The Temporary

Two

Ralph Loman woke to find he had become his best friend Stephen Sparks. The room — Stephen’s room? Yes, he supposed it must be, although he had never been in Stephen’s room before, an odd thing really — the room was cold, deathly cold, and blue with too-early light. It had been such a long night, a night busy with dreams. What a lot he had done! Just now he had been at a party — he had only just left, in fact — in a great glass place, a glass beehive filled with people. Everyone had been so kind. At one point a girl had given him an injection and for a while he had been terrified as something crept unstoppably along his veins, about to invade his heart; but then he had remembered that he was Stephen and felt an inquisitive rush of joy. It had gathered in him while the party murmured distantly, a beautiful, refracting thing, a lovely crystal suspended in his centre like a chandelier. He felt it there now, fading. His head hurt terribly. In fact, his whole body — Stephen’s body, he supposed you’d say — his whole body hurt. He closed his eyes and sang silently. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. It sometimes helped to calm him on those occasions when he was not feeling himself.

Crewe, Crewe. He was awfully tired. Stephen’s body tugged at him, weighted, escaping, a leaden anchor free-falling beneath the surface of things, then graceful as a dancer as sleep began to take the slack and he became light. He heard the rustle of bedclothes, felt one unfamiliar knee strangely bony against the other, and for a moment his mind raced and struggled. Stephen, yes. He opened his eyes again. Something loomed at the foot of the bed and a gorge of fear mounted in his throat. The chest of drawers. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes. The submarine light swam at his lids and he knew that when he opened them again Stephen would be gone and he would be alone, waking into the dead hours of an urban dawn as he always did. He kept them shut and waited, hoping that the ebbing tide of fatigue would drag him back down into unconsciousness with its diminishing fingertips; but the growing pressure of alertness in his head was forcing itself against his eyes in the effort to pry them open. As a child he had often lain like that in terror, knowing he was about to surface into the blue light, that awful, deathly light, his father lumpish and inert in the bed beside him, with hours to wait before sunlight broke like a raw egg over the room, ameliorating its unfamiliarity. There was never anywhere for him to go at that hour in the hotels they stayed in, nothing for him to do but lie still in that light which made it seem as if this time night would not progress to day, and which made monsters of the furniture while the patterned walls seemed alive with unspeakable creatures. He had seen spiders, crabs, even a lobster there. Once he had noticed a man lying on the floorboards during one of those dark dawns, a man in a bowler hat who was flat as if he were made of paper. He had smiled cheerfully at Ralph and tipped his hat, and Ralph had lain cataleptic with fear for a time which he could not quantify, his father sleeping beside him like a dead man, and had waited for this certain alchemy of night becoming day. There had been a picture on the wall opposite the bed and he had fixed his eyes on the black square of it until coloured lights danced before them. He remembered that picture still. As he watched it evolve from the darkness, he had known it primordially, off by heart. For a while it had been the only thing he knew. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe.

*

He woke again some time later. Cars were passing on the road outside and he heard a door slam, someone shouting. A beam of sunlight poked through a gap in the curtains. He had just been dreaming, something about a cripple and a horse, one of those wooden fairground horses with a shaft through the middle. It had been bobbing up and down, the way they do, except that there was no carousel. It had just sort of pogoed madly down the street. He turned on to his back and the warm ray settled across his face. A certain ripeness in the light made him suddenly suspect that it was late, and he jolted up in bed before remembering that it was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. He looked at his watch anyway. The hands pointing at one o’clock seemed so impossible, so wild in their assertion that a great swath of time had gone by without his supervision, that he immediately got out of bed to look at the clock on the chest of drawers. Its remarkable confirmation filled Ralph with a curious elation at his feat of oblivion. The telephone began to ring in the sitting-room and he went obediently to answer it. He liked the feeling of running around after himself, the compact air that delay gave to a day. There had been times recently when he had felt imprisoned in the glass sphere of every passing hour, crawling from one orb to the next in an inescapable chain he sensed was taking him far from where he wanted to go.

‘Sparks,’ said Stephen when Ralph picked up the phone.

Ralph wondered where Stephen had acquired the irritating habit of answering the phone with his last name, before remembering that it was he, Ralph, who was answering and Stephen calling. He felt a sleepy giggle rise in his throat as he saw through Stephen’s trick, and was surprised to hear it emerge from his mouth.

