ALEX GEORGE

LOVE YOU MADLY

For Hallam

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

I gaze at the solitary stalagmite of calcified chewing gum six inches in front of my face and wonder whether this was such a good idea.

The column of gum sprouts incongruously out of the carpet, a tiny grey phallus. Nearby lie two chocolate-covered raisins, an old Fruit Pastille, and a sprinkling of spilled popcorn. The carpet rubs against my cheek as I contemplate this eclectic menu.

When the lights finally go down, I gingerly pull myself up from my hiding place on the floor, and sink silently into my seat. A stark, sombre chord echoes through the cinema, and the dirty wooden sign materialises on the screen, barely legible in the half-light: No Trespassing. The ghostly silhouette of Xanadu emerges from the fog as the music rises to a strident crescendo. Then those famous lips fill the screen and whisper their anguished elegy to a lost childhood. Rosebud.

As the film’s opening images crash on to the screen, instead of the usual shiver of delightful anticipation, I feel nothing but cold, gnawing anxiety.

Upturned empty seats stretch out on either side of me, easy escape routes in both directions. The auditorium is almost deserted. I watch the solitary figure ten rows ahead of me. My wife’s arm stretches into the carton between her knees as she rhythmically shovels handfuls of yellow popcorn into her mouth. I gaze at her flickering silhouette.

What is she doing here?

I was introduced to the delights of Citizen Kane on my first date with Anna, while we were still at university. She didn’t suspect then that we would eventually marry and do all that happy-ever-after stuff. (Me, I knew. I’d already known for months.) Anna was a big film buff back then, and she told me, half serious, that she couldn’t go out with anyone who didn’t love Orson Welles. I nervously confessed that I’d never seen any of his films. Shocked, she insisted on taking me to see Citizen Kane, which was showing in a small repertory cinema in north Oxford. I agreed, blinking in disbelief: this girl had even spared me the anguish of asking her out, that ritual dance with the spectre of impending humiliation.

After the film, I lavished extravagant praise on its radical camera angles, the playful chronology, the myriad techniques which Welles had borrowed from his earlier experiments in radio. This spontaneous and instinctive criticism was delivered in a breathless, hurried monologue, and poached verbatim from a film guide that I had anxiously studied that afternoon in Blackwells. It didn’t fool Anna for a moment, of course, but something about the nervy chutzpah of my performance persuaded her to accept my dry-mouthed invitation to dinner later that week.

Once she had decided that I was going to be worth the effort, Anna launched me on a crash-course in film history. She dragged me to countless screenings of old films, all fabulously obscure and exotically subtitled. I went along in a haze of ecstatic bewilderment. We could have been watching paint dry, for all I cared; I just wanted to be with her.

Still, I paid attention. After a few months, I was able to spot abstruse cinematic references at fifty paces, with one eye on the screen and one hand down Anna’s knickers. I could distinguish Kurosawa from Kubrick, Peckinpah from Polanski. But I still loved Citizen Kane the most. Its story of a vain, lonely man in search of love pinned me back in my seat every time. And, of course, it was the flame that first welded our lives together.

I watch Anna as she impassively guzzles popcorn, her face tilted towards the screen like a flower to the sun. By now I thought I would be shadowing her through the infernal misery of an Oxford Street Saturday afternoon. But when she left the flat, rather than turning towards the Tube station, she strode purposefully in the direction of Haverstock Hill. She arrived in front of the cinema exactly ten minutes before the film was due to begin, and stepped inside without a moment’s hesitation. It was all too neat to be a coincidence, too convenient to be excused as a sudden change of plan. Besides, Anna is hardly the impulsive type. Which means that her story about the shopping trip was a considered, deliberate lie.

Suspicion and fear cloud my thoughts.

This was a mistake. I should not be here. Forgive me my trespass.

But what’s done is done: the past slams shut behind us.

After an hour I slip quietly out of the cinema. As I walk back towards Camden in the winter sunshine, I try and assimilate what I have seen. Questions ricochet around my head. Why is Anna not shopping? What possible reason could she have to lie to me?

Back in the flat, my worries continue to smash into each other, causing a multiple pile-up at the front of my brain. I collapse on to the sofa, thinking black thoughts.

Today, of all days.

Anna arrives home at half past six. She kisses me on the cheek, and lights a cigarette.

I have changed into my smartest suit. Two days of carefully-monitored stubble lurks on my chin, roguishly subversive. Anna takes a step backwards and gazes at me critically, before letting out a low whistle of appreciation.

‘Phwoar, bloody hell,’ she squawks in her best Cockney.

‘How was the shopping?’ I ask stiffly.

There is a terrible pause as Anna crosses the sitting room. She calmly flicks her ash into the ashtray on the window sill and turns back towards me. ‘Awful,’ she says.

I stare at her. ‘Awful? Awful how?’

Anna shrugs. ‘Couldn’t find anything I liked. That’s all.’ She gestures around her. ‘Hence the lack of bulging bags.’ She exhales a thin column of smoke, not looking at me.

There is no mention of Citizen Kane, no last-gasp confession. My wife is lying to me. ‘Oh,’ I say, stunned. ‘I’m sorry.’

She waves a dismissive hand. ‘It happens. No disaster. But I’m afraid I’ll have to wear something old tonight.’

‘You’ll look wonderful anyway,’ I reply, meaning it.

Anna smiles and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Ah, Matthew, always the gallant husband. Bless you.’ She grinds her cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Are you looking forward to the party?’

I was, I want to say.

‘Yes, I think so. I’m a bit nervous.’

‘Don’t be. You deserve to enjoy it. It’s not every day you get to celebrate the publication of your first book.’

I look at her, my heart cracking. ‘I suppose not.’

‘So what have you been up to this afternoon?’ asks Anna as she walks into the bedroom, pulling off her top as she goes.

‘Oh.’ I stare at the floor. ‘Nothing much.’

She takes a dress out of the wardrobe and holds it up to her body. ‘What do you think? Will this do? Suitably literary for you?’

I look at my wife with anxious longing. ‘It’s perfect.’

Anna grins, pleased. She puts the dress on the bed and sits down at her dressing table in her underwear, as unselfconscious as a child. She leans towards the mirror, scrutinising her face. I always enjoy watching Anna put on her make-up. She becomes wholly engrossed in these minute manoeuvres – an eyelash curled, a lip discreetly contoured. There is a touching innocence to these focused moments. As she prepares her mask, her defences momentarily come down.

I am still paralysed by Anna’s deception. ‘Where did you go on your shopping expedition, then?’ I ask.

‘Oxford Street, mainly,’ she murmurs through one side of her mouth. ‘The shops were full of terribly dull autumn stuff. And unbelievable crowds. Truly staggering, the number of people. Very few of whom were English.’ She rummages in her make-up tray and extracts a small but lethal-looking multi-pronged device. ‘I had to give directions to a Japanese couple who were looking for the South Bank Centre. Christ knows how they got quite so lost.’ I stare at her. She’s even gone to the trouble of inventing a small story for added effect. This embellishment, this arch adornment of the lie, torments me. God, I think, it’s so easy for her. She lies so well.

Anna swivels to face me and pouts. ‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘Am I gorgeous?’

Is she gorgeous? Anna still renders me speechless on occasion. Gorgeous doesn’t do her justice. She’s exquisite. She’s stunning. Thirteen years in, she still makes my heart do back flips.

‘You’ll do,’ I say.

She smiles. ‘Actually,’ she announces, ‘I have a special treat for you.’ She leans forward and pulls open the top drawer of her dresser. ‘Look what I’ve got.’ Between her thumb and forefinger she is brandishing a fat, tightly wrapped joint, crowned by a deft twist of Rizla paper. She waves the cigarette at me. ‘Shall we?’

Anna seems utterly unencumbered by her lies. Well, fine. If it’s not going to bother her, I won’t let it bother me. Not tonight, at any rate. I try a small grin. ‘Why not?’

I follow her out of the bedroom.

Tonight is the launch party to celebrate the publication of my novel, Licked.

