just taken place downstairs, but knew instantly that his sociability was merely a misguided nervous impulse guaranteed to earn a punishing silence.

‘How’s Frances?’ she said suddenly. Her voice was so loud that Ralph started. He looked up and met her eyes. They were guileless, but in his tremulous state he thought he saw a blade of malice glint behind them.

‘Francine,’ he said. ‘She’s fine.’

‘Oh,’ said Roz.

*

He hadn’t asked Francine to stay at his flat that evening and nor had she requested an invitation, but the mute agreement of their new complicity informed him that she would come and he hurried home earlier than his usual time. A few hours away from her had introduced him to the urgency of their situation, and he wondered why they had spoken so little of it over the weekend. He supposed they had each been waiting for the other to formulate an opinion strong enough to begin the business of action and reaction, but beneath the passivity of Francine’s aspect he feared the presence of something stronger, a predator which might be stirred by a glimpse of its prey. He had no way of knowing which of his tangled thoughts would prove the bait for her attack, and his diffuseness left him feeling unguarded and afraid.

She rang the doorbell moments after he had let himself in, with an eerie promptness which heightened his hunted spirits. He opened the door and she walked past him without saying anything, but the brief impression he had of her face told him that she looked oddly better than she had done over the weekend. He followed her into the sitting-room and in the stronger light saw that the solidity had returned to her features. He wondered if it signified resolution, and his heart began to pound in his chest.

‘How are you feeling?’ he said with ridiculous solicitude as she sat down on the sofa.

‘OK,’ she replied. ‘A bit sick, that’s all.’

She smiled at him, and he felt a companionable nausea rise up in his throat.

‘Francine.’ He sat down beside her. ‘Look, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think we must decide soon what we’re going to do.’

‘Do you think you could make me some tea?’ she said. Her voice was sweet, but a momentary strain paraded across her features and she laid a hand on her stomach. ‘It helps.’

‘Of course, sorry,’ said Ralph.

He went into the kitchen and leaned against the fridge with his eyes closed. Already he was beginning to feel dangerously detached and he pressed hard on his face with his hands to remind him of the imminence of his predicament. It amazed him that Francine could continue to defeat him when he could see her so clearly, every mechanism on display like the guts of a clock. Worse still, he could also see that he was conspiring with her against himself, promulgating the consciousness of her advantage. She knew that there was no chance of him deserting her, and her knowledge — provided by him! — made her unassailable. There was nothing he could do but wait, in the faint hope that her muddled formulas would end in a passable result for both of them. His helplessness dragged at him, amplifying his first faint identification that morning with the mysterious entity of which Francine had such complete and bewildering charge into a stronger allegiance. It was a mistake, he knew, to start getting ideas about this captured pawn, this knot by which he had been tied, but the power of relation, of bound blood, both frightened and drew him. He felt its absolutes mired in the sinking ground of his dispossession. It hadn’t flowered yet into any definable emotion but its sturdy roots and trunk were exerting their pressure inside him. Feeling it there, growing tight in his chest all day, he had had to fight off hourly the temptation of thinking that he was no longer alone.

He carried the scalding tea back into the sitting-room, and, as he lowered it on to the table in front of Francine, was ambushed by a violent image of throwing it at her. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he next looked up Francine was lapping at the cup contentedly.

‘So,’ he said again. His persistence reminded him of times when he had dialled a continuously engaged number with little hope of getting through. ‘What are we going to do?’

She looked him through a pale shimmer of steam.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

He sensed from her calmness that she had already thought of this exchange and that she didn’t really care what he said during it. It occurred to him that she was enjoying the extended interlude of their uncertainty, was perhaps even protracting its entangled hours.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy. Obviously, we have two choices.’ He felt rather foolish putting it so formally, but his longing for something concrete to displace the stifling vagueness of Francine’s evasions urged him on. Her look of sweetness had begun to cool into a less yielding expression, and he realized, his understandings coming at him now as fast as flying fists, that she actually saw something romantic in it all which his mention of choices was about to destroy. ‘Come on, Francine,’ he said, more gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but we’ve got to face it. It happens all the time—’ He heard the suggestion in his voice and reared away from it, frightened for a moment, before plunging over. ‘People do it every day, I promise. There’s nothing wrong with it — I know loads of women who’ve done it. It’s easy. It was an accident, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.’

She had turned away from him slightly while he spoke, and her face had found a certain angle from which she was utterly unfamiliar to him. Through this point, this tiny gap of dissociation, rays of alienation and loneliness fanned coldly over him. He wanted desperately to be away from her, for their whole rambling disaster to compress itself into a noxious pellet which he could spit from his mouth. It was only when she turned her head again and met his eyes that he saw the mesh which webbed his limbs and felt the sting of hooks in his tender flesh.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. Her eyes were full, though whether of ammunition or feeling he could not tell.

‘I only mean that it’s not such a big thing.’ It was an effort to remind himself of how charged she was, how filled with the capacity to hurt him. ‘It was a mistake. You shouldn’t get too — upset, you know, about getting rid of it.’

To his relief, she didn’t say anything. As he watched her, he suddenly felt such a surge of pity that he rose from his chair and went to put his arm around her. The action returned to him his sense of normality, of propriety, and with it came a feeling of acceptance — almost warmth — for the grain of intimacy at the heart of their situation and the common history which wrapped it. He was suddenly convinced of the fact that these things happened all the time, just as he had said, and that their unpleasantness was as controllable as that of an injection or a dental appointment.

‘There, there,’ he said awkwardly, patting her shoulder. ‘There, there, darling.’

‘I’m keeping it,’ she said.

‘What?’

Her form felt so lifeless beneath his arm that her voice seemed separate from it, as if there were someone else in the room who spoke.

‘It’s mine. I’m keeping it.’

‘But you can’t!’

She stood up, shrugging his arm from her shoulders.

‘I can do what I want.’

*

Later, he didn’t know what time it was, Ralph lay on the sofa. He was alone, but Francine was still in the flat somewhere — in bed, that was right — and he was drinking far too much considering he had to go to work the next day. He wanted to talk to Stephen but there had been no answer when he’d dialled his number and the machine wasn’t on either. Stephen was never there when he wanted him. What was strange was that earlier he had suddenly remembered the telephone number of his parents’ old house and had thought he might ring them. When he’d tried, though, all he’d got was a horrible noise. He didn’t want to talk to his mother anyway — he hated his mother, actually, he’d decided — but his father would have been all right. He’d talked about things like this with his father before. It had been a long time ago, but he felt sure his father wouldn’t have forgotten their conversation, and he’d been drunk himself then, after all, so he’d be a hypocrite if he criticized Ralph for it. He’d have understood, too, about Ralph not liking Francine much, because he’d told Ralph that time that his mother hadn’t liked him much either, but she’d married him just the same. Ralph had been his ticket home, he said. His lucky charm. She was the love of his life, he said, and after she’d gone he’d promised himself to look after Ralph, because Ralph was what had brought them together, after all. He had put his big hand on the back of Ralph’s neck. Ralph could feel it there now, warm and surprisingly steady.