‘You’re sounding girlish,’ said Stephen.

‘Sorry. I just got up.’ He thought of telling Stephen that he’d dreamed of him but couldn’t find the words.

‘Aha.’ His voice seemed further away, as if he were distracted. There was a rustling sound and then a heavy thud. ‘—last night?’ he boomed into the receiver.

‘What did you say?’

Ralph sat down and realized he was naked. His penis dangled grotesquely between the mottled trunks of his thighs like a hanging. The rough cloth of the seat cover beneath his bare buttocks reminded him of dreams he used to have in which he went unclothed and everything felt rather painful.

‘I said — ah — what did you think of last night?’

‘Nothing,’ said Ralph, surprised.

A leaden disappointment hovered and then plummeted as he remembered the message he had left for Francine in the optimistic hours of yesterday afternoon. He had actually been relieved when the girl had said she wasn’t there, his timid heart diving from his mouth down to the thrashing pit of his stomach, but her voice had been so warm and interested — had made him feel as if he was a prospect, a catch! — that for a while after he had put down the phone he had felt sure that things would go his way. The long vigil of evening had cooled his hopes, solidified them in ridiculous postures. He had become nervous, braced for the shriek of the telephone, jumping up every few minutes to rupture with activity the terrible membrane of silence which thickened around him. She hadn’t called, of course, and he had watched television until his head ached and then plunged into the sleep from which he had only just awoken.

‘Party,’ mumbled Stephen. There was something in his mouth. Ralph heard the click and hiss of a lighter, the suck of Stephen’s breath.

‘Alf’s thing? The private view? That was Friday,’ said Ralph sternly. ‘Yesterday was Saturday.’

‘Was it?’ Stephen paused. After a while he gave a bark of laughter and began speaking in a silly, high-pitched voice. ‘It’s all become the most terrible blur.’

Ralph waited for Stephen to reproach himself but instead felt wearied by his own dullness, the tightening bondage of responsibility from which Stephen would never permit him to escape.

‘Ah yes,’ said Stephen. ‘Alf’s pictures. Bloody toss, if you ask me.’

‘I didn’t look at them much, I’m afraid. I don’t think anyone ever does at these things. It’s all so—

‘The temp!’ interrupted Stephen, inspired. ‘The tarty temp from Tunbridge Wells!’

Ralph was silent.

‘Francine,’ he said finally.

‘Francine!’ echoed Stephen. ‘Yes! Lovely girl. Awful voice. Awful! Francine,’ he mimicked.

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Ralph. ‘I’m late for something.’

‘I’d better run along. I was supposed to be at Mother’s half an hour ago for lunch. She’ll cook the cat if I’m not there to keep an eye on her.’

‘Give her my regards,’ said Ralph stiffly, although Stephen had already put down the phone.

He sat for a moment in his chair. The conversation had had a derailing effect and it was a while before he remembered that he was cold and hadn’t had any breakfast yet. Stephen often did that, summoning and then abruptly dropping him so that he felt disorientated and lost afterwards. Disruption and confusion followed him like a weather system. These days, living outside Stephen’s atmosphere, Ralph was more aware of what happened when he entered it, but at school, when they were younger, he had been under the siege of Stephen’s presence most of the time. He rather missed it, despite feeling his humiliations more deeply now. The gradual severance of adulthood had left him not strong but ridiculous, marooned in his habits, so that when he saw Stephen he felt the more extraneous and lonely for the glimpses he had of their distant past. Besides, when they did meet Stephen was always spectacularly late, so that the very basis of Ralph’s presence was untethered slavishness, a foolish injury with which he swelled with every passing minute. Once, Ralph had waited an hour and a half for him in a pub which was just around the corner from Stephen’s flat. He had not been sitting alone at his table for more than fifteen minutes when an effeminate little man with wild eyes and an odd little beard — a goatee, like a courtier — had approached him and insisted on keeping him company. He hadn’t spoken much, Ralph recalled, merely sat beside him occasionally sipping from a glass of beer and giving him a sweet, fleeing smile whenever Ralph caught his eye. At one point, he had suddenly leaned over and gripped Ralph’s hand. His fingers were warm and surprisingly comforting. Had Ralph been less embarrassed, he might have wished they could have stayed like that, holding hands.