I have sweated blood over that book. It has taken me three and a half years to write. Licked is part paean, part eulogy, part threnody. It celebrates and mourns the passing of youth’s innocence. It unsparingly charts the descent into the emotional detritus of tarnished middle-age. Using as a central leitmotif my own schoolboy experiences of stamp collecting, the novel’s principal character, Ivo, chooses to retreat into the rarefied, musty world of philately rather than confront the harsh brutalities of life. His stamps, which he cares for like precious, exotic butterflies, are a wonderfully profound metaphor for love. Or, rather, Love. They are beyond price, yet worthless; beautiful, yet useless. The book is funny, sad, gentle, acerbic, enriching, and devastating.

Now, after years of wandering through bookshops, glancing longingly at what I have come to regard as my bit of shelf space between Nancy Mitford and Iris Murdoch, Licked is about to be published. It has taken me, in total, twelve years and five unpublished novels, but I am finally going to be able to call myself a writer. Henceforth I shall be Matthew Moore, purveyor of literary pearls.

I have dreamt of tonight’s party, my introduction to London’s literary scene, on every day of those last twelve years. Those dreams have sustained me as I ploughed my lonely furrow through the dark times, when I was annihilated by creative exhaustion, when the well of inspiration ran dry. This evening represents the triumphant culmination of all of those years of solitary work, the apotheosis of more than a decade of determined grind.

So why did Anna have to start lying to me today?

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rings. I open the door and Sean, my literary agent, sweeps into the flat, waving a bottle of champagne at me as he goes.

‘So,’ he shouts as he walks past me into the kitchen, ‘the big day has finally dawned.’ He puts the bottle of champagne down on the table. ‘I thought we should start the evening off with a bang. Begin as you mean to go on. Get off on the right foot. It’s time for you to turn over a new leaf, Matthew. This is the beginning of a new dawn for you. All your Christmases have come at once.’ Sean turns to look at me with a messianic intensity. ‘It’s time for you to step up to the plate, walk into the spotlight, knock their socks off. Are you ready to be the toast of the town?’

I lean against the kitchen wall, dazed by the linguistic roadkill that Sean employs instead of conversation. I can feel my spirit being crushed beneath the weight of all those mangled metaphors. ‘Hi, Sean,’ I say.

Sean flaps a flamboyant hand at me in greeting and carries on. ‘Are you ready to take the bull by the horns, Matthew? Prepared to grasp the thistle in both hands? Are you set to take the plunge?’ He looks around him. ‘Where are your glasses?’

‘I’ll get them for you.’ I open a cupboard and pull out three champagne flutes.

Anna walks into the kitchen. ‘Hi, Sean,’ she says.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ says Sean. ‘You look like a million dollars.’ There is a brief pause as Sean opens the champagne and pours us each a glass. ‘A toast, then,’ he says solemnly. He raises his glass towards me. ‘To Matthew, and his exciting career. Here’s to literary superstardom. And, of course, to Licked itself – the steamiest, sexiest novel about stamp collecting ever written. Cheers.’

We drink. I let the bubbles pop against the back of my throat. ‘Thanks, Sean,’ I say.

Sean tilts his head to one side and gazes at me. ‘I mean it,’ he says. ‘Soon everyone will be talking about you. The word will spread like wildfire. Your ears will be burning.’ He smiles as he drinks his champagne. ‘Everyone will want a piece of you. They’ll be after you ten to the dozen, as quick as a flash, faster than the speed of light.’

‘Well, I hope so,’ I say. Sean is one of the most successful literary agents in the country. His client list reads like a Who’s Who of famous and successful authors. I’ve never been quite sure why he agreed to represent me. Perhaps I am a speculative play for future greatness. Perhaps I am a tax loss. I haven’t dared to ask.

Our earlier joint was, in retrospect, a mistake. It has relaxed Anna: she giggles as she chases it down with champagne. I, on the other hand, have become edgy. The fringes of my consciousness have become tinged with a hyper-real buzz. I know the relentless nudge of paranoia is not far behind.

Fired up by Sean’s infectious enthusiasm, my excitement at the approaching party grows. I know that I’m fortunate to be having a launch party at all. Neville Spencer, my publisher, doesn’t believe in them. Launch parties, he told me, are despicable, shallow affairs, an endless self-congratulatory gravy train of free booze and cliquey back-slapping. Exactly, I replied, that’s why I want one. After hours of squabbling, Neville finally conceded, with considerable bad grace, and promised to look after everything. I just have to turn up. The venue he has chosen is in Shoreditch (sufficiently modish, I feel), and is called Il Cavallo Bianco, which sounds perfect. As I quaff the champagne, I wonder who has been invited. Industry big-shots, journalists, perhaps a celebrity or two. I have been practising my lines, trying to perfect the sort of self-deprecating modesty that every author on the verge of greatness should aspire to.

Anna looks perfect in her dress, a dramatic, dark red thing, very Daphne du Maurier. She is wearing a shawl over her shoulders to protect against the November chill. We quickly finish the bottle of champagne and go outside to look for a taxi. Half an hour later, we arrive at the address Neville has given me.

‘Some mistake, surely,’ says Sean.

I check my piece of paper with the address on it. ‘This is right, I’m sure.’

We are standing in front of a dirty, modern pub, within gobbing distance of the concrete outposts of a vast, graffiti-strewn housing estate. A streak of neon flickers in the grimy window and tattered pennants hang limply over the door. A blackboard on the pavement announces ‘EXOTIC DANCEING LUNCHTIMES’.

‘What did Neville say the name of the place was?’ asks Anna.

‘Il Cavallo Bianco.’ I look around me. ‘It must be near here somewhere.’

Anna nudges me in the ribs. ‘This is it,’ she says. She points to the mock gold letters on the pub’s frontage. ‘The White Horse,’ she says. ‘Or Il Cavallo Bianco, if you happen to be Italian.’

‘Oh, bollocks,’ I mutter.

‘I think Neville’s been having a little joke with you,’ observes Anna.

There is a pause. ‘Well,’ I say, gesturing towards the front door. ‘Shall we?’

Inside the pub, Neville and his wife Patricia are standing by the bar, drinking half pints of lager. Together, they make a peculiar sight. Patricia is extremely tall. Neville, on the other hand, is very short.

Fed up with the crass commercialism of the British publishing industry, six years ago Neville Spencer established his own publishing house, Wellington Press – named in honour of the Iron Duke’s famous riposte to a blackmailer to publish and be damned. Coincidentally, Wellington’s exhortation is also a cogent description of Neville’s business practice. Everybody hates him. He is fractious, aggressive, and truculent. His antagonistic, curve ball approach to the business of selling books has publishing wallahs throughout London shuddering over their gins and tonics.

Neville, though, is unique in the publishing industry, because he’s actually interested in books. Sales figures and business plans, by contrast, are anathema to him. The suggestion that one should even try and make money out of selling books produces torrents of foul-mouthed invective. Over the years Neville has developed his own skewed criteria for measuring success. He is, basically, an incorrigible snob. He believes that there is an inverse correlation between a book’s popularity and its artistic significance. For him, obscurity is the thing. He relishes the esoteric, he celebrates the arcane. He wallows exultantly in the failure of his books to sell a single copy.

Of course, I relish the fact that I’m being published by a small, cutting-edge publishing house. It gives me instant cachet, immediate, ready-to-wear literary spurs. But there are times when I wish that Wellington Press wasn’t quite so cutting edge. It would be nice, for example, if Neville was at least on nodding terms with the concept of a marketing budget. As it is, his idiosyncratic approach doesn’t help me earn much of a living. There would be no chance of earning out my advance if it wasn’t so very, very small.

Neville and Patricia appear to be the only people in the pub. Quite how Neville has managed to find such an unprepossessing place for a party is beyond me. It has all the cosy warmth and charm of a vandalised Portakabin. The room is harshly lit by naked bulbs dangling from the puke-coloured ceiling. In one corner is a small raised platform with coloured lights dotted around its periphery, presumably the venue for the lunchtime strippers. Two battered speakers are bracketed high up on the wall; cobwebs dangle from them like discarded underwear. Immediately in front of the stage is a carpet of cigarette ends, a legacy from this afternoon’s crowd. It seems that the punters like to get up close for a good view.

We approach the bar. ‘Hi, Neville,’ I say. ‘Il Cavallo Bianco, eh? Very funny.’

Neville smiles thinly. ‘Yes, well. You have to let me have my little laugh.’

‘Indeed,’ I say, wondering why Neville’s little laughs always have to be at my expense. ‘So, what, have you booked this place out for the evening?’

‘You’re joking,’ he says. ‘No need. It’s always empty. Even on a Saturday.’

‘Ah.’ My spirits sink a little lower. I turn to survey the rest of the pub, and see that in fact we are not quite alone. In one corner, two skinheads are slumped over a table. A scrawny dog lies asleep on the floor next to them. ‘Clever old you,’ I say.

‘You know Patricia, don’t you?’ says Neville.

Indeed I do.

Patricia Spencer is the reason why Neville can afford to indulge in his financially suicidal publishing venture. She is one of the bestselling novelists in the country, and vastly rich. Under the sobriquet of Candida Divine, she churns out nineteenth-century sagas of deprived childhoods in Northern industrial towns. Her novels all have the same poor-girl-conquers-impossible-odds-to-fulfil-her-hitherto-mocked-childhood-ambition-and-then-finds-True-Love-only-to-have-it-cruelly-snatched-away-two-chapters-from-the-end plot. Her stories have an astronomically high mortality rate: the characters are ruthlessly killed off to boost the Kleenex count. It’s drivel. And what the millions of readers who avidly devour her books don’t know is that Candida Divine, whose ear for regional accents has been heralded as ‘ringingly authentic’ by the Daily Telegraph, arrived in Britain from Jamaica when she was five years old.

Patricia Spencer makes Grace Jones look like an under-nourished pussycat. She towers over most men, myself included. Her pneumatic body is all sleek muscles and well-toned limbs. She has a long, swan-like neck. Her head is shaven. She has big white teeth, which she flashes occasionally from within her large, luxurious brown lips. She possesses an untouchable, ineffable elegance, and moves with impossible grace.

She’s the most terrifying woman I’ve ever met.

Obviously, I fancy the pants off her.

‘Hi, Patricia,’ I say, standing on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. She has an exotic, feral scent. I inhale deeply while I’m up there.

‘Matt. And Anna. How nice.’ Patricia looks down at us and smiles. I stand there and grin stupidly.

Sean walks up to Neville and pumps his hand with gusto. Neville’s distaste is obvious to everyone, except Sean. In Neville’s opinion, agents are the equivalent of amoeba in the literary food chain. Parasitic amoeba, at that. Not that Sean is at the bottom of the food chain, though. No: that place is reserved for me. As an author, I’m little more than a necessary inconvenience to the whole process of publishing books, an unavoidable irritant, like the maiden aunt who must be invited to family get-togethers but who always drinks too much sherry and ends up complaining about her haemorrhoids. That’s me. I am that pissed, pile-plagued spinster.

‘I suppose you all want a drink,’ says Neville sourly.

‘That would be great,’ I say. Anna and Sean nod.

‘Well, there’s the bar,’ replies Neville, pointing.

‘Right,’ I laugh.

I wait.

‘I’ll have a pint, if you’re buying,’ says Neville.

With a disbelieving sigh, I extract my wallet. As I distribute the drinks a few minutes later, I ask, ‘So Neville, who else is coming to this bash, then? Journalists? Booksellers? Any celebs?’

Neville snorts. ‘Do me a fucking favour,’ he says. ‘That lot? Parasites.’

‘Who have you invited?’ asks Sean.

‘Well, all of you, obviously.’ Neville calmly takes a sip of his drink.

‘That’s it?’ I say, dismayed.

‘That’s it.’

‘Oh.’ I pause. ‘Did you bring some books along?’

Neville looks at me oddly. ‘Now why would I want to do that?’

I hesitate. ‘It’s just that, I don’t know, a book launch without any actual books seems a bit peculiar.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry, Matthew,’ says Neville sardonically. ‘No books.’

There is an awkward pause.

‘This is certainly less run-of-the-mill than most book launches I’ve been to,’ remarks Sean doubtfully. ‘I love it, though. It’s gritty. It’s real. It has a certain je ne sais quoi.’

‘It’s a disaster, is what it is,’ I retort.

‘A working launch,’ suggests Anna.

‘Ha ha,’ I say, unamused.

‘We’re all out to launch,’ says Anna.

‘All right, sweetheart,’ I say.

Anna points at Patricia, then at herself. ‘We’re ladies who launch.’

Now Sean decides to join in.

‘There’s no such thing as a free launch,’ he says, looking very pleased with himself.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

‘Anyway, cheers,’ says Neville ill-naturedly. ‘Here’s to Licked.’

‘Hear, hear,’ agrees Sean. ‘Congratulations on publication.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I mumble.

‘Yes, well,’ says Neville.

We lapse into silence.

‘So, yeah, anyway,’ says Sean. ‘I just love the book.’

I look at him. He hasn’t read a word of it, I know. ‘Really,’ I say.

To my surprise, Neville agrees. ‘Me too,’ he declares. ‘It’s like, what, Anaïs Nin meets Stanley Gibbons.’

I look at him quizzically. ‘You think?’

‘Definitely.’ Neville takes a swig of beer. ‘Nobody else has published anything like it. Whatever else it may be, it’s different.’

‘Thanks,’ I say uncertainly.

‘And November’s a great time to be published,’ enthuses Sean. ‘The book will be in the shops well in time for Christmas.’

At the thought of Christmas and its attendant retail excesses, Neville shudders visibly. We stand about chatting in a desultory way. Anna listens to the rest of us talk, languidly smoking. In the absence of anything better to do, we all begin drinking too much.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ says Anna after a while. ‘I’m off for a pee.’ As she leaves, I turn my attention to Patricia, who is telling us of the squabbles between three Hollywood starlets, who each want to play the lead in the forthcoming film adaptation of one of her books. The story is met with amusement by Sean and Neville, but I am so overcome with bitterness that I can barely muster a smile. Waves of bilious jealousy froth within me. Hollywood? I don’t even have any bloody books at my book launch.

Some time later, Anna has still not returned. My mind drifts as I begin to wonder what could possibly be taking her so long. Suddenly this afternoon’s worries crowd back in on me again. Why did Anna lie to me about her shopping trip? What is she trying to hide? Before long I can no longer ignore the relentless prod of my suspicions. With a mumbled excuse I break off from the group and go in search of her, fearful that I might be missing something – what, I do not know.

I go to the back of the pub. In front of the women’s toilets, I hover uncertainly, wondering what to do next. I can’t very well just barge in. The thought of Anna’s clandestine trip to the cinema this afternoon needles me insistently. I am paralysed by indecision. My spirits, astonishingly, contrive to dip even lower than they already were.

‘Hello,’ says Patricia into my ear.

I spin round. ‘Patricia,’ I gasp.

Patricia eyes me with interest. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asks, pointing at the door to the ladies’ lavatory. She smiles. I stare at her big teeth.

‘Ah.’ My mind goes blank. ‘Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to ask you a question.’

She folds her arms across her chest. ‘Be my guest.’

I stare at her, unable to formulate a thought. Then, inspiration strikes. ‘It’s about your name. That is, your pen name. Your pseudonym. Your, um, nom de plume.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, I’ve always wondered. Of all the thousands of names you could have chosen, why did you go for Candida?’ I swallow. ‘Was there, you know, a reason for naming yourself after a fungal infection?’ I attempt a look of serious enquiry.

Patricia draws herself up to her full height and looks down at me through her melting dark eyes.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she says.

To my relief, the door to the toilet opens and Anna comes out. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I say hastily. ‘Wasn’t important.’

Anna sees me and smiles. ‘Hi.’

‘Anna,’ I breathe. ‘There you are.’

‘I think I’ll just –’ says Patricia, frowning. She turns and pushes open the door to the lavatory.

I wave weakly at her disappearing back.

‘What are you doing out here?’ asks Anna, slipping her arm through mine and giving me a squeeze.

‘I, er, oh, just chatting with Patricia.’

‘Well, come on,’ says Anna. ‘Let’s get back to the party. We’re missing all the fun.’

‘OK,’ I say, my nerves electric.

The rest of the evening passes without further incident. There are no big scenes, no dramas of note. Anna and I finally fall into a cab at about eleven o’clock. As I sit next to her, watching her laugh, I feel myself torn in two. I don’t want this moment to end. I want to stay within the cocoon of this taxi and keep the outside world at bay. This is all right; this will do just fine. But the journey will end, this moment of sanctuary will pass, and then I will have to square up to my wife’s lies.

Anna chats on, unaware of my anxiety, pulling on a cigarette. Her shawl slips as she talks, revealing a bare shoulder, vulnerable in its nakedness. I hold her hand, and watch her talk.