‘Who’s your girlfriend?’ Stephen had said when he arrived, grinning unkindly. The man slipped quietly away with a curt nod of the head, and Ralph had felt inexplicably guilty. Nevertheless, he had stayed where he was, offering to buy Stephen a drink and even laughing with him about his strange companion. The man had caught his eye sadly from the other side of the pub and Ralph had felt dizzy with malice.

He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge, perusing it like a car engine. He had seen other men do that; not his father, of course, who would open the fridge door quickly and snatch something from it, as if worried that he would let the cold air out. One or two things lay inert on the metal shelves, like the contents of a morgue. A curling rubber leaf of ham languished in its collapsed packaging beside a small, waxy brick of cheese. He felt a wall of cold advance towards him and remembered that he was naked. There was a plastic bottle of orange juice lower down and he grabbed it, slamming the door of the fridge so that it recoiled jangling as if he had slapped it. He reached for a glass and then changed his mind, deciding instead to drink directly from the bottle. It was a cavalier gesture, and one which he felt led naturally on from his oversleeping, his nakedness, and perhaps towards a casual second phone call to Francine later in the day.

He threw back his head to make a funnel of his throat, and for a moment the acidity of the juice was appalling, poisonous. His scalp prickled as he felt it coursing cold across his chest and into his stomach. He tipped his head back further and drained the bottle, before tossing it across the room towards the bin. It landed instead on the draining-board beside the sink and skidded on its side into an arrangement of drying crockery. A mug shot over the edge and crashed to the floor, exploding into shards among which its handle lay intact, like an ear. Ralph stared for a moment at the miniature disaster. He considered leaving it as it was, but his sense of his own drama had collapsed and he propelled himself to the broom cupboard for a dustpan and brush. He penitently gathered up the fragments of china, wrapped them in a newspaper which lay on the kitchen table, and threw them along with the plastic bottle into the bin.

Some time later he slammed the front door and descended the steps, taking them jauntily two by two in an attempt to button up the mood of cheerful disdain which he had selected, as if from a drawer of tempers, to wear alongside his clothes. He felt better after his bath — could still feel its warm embrace on him — remodelled and fit for action. A determination to leave his mark on the day had driven him from the dragging influence of the flat, and he turned towards Chalk Farm Road filled with purposeful but undirected energy. In the distance he could see the brimming pavements flowing towards Camden Town and a plan to go to the market formulated itself, convincing Ralph that he had intended to do so all along.

The sun was bright but weak and gave the day a deceptive appearance, casting a patina of warmth which did not convert the essential coolness of the air. The naked trees lining the road strained towards the light, greedy for its faint catalyst to burst them prematurely into bloom. It was spring, Ralph supposed, that long and amorphous season into which winter would occasionally recover and summer remit like a lingering low-level illness, never quite gripping at the throat with certitude. He groped for a date and remembered then that it was still only February. The year stretched before him in all its unavoidable detail, the hundreds of days and thousands of hours which he would endure as if something more lay at their end than mere repetition. He wished that he could be tricked, as others seemed to be, by the close of each week, seeing in their false endings the imminence of some sort of conclusion, like a soap opera. He wondered why he had never fallen into step with this pattern of days, comprehended in the helpful clarity of a week’s tiny eras — birth, growth, productivity, decline, dormancy, regeneration, played out beneath the celestial presence of longer phases of weather — a system which might ease the slow construction of his life. The year he had spent alone with his father, a chaotic tract across which no borders of time or habit were erected, had become in its elasticity the infinitely capacious repository of Ralph’s failings and he placed this latest grudge firmly within it. How could he, who had spent the most formative year of his youth, the year in which he was most pliant, most liable to gel in whichever crazy mould was nearest to hand, had spent that year ‘on the road’, a hostage to his father’s misfortune; how could he, then, be expected to see things as other people did?