Anna and I have been married for five years. We lived together in glorious, highly enjoyable sin for six years before that, and dated each other for two years before that. A grand total of thirteen years, so far. We have gently graduated from each stage of togetherness to the next, merging our lives in new levels of delicious interconnectedness. There were the obvious things – our paperbacks mingling together on the bookshelf, the joint bank account – but the real intertwining took place in a more private sphere: the reassuring warmth of our collective history, a mutual repository of memories; each other’s favourite jokes fondly tolerated; the solace of shared values; the bliss of unreserved intimacy.

After we left university, we got a place together in London. While Anna spent her days at law school, I did the housework and worked on the first of my five abysmal, unpublished novels. We had only just enough money to survive, but we were young, and in love. We didn’t need much, except each other.

While I remained at home, still seeking the elusive formula for that critically-acclaimed-yet-phenomenally-successful first novel, Anna began her job in a large City law firm. Ten years on, she’s still there. She specialises in non-contentious corporate work, which consists of an apparently never-ending list of gnomic acronyms – M and A, HBOs, IPOs, and the rest. It baffles me how someone as sharp, funny, and quick-witted as Anna could have chosen to do something so excruciatingly boring. She’s very good at her job, though, and has gradually climbed up (or down, depending on your opinion of lawyers) the slippery pole of her profession, determinedly working her way towards promotion to fat-cat partnership. Sometimes she even appears to enjoy it. And, in the final analysis, if she’s happy, then I’m happy. After all, she’s the one who’s been putting bread on the table for all these years, and so it would be churlish of me to object to her career on aesthetic grounds.

My wife is the consummate professional, all snappy suits and ferocious work ethic. Together, we make a great team. That corporate pizzazz of hers is a perfect counterpoint to my flighty artistic temperament. She keeps my feet on the ground; I keep her eyes fixed on the stars. Anna’s colleagues are all married to other lawyers, and my creative, bohemian lifestyle makes us an exotic pair in comparison. At dinner parties I am expected to épater les bourgeois and taunt these affluent contemporaries of mine – a task that I relish, due to my staggering inferiority complex about the size of their incomes and their obvious sense of professional fulfilment.

Anna has never complained about being the sole income provider in our household. In fact she loves it that I’m a writer. She has been unfailingly supportive and generous. It was Anna who picked me up each time the onslaught of publishers’ letters came barrelling through the letterbox, rejecting my latest novel and smashing my confidence. It was Anna who cajoled me back to my typewriter, persuading me to try again. Without her, I would have given up years ago. She is my spine, my support system, as reliable as a mother’s heartbeat.

Of course, we’ve had our moments. We’re human, after all. We fight, like everyone else. My refusal to face up to some of life’s more earthly realities frustrates her sometimes. And there have been occasions when she overanalyses things, which can act as a brake on spontaneity. But we do all right. We’re each other’s biggest fans. I am her hero. She is my life.

Now, I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. After all these years, I am still madly in love with my wife. I have adored her, worshipped her, idolised her, ever since we met. Since I first laid eyes on her, in fact. She is the only woman I have ever loved. She makes me breathless, giddy with the possibilities of life. Not everyone gets dealt the full hand, the love that changes your life for ever. But lucky, lucky me – I got the whole shooting match, the full kit and caboodle. I have felt the ecstasy of indescribable ardour, the delirium of true, deep romance.

But.

Just lately, something is not quite right.

It began with nothing more than a niggle, which I did my best to ignore. While I was looking the other way, though, the niggle quietly worked through my emotional defences, mutating as it did so into fully-fledged disquiet, and then took up residence, implacably unbudging, at the forefront of my brain, holding every idea hostage, souring every felicitous thought.

Here’s the thing: Anna has changed.

It’s nothing big. She hasn’t grown horns. Indeed, the accumulated evidence is flimsy at best, perhaps nothing more than circumstantial. But I’ve become so attuned to her behavioural nuances that even the smallest deviation from the norm is grotesquely distorted through the prism of my expectations. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts where there are merely shadows. Well, yes. Perhaps. But if you mistake a shadow for a ghost, you’re still spooked. Anyway, my doubts are immune to logic; they mock reasoned analysis. They’re simply there, wreaking their own poisonous brand of havoc.

So, to the naming of parts. Dissecting my paranoia item by item:

In conversation Anna used to latch on to an issue and rip into it mercilessly, analysing and arguing with her flawless, legally-trained logic. For her, intellectual stimulation was a matter of rigorous exercise rather than capricious whimsy. Every opinion, every assertion, had to be backed up and justified with rational and cogent arguments. No intellectual floppiness was tolerated. Talking to Anna was like cerebral boot camp.

But recently there has been an unmistakable change: Anna’s head now seems to be lodged firmly in the clouds. She meanders carelessly from topic to topic, leaving matters unresolved, issues open. She often drifts off into wordless reverie halfway through a sentence, as if she has been distracted by a more diverting train of thought. After years of her unflagging intellectual rigour, this new approach is unnerving. It’s as if a convoy of hippies has accidentally wandered into her brain and set up a commune there.

Next, we have perhaps the most frightening words in the English language: Gym Membership.

For Anna, sport and physical exercise have always been a boring irrelevance, a fatuous waste of time. She has never understood why I cherish my Arsenal season ticket so much. (I once made the mistake of asking her to the pub to watch an away game on the big screen. She didn’t talk to me for two days afterwards, furious that I had ignored her completely for an hour and a half. I tried to explain: you go to watch, not to chat.) There’s a neurone missing up there somewhere, a faulty connection: the excitement, the passion, the despair and the elation all just pass her by. And although I love football, I would never dream of playing myself. Dedicated and indolent smokers, Anna and I were united in our scornful rejection of any activity (except for the obvious) which required any physical exertion.

Suddenly, though, Anna has started going to the gym.

She arrived home one evening with a carrier bag from Lillywhites full of leotards and dazzlingly white trainers with soles as thick as telephone directories. She had decided, she announced, to treat her body with a bit more respect. She was spending too much time sitting behind her desk, letting her body go. I protested that her body hadn’t gone anywhere – and indeed it hasn’t. But her mind was already made up. Now she goes to a swanky gym near her office three times a week. She arrives home completely wiped out, but strangely elated, speaking in riddles about endorphins. I always thought that endorphins were small, grizzled creatures in The Lord of the Rings. I listen to her talk, and wonder what has prompted this madness.

The final piece to this rather hazy jigsaw is the abrupt change in Anna’s musical taste. Or, to be more specific, the sudden advent of Anna’s musical taste. She has never been particularly interested in listening to music. Instead, she listens to pop. And not just pop, but bad pop. Since the heyday of Take That she has had an unfathomable fondness for boy bands. You know the type. There are usually four or five pretty-looking boys, whose only apparent talent is the ability to walk moodily along a windswept beach. For some reason only one of them can ever actually sing, so he does all the work while the others prance about behind him in carefully choreographed ataxy. I have pointed out to Anna on numerous occasions that these manufactured bands are monstrously cynical exercises in the exploitation of the burgeoning libidos of prepubescent girls, and that someone of her age and intelligence should know better. Still, she can’t resist the lure of Tower Records on Camden High Street every Saturday afternoon, where she will eagerly buy the latest offering of undiluted schmaltz from Ronny, Donny, and Johnny. And Brian. (There’s always one called Brian.)

Well, all that has suddenly changed. Anna’s Westlife CD has been consigned to the dusty racks of the unloved, and has been replaced by something which is actually (hard though this may be to imagine) far scarier.

It’s bye-bye boys; hello Ravel.

Now, Ravel: ‘Boléro’, right? Torville and Dean. Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. Naff, pseudo-Spanish gimmickry. Well, yes. But this isn’t ‘Boléro’. This is something altogether different. Anna has brought home a recording of Ravel’s piano trio. And it’s beautiful, beguiling music – rich, compelling, and frightening beyond belief. Anna listens with a rapt, faraway look in her eyes which I do not recognise. As I watch her immerse herself in the music, new barriers silently erect themselves between us. I find myself yearning for the bland awfulness of Anna’s fabricated pop stars and their lovely teeth.

Regarded objectively, I’m aware that all of this may not seem like much, but the accumulation of these tiny changes has slowly been crowding in on me, messing with my head. All I really want is some reassurance. I need to know that none of this portends a more significant, more sinister change.

That’s why, last week, I began to examine the contents of Anna’s suit pockets.

My searches have revealed little so far: a receipt for a new pair of tights, a plastic toothpick, a chewed biro top. This bland innocuity whips me up into ever increasing spirals of anxiety, so I’ve also started to conduct jittery forays into Anna’s handbag while she’s in the bath. Her contented splashes almost make my heart stop as I delve into the bag’s scented darkness, clumsily scattering peppermints and tampons in my quest for clues.

The lack of meaningful results from my surreptitious prying made me realise with an unpleasant jolt how little I know about what Anna actually does all day. Vast swathes of her life are hidden from view behind the grey façade of her office near Moorgate. Consequently I spent last Friday hovering on the street near where she works, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did, of course. Anna didn’t even leave the office for lunch. She eventually emerged, looking tired and drawn, at seven o’clock in the evening, and went straight home.

It was the frustration of that unenlightening experiment that prompted me to follow Anna on her purported shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. Out in public, I reasoned, I would be able to observe her without interruption. There was nothing sinister about it, nothing untoward. I’m no deranged obsessive. (Anyway, I doubt whether it’s technically possible to stalk your own wife.) I just wanted to observe Anna with her guard down. I wanted to see how she behaved without me around. That was all.

Of course, I wish I hadn’t done it now. All of my worries have been compounded by Anna’s purposeful stride towards the matinée showing of Citizen Kane, and her cool, deliberate lies.

Why did I not stay at home?

I am trapped, helplessly pinioned on the skewers of my own distrust. Worse, I don’t even know what it is I should be worrying about: my emotional radar isn’t sufficiently well-equipped to interpret all these alien signals. There’s a little green dot flashing angrily on my screen, telling me that there’s something out there, but I can’t tell what it is.

Sometimes I wonder whether I want to know.

On Monday morning, when I wake up, I am alone in the bed.

I roll over and look at the alarm clock. It is just after nine o’clock. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments, then reluctantly pull back the duvet and stagger into the kitchen. On the table is a note.

Have a good Monday,darling. Hope the writing goes well. Please will you get some (lavender!) loo roll when you go shopping today? We’re nearly out.

A

On weekdays Anna is always long gone by the time I wake up. Instead of a goodbye kiss every morning I receive one of these notes, which contain the occasional unsolicited endearment and (more regularly) gentle reminders of the chores that I, the doyen of house-husbandry, am expected to do each day.

Also on the kitchen table is an envelope with a lurid Australian stamp. It is a card from my parents – late as always – wishing me luck for the launch party. My mother has written a brief message inside the card, Sorry we can’t be with you on your special day. I snort at this. They’re not sorry in the slightest.

My parents had been living a quietly middle-aged life in the shallows of Hertfordshire until one Saturday evening four years ago, when their lives changed forever. My mother called me as soon as she had recovered her power of speech after she had watched her numbers roll out of the National Lottery machine. Six balls nestling alongside each other in a narrow Perspex tube: their passport away from Home Counties drudgery. They had to share their jackpot with four other winners, but still pocketed well over one and a half million quid. There was much celebration, not least by me. Two of the numbers that my mother always picked were based on my birthday, so I felt that I had a legitimate claim to some of the proceeds. Anyway, all parents would distribute at least a share of such a huge windfall to their nearest and dearest, wouldn’t they?

Apparently not.

Within a week, my mother and father had put their house in Potters Bar on the market and had decided to move to Australia. I wasn’t given a penny of their new-found fortune. It was explained to me that nowadays one and a half million pounds wasn’t really that much, and that they couldn’t afford to start giving handouts to all and sundry. I pointed out that, as their only child, it was arguably disingenuous to describe me as ‘all and sundry’, but my complaints fell on determinedly deaf ears.

My parents’ new ambition is to annexe the world through their camera lens. They spend more time travelling than they do in their brand-new, architect-designed beach house just outside Perth. The only place they refuse to visit is England – too boring, apparently, my continued presence here notwithstanding. Whatever happened to growing old gracefully? They really shouldn’t be having so much fun at their age, especially not as they’re whittling away my inheritance in the process.

At least Mum and Dad have acknowledged that my novel has been published, which is more than can be said for my parents-in-law. There is nothing that Anna’s father likes to do more than enumerate, at length, my many failings – particularly when I am within earshot. My greatest transgression is that I do not have a Proper Job. A Proper Job, in this context, is one that commands a basic annual salary in the middling six-figure range (that’s excluding twice-yearly bonuses large enough to buy a Porsche or two) and requires a wardrobe full of pinstripe suits. My father-in-law thinks I’m little more than a parasite, greedily feeding off the fruits of his daughter’s industry. He obviously has no idea how much effort goes into writing a novel. I had rather hoped that the publication of Licked would allay his misgivings, but both he and Anna’s obnoxious mother have ignored it completely. There have been no polite enquiries, no words of congratulations, nothing but the icy silence of sour indifference.

Sometimes, I have to admit, I share Anna’s parents’ loathing of my job. There are occasions when I wish I had become an accountant instead, but my fate was writ large in the constellations, indelibly inscribed in the heavens by a celestial hand greater than my own. Ultimately, I was powerless to resist the sweet song of my Muse. I was put on this earth to write; and so write I must.

I began making up stories as a child. I would slave over these heavily derivative tales (one was called, ‘The Tiger, the Wizard, and the Chest of Drawers’) and would then solemnly recite them in front of my parents, who always applauded kindly (and doubtless with relief) when I finished. And this was the key: I loved being the centre of attention. That clapping was for me. The hubristic lure of approbation was what got me in the end. I was powerless to resist my all-consuming egotism.

But it’s not all my fault. I also blame Ernest Hemingway. It was reading A Moveable Feast, his account of his life in Paris during the twenties, that made me think that being a writer would be an enjoyable way to earn a living. Hemingway, the lying bastard, made the writer’s existence sound too alluring to resist. He cavorted around Paris with his glamorous chums, knocking out literary masterpieces in between drinking binges in the glittering bars of the Left Bank. I was captivated by his stories of ordering oysters and a bottle of white wine to celebrate the completion of a story. I wanted a slice of that carefree, bohemian existence.

(I did get a job, once. It was after my third unpublished effort, Peeling the Grape, had been met with the by then familiar chorus of indifference and hostility from thirty-five of the country’s largest publishers. Crushed, I decided to give my self-esteem a break and resolved to abandon fiction completely. I had done my best; it was time to submit to the inevitable. Literature’s loss was to be the advertising industry’s gain. I sent my rather sparse CV – embellished with one or two half-truths and three or four outright whoppers – to a few advertising agencies. To my surprise, I managed to blag my way into a copywriting job in a small agency in Fitzrovia. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I had anticipated; there was none of the coke-snorting excess amongst the creatives that I had always imagined. Instead people nervously sat at their desks, desperately trying to think of ways to persuade people to buy things that they didn’t want. The atmosphere of paranoid terror quickly seeped into me by some sort of awful corporate osmosis. I began to lie awake at night, terrified that my creative juices would abandon me. In fact, released from the demanding, unforgiving shackles of writing fiction, my creativity blossomed. It was just a pity that the narrow-minded account executives couldn’t see past the ends of their noses, which were buried in the lucrative feeding trough of bland conventionality. They weren’t interested in my radical ideas. Personally, I thought that my use of some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, cleverly altered to praise a diabolical brand of versatile low-fat cream cheese (‘How do I eat thee? Let me count the ways’, etc.), was breathtakingly innovative. When I refused to come up with alternative ideas, they sacked me on the spot. I went back to my typewriter, weeping with relief. The experiment had lasted three and a half weeks.)

The irony is that now I sometimes think that I would love an ordinary, boring job again. All this freedom is getting me down. Hours, days, and weeks stretch ahead of me, oppressive in their emptiness. The ordered structure of a nine-to-five existence would give me a solid framework for my life, a means of regulating the chaos. I would dearly love to be told where to put my pencil-sharpener; I yearn for a militantly officious boss. As it is, the only taskmaster I have is me, and I am a workshy dilettante at the best of times. I have the worst of both worlds. I don’t get any work done, and have nobody but myself to blame.

Another long day looms.