He fed himself from the tributary of his street into the main concourse drifting towards the lock, and in the suddenly thick press of bodies felt his exposure ease as they gathered him in. He had had days like this before, days when his spirits would gutter or flare at each movement of life, when he wrestled hourly with his recollections, at once their victim and their hero. It was good that he was out, although even here in the open air his father’s eyes were on him, shrivelled with whisky and immolated desire. He felt their reproach, as he always did when shrugging off portions of himself into the complaining vacuum of his absence. The problem was that it wasn’t a vacuum at all. He was merely relocating things he disliked about himself, slapping up hasty walls around them, building twisted, ridiculous corridors, papering over their leaks. He had complicated himself with introspection. He felt a longing to demolish it all and start again. His father had been a master of evasion, blockading all routes to the past, bricking up vistas of the future, until all that was left of him was a tiny room in which a man sat in an armchair watching television. He had once been a boy scout, though; the only photograph Ralph possessed of his father depicted him at the acme of his scouting career, when he had risen from amongst the ranks to become their general. He wore a cap and cravat, and stared out beyond the lens with triumphant eyes as if towards vanquished hordes. Later, his mind would travel back to that glittering epoch and he would endeavour gently to tell Ralph of it, in a hotel room where rivers of Terylene cascaded from the mouths of his suitcases and the air was warm with the rank perfume of their take-away dinner.

‘Dad, I’m reading,’ Ralph would implore, raising his book by the covers as if to shield him from the eye-watering woodsmoke of his father’s recollections.

‘Ah, yes,’ his father would confirm, nodding. ‘But a boy your age shouldn’t have to turn to books for company. He should be outdoors with other boys engaging in some form of organized activity.’ He would sigh and put his arms behind his head, like a man on holiday. ‘What do you say we play a hand of whist?’

‘Dad, I’m reading.’

Once Ralph witnessed his father getting into a fight — or failing to get out of it, in any case — in a pub in Worthington where they had gone one evening for pie and chips and where Ralph was permitted to drink his lemonade from a pint glass identical to that from which his father sipped beer with womanly daintiness. Ralph had deliberately left the translucent spume on his lip while his father wiped his own away, watching him closely as he ate and drank.

‘Is it good?’ he said after each mouthful. Ralph nodded. ‘Never leave a moustache,’ he counselled, handing Ralph a paper napkin. ‘A gentleman never leaves a moustache.’

Already his father had begun to deliver his epithets in the defensive manner with which he touted Terylene, at once sheepish and proud.

‘A gentleman,’ he repeated, ‘never has a sloppy lip.’

It was shortly afterwards that he saw his father, gone to the bar to refill their glasses, borne away from his view in a sudden clutch of strangers and swept out through the double doors of the pub beyond into the street, his bald pate bobbing as if suspended in water. Ralph had thought to follow him out, but the barmaid had come to the table with his second pint glass of lemonade and had instructed him kindly to drink it. He had done so while she watched, drinking it all down in one go as he had seen other men do until she had laughed and told him he’d burst if he carried on like that; and what with all the excitement he had quite forgotten about his father until he emerged back through the doors with his shirt hanging out and his cheeks flushed dark red in a grotesque approximation of youth and vitality.

‘A word of advice, Ralphie,’ he had said, sitting down heavily beside him. His belly heaved in and out frantically. ‘Never show your wallet at the bar. Temptation, you see. The smart fellow always takes out a single note in advance.’

Ralph asked him if you could make yourself burst by drinking too much all in one go.

‘Well, let’s see,’ said his father after a pause, furrowing his brow and screwing up his eyes intently. His upper lip glistened with sweat. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s likely. No, I don’t think it’s likely at all.’

Ralph would read in the evenings, devouring the pages of library books while his father dozed before the television with a hotel tooth-mug filled with whisky. Sometimes the empty glass would slip from his hand and he would wake with a start as it thumped to the floor.

‘Must have dozed off,’ he would apologize, rubbing his eyes and smiling crookedly. ‘Good book, Ralphie?’

‘Quite good.’

‘Ah, I see. What’s the plot?’

He crossed the lock and plunged into a sea of stalls, through crowds whose lumpy shopping bags thumped against his calves, past Indian men selling garish explosions of clothing and girls with dead eyes and chalky faces around which shreds of hair hung like seaweed. He headed down towards the fruit market, craving the perishability of its offerings. When he reached it the market was noisy, a field of combat where red-faced stallholders shouted like disgruntled babies while produce which seemed overly bright was fondled by people who evidently weren’t.

‘Can’t you read?’ roared one of them, as a woman in a grubby knitted hat ran her fingers over a hill of oranges, touching them delicately like a blind person. She started at the sound of his voice, her eyes wide. ‘What does that say?’ persisted the stallholder. He pointed to a sign perched on the display, on which was depicted a large pair of melons with the warning ‘Please Don’t Squeeze’ emblazoned beneath them. The woman removed her hands from the oranges and left them to hang inertly by her sides.