I go into the sitting room, and turn on the record player. The needle lands softly on the rotating vinyl, and after a moment –

Bam! The pitch-perfect trumpets punch out the jumped-up tune, the saxophones gliding smoothly beneath them. This is ‘Cotton Tail’, ladies and gentlemen, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the greatest jazz band in the world. Here comes the warm tenor sax of Ben Webster, rocking gently through his solo, prancing over the band’s tightly syncopated chords. Duke’s piano gets a few rollicking bars, and then the seamless sax section takes up the charge, followed by the swinging trumpets, spiralling ever higher.

I shut my eyes. This is the spiritual equivalent of brushing my teeth. The music leaves my soul refreshed and protected against decay. I sit on the floor, next to the speakers, and wallow in the rich symphony of jazzed horn lines which spill into the room.

Edward Kennedy Ellington, the Duke, that grand old aristocrat of jazz, was one of the music’s true pioneers. From his beginnings as a dapper and debonair band leader in 1920s Harlem, he became the friend of royalty and presidents, loved and admired the world over. He toured tirelessly throughout his career, spreading his own brand of syncopated happiness, dazzling audiences everywhere with his exciting rhythms, his unforgettable tunes, and his suave showmanship. He loved us madly – and his gift to the world was his music. Now jazz, of course, is meant to be the quintessence of cool. It’s about tortured genius, complex chord structures, jarring time-signatures. It’s about squalling saxophone solos, smoky subterranean joints, and sultry, mysterious women. Duke was as hip as they came, but this isn’t just music to smoke to. It’s music to dance to, as well. I have pulled Anna around this room many times, laughing and twirling to the band’s upbeat tempos.

As the music plays on, I survey the spines of my record collection. I own yards of Ellington records, neatly arranged on their shelves. I have LPs, EPs, battered 78s, reissues, and foreign imports, from the pristine and unplayed to the almost unplayable. I love them all dearly. They are the proud result of fifteen years’ trawling through the dusty racks of second-hand record shops, hours spent hunched over acres of old cardboard. I still spend days arranging and rearranging my records. I love the endless cycle of processing and regulation: marshalling my Duke Ellington collection allows me to impose my own brand of order in at least one small corner of this otherwise uncontrollable world.

I own almost every note that Duke ever recorded, but there’s one performance that I still dream about. Here’s the story. Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s enigmatic collaborator and co-songwriter, dies on 31 May 1967 – finally claimed by cancer. Duke is devastated. He’s lost his crutch, his right-hand man, his creative pivot. Three months after his death, the Ellington Orchestra assembles in RCA Victor Studio ‘A’ in Manhattan to record a tribute album of Strayhorn compositions. At the end of the second day of the session, while the rest of the band are packing up and getting ready to go home, Duke sits at the piano and, unaccompanied, plays a tender Strayhorn tune, ‘Lotus Blossom’. It is Duke’s personal tribute to a man he loved deeply.

That much we all know. It’s after this that the myth begins:

As the studio empties, Duke remains at the piano, staring at the keys, alone with his memories. He’s an old man, now. Still dapper, still elegant, but tired after a lifetime of hard graft and sacrifice. Ellington turns and faces his loss – and starts to play the blues. Tune after tune, the piano cries a sad song of loss and heartache. The wistful, tender lyricism of this final, intimate salute is unbearably poignant. He plays seven or eight laments, quietly closes the piano lid, and shuffles home.

Unknown to Duke, one man has remained in the engineering booth throughout, and has quietly switched on the tape to capture the impromptu performance. The engineer, a young Italian called Alessandro Ponti, has a string of gambling debts to his name that he is unable to pay. He spirits away the illicit tape, his eye on a quick profit and an end to his financial troubles. Some test acetate pressings are produced before Ponti loses his nerve and decides to destroy the master tape. But by that time the acetate pressings are already in circulation, and they are still out there somewhere.

That, at any rate, is the story.

Since then, the fate of those lost recordings has inspired decades of obsessive speculation and wishful rumours. For Ellington enthusiasts, those acetate pressings are our Loch Ness Monster, our Holy Grail. Nobody even knows if they really exist or not. I still cannot resist scouring the second-hand record racks in the hope that one of the pressings will magically appear at my fingertips.

I climb into the shower, whistling a medley of Ellington tunes. A few minutes later, as I am drying myself (by way of indolent rub, rather than the efficient, chafingly vigorous towel-work that Anna favours) I notice three virgin rolls of lavender loo paper in the wicker basket next to the toilet. This is what Anna calls ‘nearly out’? I cannot think of any disaster – global, domestic, or intestinal – that could possibly put our present reserves of toilet paper under immediate threat, but Anna suffers from that exclusively female psychosis whereby she gets twitchy if we have less than a quarter of a mile of readily available bog roll.

By the time I have washed and dressed, it is almost ten o’clock. With a knot in my stomach, I put on my coat and walk to our local bookshop.

As I stand in the doorway of the shop, I take a couple of deep breaths. I want to be poised, calm, so that I will remember this moment. I’ve been into this bookshop hundreds of times, but this morning is different. Licked is officially published today. My role has changed. I’m no longer just another browser. From now on I shall be part of the stock. I shall be a commodity. I shall be a browsee.

Inside, there are only one or two customers nosing about. Behind the main desk stand two scruffy individuals in shapeless jumpers. I wander up to the New Releases table. Licked isn’t there. I inspect the Bestsellers table. Finally I walk over to my bit of shelf between Nancy and Iris. Then I go over to the desk.

‘Do you have a novel by Matthew Moore?’ I ask. ‘It’s called Licked.’

One of the assistants pulls a face. ‘Matthew Moore? Doesn’t ring a bell.’

I smile thinly at him. ‘I think it’s quite new.’

The man turns to his colleague. ‘Declan. You ever heard of a Matthew Moore?’

The other man wrinkles his nose. ‘Nah.’

I put my hands deep in my pockets. ‘Could you check?’

‘Hold on.’ The first assistant taps at the computer keyboard on the desk, and peers at the screen. ‘Let me see. Here we are. Moore, M. Licked. Wellington Press.’

‘That’s it,’ I say eagerly.

‘It’s actually published today,’ the man tells me.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’

There is a pause.

‘So have you got any?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ Deflation beckons. ‘Have you got some on order?’

The man peers at his screen again. ‘No.’

‘Are you going to order some?’

‘No.’

I think. ‘Can I order one?’

‘I suppose so,’ says the man reluctantly.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘I’ll do that, then.’

‘Who are Wellington Press, anyway?’ asks the man. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

‘Me neither,’ agrees Declan, yawning.

Neville, I reflect ruefully, would be delighted.

‘It’s just that I heard that this book was absolutely brilliant,’ I say.

The first man looks doubtful. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

I stare at him, dumbstruck. I can’t admit who I really am. It would be too embarrassing. And lying would be too desperate, too sad. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I mumble. ‘I’ll see if I can find it somewhere else.’

The assistant shrugs. ‘Suit yourself,’ he says.

I walk away from the till with the saunter of a man without a care in the world, the saunter of someone who isn’t bothered whether this stupid bookshop has any copies of Licked by Moore, M., or not. I stroll nonchalantly back towards the front of the shop, whistling to myself, until I stop short, the tune dying on my lips.

In front of me is not a stack, not a pile, but rather a mountain of books. They have been built up in a pyramid, about six feet high and four or five feet across at the base. The book which has been used to construct this monstrous edifice is called Virgin on Mergin’, the latest effort by another of Sean’s clients, Bernadette Brannigan. This is the most recent novel in her long-running Virgin series, which began with the now infamous pile of tripe, Virgin on the Ridiculous. I pick up a book and read the blurb on the back cover. Virgin on Mergin’ tells the story of the gormless heroine, Poppy Flipflop, and her attempts to find a husband. To my disbelief there are quotes from several literary luminaries on the back cover. Julian Barnes describes the book as ‘Devastatingly Original’. A. S. Byatt calls Brannigan ‘the most astute chronicler of female social angst since Jane Austen’. I am convinced that these encomiums have been fabricated without the knowledge or consent of their alleged authors. As if A. S. Byatt would ever dream of reading such dross.

The book is atrociously written, with pedestrian jokes, terrible puns, mildly raunchy sex scenes, and painfully obvious payoffs. It is undemanding pap. It is, frankly, shit. I know, because I’ve read it. Actually, I’ve read all of Bernadette Brannigan’s books, and they’re all exactly the same. That, of course, is why she is the most popular writer in Britain.