Ralph moved away quickly. Squashed fruit and bruised bits of vegetable lay trampled on the pavement, strangely ghoulish and unidentifiable, like the detritus of a serious operation. His foot slid on something pulpy and yielding, squelching beneath his shoe and oozing out around the sole. He limped along a few paces despairingly, trying to scrape it off against the kerb. It came away in smears, and by the time he managed to get rid of it he saw that he had spread it over rather a large patch of concrete. He looked around, embarrassed, and then walked awkwardly on as if nothing had happened. Moments later, recognizing the foolishness of his growing discomfort, he stopped at another stall and bought a bag of apples. The bag was made of brown paper and he had to hold it underneath to prevent it from giving way. He moved on, encumbered, through the nervous sunlight. As he approached the end of the small street he saw a well-dressed oriental girl bending over a large rubbish bin as if she had dropped something in it which she wanted to retrieve. She was exceptionally graceful, Ralph thought, fragile and luminous in that way Eastern girls were. People were looking at her as they passed. For a moment he thought ridiculously of offering to help her, but as he drew near he saw to his horror that the girl was clutching her belly with one hand and holding the other to her chest, while neatly depositing long ribbons of mucus and vomit into the bin. Her narrow shoulders shook slightly beneath her tailored jacket. He hesitated as a double wrench of pity and selfishness twisted in his chest. The girl would be grateful for kindness, he knew — she was alone, after all, sick and far from home! — but as he stood there the scope of the city seemed to unfold and chide him, bidding him to keep to himself, to go about his business in its common parts, its streets thick with souls, and then return directly to what was his, to what he knew. He permitted himself to walk past her. Later, walking back in the direction of the lock, he imagined himself stopping to help the girl, his arm strong around her convulsing shoulders, a handkerchief produced to smooth over her glistening lips. She leaned weakly against him, her eyes filled with tears and gratitude. He strained guiltily to return to her, but his legs carried him stubbornly on.

Once, a few years before, he had stopped to help an old woman who had fallen over in the street. It was late and he had come upon her lying on the dark pavement with her skirts around her waist, her mottled legs veined and appalling in the street light. She had smelt unspeakable as he bent down, the awful stink of cheap beer and neglect, and when he tried to pull her skirt down over her legs, fumbling with it ineptly in a parody of male adolescence, she had opened her bleary yellow eyes and watched him helplessly, as if he were an assailant.

‘It’s all right,’ he had said awkwardly. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

She had not been wearing underwear, and her flesh had looked both wizened and bloated, androgynous somehow, identifiable as female only by the bloodless lips of her genitals. A trail of ooze glistened over the tops of her thighs; and Ralph had felt a sudden surge of aversion, not physical revulsion exactly, but more of an intellectual certainty that there was nothing here for him, that to stay would constitute a defection from hope, from aspiration, from the business, the responsibility, even, of being himself. The street had been deserted, he remembered, and there was no one to see him as he left her there, scarcely believing what it was he was doing, and walked slowly on his way while her mute eyes burned at his retreating back.

He stopped at a stall and began fingering cloth, not knowing what he was touching. Some girls were laughing near by and there was something in the sound which caught him and made him look up. Francine Snaith was standing no more than ten feet away from him, with a girl he did not know but whose voice he recognized from the telephone as that of her flatmate. A bolt of surprise stunned him and he drew back slightly, instinctively shrinking from an encounter. Francine was holding by its edge a piece of red silk — a shirt, he could see — while the animated stallholder waved his hands operatically, never taking his eyes from her. Ralph watched her face in profile, drawn by it into something approaching a trance. Her unconscious features welcomed his eyes, proclaimed themselves the property of appreciation, and as he travelled over the pearly surface of her skin, the symmetry of its ridges, the dark pool of her hair, he felt oddly as if he were touching her. She carried an aura of astonishing clarity about her which made everything else appear blurred, as if she were at the focal eye of a camera constantly trained upon her. The stallholder took the shirt by its other edge and they held it between them with an intimacy which struck Ralph as almost painful. Finally he nodded his agreement, and the tranquil surface of Francine’s face broke and made a smile. She dropped the shirt, opening a leather bag which hung from her shoulder and extracting a single note. Her activity buffeted him with waves of troubled longing. The stallholder folded the shirt carefully — caressed it! — and Francine took it, saying something to the girl beside her. She closed her bag and looked up. He had been so intent on observation that he had forgotten she could see him. Suddenly her gaze was upon him and their eyes collided before either could contrive to look away. Far from giving him the advantage of preparation, Ralph found that his minutes of secret gazing had rendered him awkward and detached. For a moment he could do nothing but look. Francine’s face was blank, and the thought that it was consciously so, that she was deciding whether or not to recognize him, flashed upon him during dreadful seconds. Finally, before it was too late, he found himself again and waved his hand. At the signal she hesitated momentarily, as if trying to place him, and then smiled her open acknowledgement.