I stomp home, utterly deflated.

After the anticlimax of my trip to the bookshop, a cloud of gloom settles over me. I lie on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes the flat feels like a prison. We live in Camden, in a small street off Kentish Town Road. It’s as good a place as any to live in London, except perhaps on weekends, when millions of bargain-hunters invade the area in search of tatty afghan coats and PVC boots at the weekend markets. Our one-bedroom flat is in the basement of a converted terraced house. There’s a small garden, conveniently swathed in concrete. I live here; this is my home; but my name isn’t on the property deeds. We were advised that it might be best if the mortgage were taken out solely in Anna’s name. Building society managers, we were told, were a conservative lot. They might be reluctant to lend money to a writer with no meaningful income. Solicitors were a much safer bet. I was, in other words, a liability.

So, here I am, in my home which is not actually mine. I feel remote, deracinated. It is hard for me to share Anna’s enthusiasm for the place. When we venture out to the antique stalls of Camden Lock, she leads the charge. I do my best to muster some interest, trying to make an emotional investment, if not a financial one.

I clamber off the sofa and find Anna’s recording of the Ravel piano trio. I prise open the case. The compact disc, catching the winter sunlight and rainbowing promises into the room, glints like the polished blade of a killer’s knife. I put it into the machine and press play.

I listen as the violin paints its simple melody, elegant arcs of beauty hanging in the air. The cello weeps a rich, mournful echo. Each day I listen to this music, secretly, on my own. I have been beguiled, seduced. But even as I am hypnotised by the piece’s sorrowful beauty, a small voice in the back of my mind is whispering: what happened to those cheeky chappies in Westlife? Where is Anna’s Backstreet Boys CD now?

When the fourth movement of the piece draws to its electrifying conclusion, I stand up and open my saxophone case. I need to chase away the ghost of Ravel’s music, which lingers long after the notes themselves have died. I have a Weltklang tenor saxophone, a 1950s model. The bell of the horn is chipped in a hundred places. The bottom keys were broken off long ago when Ron accidentally trod on them after a gig, but I don’t mind. It’s mine, and I love it.

I begin my daily practice by playing some arpeggios in diminished fourths. Some I knock off easily; others I struggle with, going over them again and again, until I am satisfied or too bored to carry on. Gradually my mood lifts, as I concentrate on the patterns of notes. Gavin has written some new music for the rehearsal tomorrow. The tune is called ‘Urban Machinations – the Plight of the Zeitgeist’. I play it through a few times. It’s a gentle waltz, really quite pretty.

The tune reminds me of another waltz, the old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune ‘My Favourite Things’ – not the saccharine-heavy rendition by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, but John Coltrane’s interpretation, tinged with eastern mysticism and steeped in lyrical beauty. I have the music somewhere. I put down my saxophone and go into our bedroom. There I open one of the cupboards, humming quietly, looking for my folder of sheet music.

As I search, I find an old diving mask and snorkel gathering dust in a cardboard box. I pull them out and examine them. I remember these. When I was a young boy I wanted to be a scuba diver. Every night I took this mask and snorkel into the bath, and spent hours lying face down in the water, my face just submerged, staring at the plug. In my head I was exploring ship wrecks, inspecting coral, swimming through schools of exotic fish. In the end, though, my asthma thwarted me. I was told that I would never be able to dive with an aqualung, as my lungs weren’t strong enough. The mask, and my dreams, were abandoned.

I replace the mask and snorkel in the box and continue my search. When I find the folder of music, I take it back into the sitting room and spend an hour flicking through the yellowing sheets, playing old tunes.

My practice finished, I can procrastinate no longer. Cautiously I slide into the chair in front of my typewriter. (Proper writers use typewriters, by the way. No word processors for us. The soundtrack of creative genius is the clatter-clatter of crashing keys, not the soulless hum of the laptop.) I stare at my Olivetti for ten minutes, and then with my right index finger I wipe a layer of dust off the space key.

For this is my terrible secret: I am suffering from writer’s block – a heavy-duty, career-crippling dose of it, as unmoveable as the Alps. It weighs me down like an unforgiving yoke, pulverising my spirit. The longer I sit in front of my typewriter, the harder it is to begin. I am caught in a hellish downward spiral of petrified inactivity.

To complicate matters further, I have been less than forthright with Anna about my problem. She believes that my next novel is nearing completion. In fact, so far I have written only one sentence.

Here it is:

The moustachioed peasant rested his not inconsiderable weight on the swarthily crooked ash walking stick that he carried with him everywhere he went – Illic had never seen him without it somewhere on his corpulent body – and gazed up towards the towering clouds that were amassing ominously overhead in the sky above the terrain upon which they stood, side by side, and emitted a raspy breath before intoning in that authoritative voice that the boy loved and admired almost as much as the old man himself, ‘All I am saying, Illic my boy, is that we should give peace a chance.’

I’ve spent hundreds of hours crafting and reworking this, but it’s still very much a work in progress. For example, I’m having second thoughts about the ‘swarthily crooked’ walking stick. The image is almost too rich, too complex. I read my solitary sentence again. Is it, I wonder, too demanding, too majestic, for an opening paragraph?

This will be a rites-of-passage novel which uses, as a structural device, song titles of the Plastic Ono Band to establish the chronology of the narrative. It’s all rather complicated, and is lodged firmly in my head. The difficulty is getting it from my head on to a sheet of paper. At the moment it refuses to budge. Instead it just sits there, driving me mad with frustration and guilt.

After a few minutes I abandon my typewriter and prowl around the flat. A sea of champagne corks floats in a bowl on the coffee table. I pick up a cork and examine it. Around its neck Anna has written in black biro, ‘A’s BIRTHDAY. M, A, THERESA + AL’. This is one of Anna’s intransigent habits: every time we drink champagne, she keeps the cork and inscribes on it the details of the event and who was there to help us drink it. This bowl is an alcoholic documentary of our time together. If I delve deeply enough, I will find corks commemorating our engagement, the flat purchase, Anna’s qualification as a solicitor. These corks have always bewildered me. I have never been able to invest inanimate objects with particular emotive significance, but Anna loves to rummage through the bowl, sighing with memories. Her birthday was five months ago; I remember nothing about it. I certainly don’t remember drinking champagne with my sister-in-law Theresa and her idiotic husband Alistair. This bowl, so full of memories for Anna, is quite empty for me.

I walk into the bedroom and start sifting through the laundry basket. It’s Monday, so it’s whites. As I work, I ponder the fate of my novel. Given Neville’s aversion to advertising or marketing, perhaps it’s not surprising that the staff in the bookshop hadn’t heard of me. I put down the bundle of dirty clothes on the bed and open the top drawer of Anna’s dresser. I am confronted by her collection of exotic silk underwear. Beneath these alluring items lie prosaic white cotton stand-bys, and one or two more elaborate pieces, frilly things with lace panels and interesting quick-release gussets. I begin to dig, but I am not looking for saucy lingerie: this is where Anna hid the joint that we smoked on Saturday evening, before the launch party. I am hoping that she had more than one stashed away: I am suddenly craving a calming hit of marijuana. I’m not in the habit of smoking pot in the middle of the day, but after my book’s abject non-appearance in the bookshop, I need cheering up.

As I delve, my fingers fall on something alien amongst the smooth silk. I pull out a small, sky blue bag. On the front are printed the words ‘TIFFANY & CO’ in black type. Curious, I open the bag and tip out its contents. On to my open palm fall two silver cufflinks. Their design is simple: heavily-wrought silver knots are connected by a gleaming argent arc. They are elegant, unfussy, and beautiful.

I sit down on the bed, my search for drugs forgotten.

After half an hour I carefully put the Tiffany bag back where I found it.

They were unquestionably men’s cufflinks. But they couldn’t be for me. Anna knows I’d never wear them; I own one shirt and one tie which I put on, grudgingly, once a year, for the mandatory appearance at church with Anna’s family on Christmas Day.

But if they’re not for me, then who are they for?

And why has Anna gone to the effort of hiding them?

Suddenly the flat seems unbearably small. The walls close in around me. My discovery of the cufflinks brings all my worries about Anna back, redoubled. Claustrophobia crowds in. Pulling on my coat, I hurry out of the flat. Drawing in cold lungfuls of icy November air, I walk quickly through Camden, hoping to escape my anxieties. The streets are quiet, unrecognisable from the edgy chaos of the weekend and its quick, carnival atmosphere.