‘What a surprise!’ he called out as she approached him, pronouncing the words rather too loudly in his determination to be the first to speak. He cursed himself for yesterday’s peremptory telephone message. If only he had known, how much better it would have been to have left things to chance! He felt heavy with the guilty scent of his desire, a desire no response had aired, in which he had been left to steep, and which now emanated a rank odour of rejection which shamed him as keenly and publicly as if he were unwashed.

‘Yes,’ said Francine, reaching him. Her eyes were downcast, and it was a moment before she revealed herself to him. He examined her shyly again in disbelief, as if looking for some mistake in her face which might release him from his giddiness. She looked very calm, not with the suggestion of relaxation or dullness, but rather as if animation did not occur to her. There were no traces of it on her skin, and it struck him as he watched how carefully she held herself that she was surprised by her own beauty, that her custody of it, her refusal to wear it out with base uses, was a constant responsibility. The surprise of her eyes when finally she looked at him almost took away his breath.

‘How are you?’ he said.

‘I’m fine.’

She was wearing a jacket too thin for the cold, and he noticed fondly how her hands had crept within its sleeves for warmth.

‘Good.’ There was a pause, and Ralph felt a terrible blankness envelop his thoughts. For a moment he could seize on nothing which would deliver them from the oncoming silence. ‘I always make the mistake of coming down here on a Sunday,’ he said suddenly, to his own relief. ‘I forget what it’s like. Each time I swear I won’t do it again, and every week I find myself back here elbowing through the crowds.’ He gestured vaguely, like a man doing magic tricks.

‘I like it.’

There was another pause which almost took Ralph to the brink of his endurance as he waited for some sequel to qualify this bleak statement of their differences. Over Francine’s shoulder he could see the other girl waiting, shifting irritably from one leg to the other. She caught his eye and gave him a sudden, encouraging smile. Francine was gazing downwards again. Her eyelashes were so thick and dark against her pale cheek that he wondered clumsily if they were false.

‘Well—’ he said finally, looking around him in a manner suggestive of departure. His heart writhed with such acute embarrassment that he could feel no disappointment through it, just a humble acceptance of his own foolishness which rendered him desperate to put a stop to the encounter as quickly as he could. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be off.’ To his astonishment he saw something happen in her face as he spoke, a small acknowledgement of exigence which inflamed him with hope. ‘Did you — would you like to meet up some time?’ he said hurriedly as she watched him. Panic gripped at him as things slipped outside his control, like a silent prisoner escaping over a moonlit roof. ‘Just say — please do say if you’d rather not. I’ll quite understand.’

‘All right.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s just that when you didn’t call back,’ he rushed on, ‘I thought perhaps you weren’t — for whatever reason—’

‘Call back?’ She furrowed her untrammelled skin with a child’s perplexity. ‘I didn’t get any message.’

‘Yesterday!’ cried Ralph, a suffocating relief welling up in his throat. ‘I spoke to your flatmate — she said she’d tell you.’

‘Oh, she probably meant to,’ said Francine wistfully. Her eyes implored him and she glanced behind her. ‘But things have been — a bit difficult with Janice lately.’

Ralph’s righted injury combined with this whispered confidence to fill him with new allegiance. He felt himself swell before Francine’s fragility. In the distance, Janice’s serpentine eyes glowed with cunning.

‘Really?’ he said. His eyes pricked ridiculously with the forewarning of tears.

‘Yes. It’s, well — never mind. I’d better go.’

‘Listen, if you need anything, I mean if there’s anything I can do—’ She was retreating from him into the crowd. ‘I’ll call!’ he said.