I turn left past Chalk Farm station and walk over the bridge which spans the railway lines, towards Primrose Hill. On Regents Park Road, the atmosphere of domestic refinement is in stark contrast to the litter-strewn sprawl of Camden High Street. Leaves dance in the quiet road. I step through the gate at the bottom of Primrose Hill. In the distance two figures, their collars turned up against the wind, walk their dogs. I begin to climb the steep path up the hill. At the summit, the wind whistles past my ears. I almost feel as if I’ve escaped London’s grimy clutches. I look southwards across Regent’s Park and towards the grey, silent city beyond.

What is happening with Anna?

I allow the wind to sweep through me, clearing my head. Up here I am free, shucked from my life. Finally I walk back down the hill, through the long grass towards the swooping aviary of London Zoo. At Prince Albert Road I turn left and trudge back towards Camden, my mind a grateful blank. On the way home I go into the supermarket. After finding everything I need for supper, I wander over to the Household Goods aisle for a spot of thoroughly modern angst.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the grim realisation dawns that the party is over – that it’s finally time to grow up. This usually happens when people take out their first mortgage, make their first pension contribution, or change their first nappy. Of course, I haven’t done any of those things. For me, the death knell of my carefree youth, the herald of sombre responsibility, was when I started having to buy lavender toilet paper.

Until our bathroom was redecorated I never worried about what colour of loo roll I pulled off the shelf; I chose whatever pastel hue took my fancy. But all that has changed now. Now it’s any colour I like, as long as it’s lavender. Lavender, Anna tells me firmly, is the only colour that works. I have reservations about this rigidly monochromatic approach. Does it really matter whether we use colour coordinated paper? Would it really spoil the overall aesthetic effect if we had Buttercup Yellow, just for once? It’s a bathroom, after all, not an art gallery. But Anna is unmoveable on this issue. Lavender it must be. I pull a pack of four rolls off the shelf and deposit them in my basket with a heavy heart.

I walk home with my shopping. Tonight, as usual, I will be cooking chicken. I am great at chicken. I am a maître de poulet, a fowl supremo. I can grill it, roast it, poach it, steam it, pan-fry it, blanche it, deep-fry it, curry it, stew it, parboil it, barbecue it, griddle it, marinade it, or stuff it. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing I can cook. Tonight, I am preparing pan-fried chicken breasts in a cream, garlic and cider sauce. I put the shopping away and consult the recipe book, even though I won’t be cooking for hours yet.

Lunch is baked beans on toast, and then I settle down in front of the television for my usual afternoon diet of wooden game-shows and repeats of old soap operas on UK Gold. My brain goes numb, which is how I like it nowadays. I resolutely ignore my typewriter on the table behind me. It sits in silent reproach as I stare, eyes glazed, at the television screen. My fingers never stray far from the remote control, as I flash across the networks, praising the day they laid the cable in our street. I try and follow six or seven programmes simultaneously, in an attempt to distract my brain from Anna and the cufflinks hidden in her underwear drawer. It doesn’t work. I cannot get the sight of the heavy lumps of silver out of my mind.

After all the recent changes in Anna’s behaviour, especially after her furtive trip to the cinema, I no longer know what to think.

By the early evening news, I have wound myself into a tight ball of anxiety. I realise that I am going to have to ask Anna about the cufflinks if I am to avoid the descent into fretful madness. I run through various possible opening gambits, trying to decide how to broach the subject. I need something nonchalant, urbane, and relaxed. Every formulation I concoct is nervy, self-pitying, and paranoid.

Finally, at about eight o’clock, I hear the front door open. I feel my heart stretch and skip a beat in anticipation.

‘It’s me,’ calls Anna from the hall.

I get up to greet her. She is hanging up her coat. ‘Hello you,’ she says. I kiss her on the cheek. We walk into the kitchen. Anna sits down at the table and lights a cigarette.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Come on. Tell me everything. What was it like?’

‘What was what like?’

‘Don’t be a tease, Matthew. Seeing your book on the shelves. All that stuff. Did you see anyone buy a copy?’

I sigh. ‘Actually, they didn’t have any.’

Anna looks at me. ‘None?’

‘None.’

‘Oh.’

‘They told me that they’d never heard of me, they hadn’t ordered any copies, and they weren’t going to. It wasn’t exactly the most electrifying start to my career.’

‘Oh, sweetheart. I’m sorry.’ Anna takes a long drag of her cigarette. ‘Have you told Neville?’

I shake my head. ‘He’ll probably be delighted.’

‘Well, don’t worry. It’s only one bookshop, after all. There are plenty more out there.’

‘Hmm,’ I reply doubtfully.

‘How was the rest of your day?’ she asks. ‘What progress on the next masterpiece?’

I think guiltily of my solitary paragraph. ‘Actually, it’s hard going at the moment. I’m struggling with some of the characters.’

Anna grins. ‘Are they not doing what they’re told? Naughty characters.’

I shift uncomfortably. ‘Something like that. The main character, right, Illic –’

‘Illic?’ snorts Anna. ‘What sort of name is that?’

I pause. ‘It’s Eastern European.’

‘Eastern European?’ Anna looks at me strangely. ‘What do you know about Eastern Europe?’

‘Enough,’ I stammer. Actually, I know nothing about Eastern Europe. But everyone accepts that nowadays serious fiction tends to be about Eastern Europeans. The only authors who still write about English characters are people like Bernadette Brannigan, because neither she nor her readers have the wit or imagination to understand how parochial and mundane it all is. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, you have the lingering spectre of Communism, lots of war, unpronounceable names, and grittily authentic characters who have not been spiritually disembowelled by the capitalist excesses of Western civilisation. It’s the perfect setting if you want to say anything relevant.

There is a pause. ‘So, go on then,’ prompts Anna. ‘About this guy Illic. Tell me more.’

‘Oh. Well, it’s difficult to explain. He’s a very complex character.’ As he would be, coming from Eastern Europe. ‘But at the moment he’s, er, subverting the author-character dialectic.’

Anna pulls a face. ‘Sounds serious.’

‘Oh, I’ll soon knock him into shape.’ There is a pause. I look at my wife anxiously. I decide to wait until after supper before I ask her about the cufflinks. ‘Hungry?’ I ask.

‘Ravenous. What are we having?’

‘Well, just for a change, I thought I might have a go at chicken.’

Anna gasps. ‘Chicken? Surely not.’

‘I’ll get started, then.’ I stand up.

Anna remains where she is, looking at the ashtray in front of her. ‘Matthew,’ she says after a moment, ‘I have some news.’

I am crouching in front of the open fridge, a blue polystyrene tray of chicken breasts in my hand. Slowly I stand and turn to face her.

‘News?’ I say uncertainly.

‘We need to talk,’ she says.

‘Talk?’

‘Something’s happened, Matthew. I’m leaving.’

I have misheard her. Surely.

‘What did you say?’ I breathe.

Anna sighs. ‘I have to go. I have no choice. I’m sorry.’

So this is it. A scythe of gut-wrenching nausea rips through me. I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t expecting this. Anna is leaving me. Just like that. My head is filled with shrill panic. I realise that she is still speaking.

‘…until about the end of the week. Mind you, it could be worse.’

I stare at her.

Anna looks at me quizzically. ‘Is that OK? I know it’s not ideal, but I thought maybe you could do with some time to yourself. You can crack on with the book.’

I shake my head. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Run it by me again.’ I put the tray of chicken breasts down on the kitchen table. My over-anxious thumb-print is clearly indented against the cool flesh of the meat.

Anna sighs. ‘Do you ever listen to me, Matthew? I have to go to Paris. On business. That pharmaceutical client I told you about.’

Paris. Business. I nod blindly. The edict has been handed down, gubernatorial discretion exercised. Clemency has been granted! I am escaping the noose, skipping away from the electric chair!

‘I have to leave tomorrow,’ continues Anna. ‘The deal should be done by the end of the week. Although you never know with the French.’

Ah, yes, the French.

Inevitably, the very mention of our garlic-chomping cousins from across the Channel sends me into a spin. The genesis of my neurosis was one Frenchman in particular, but as the years have passed my antipathy has spread to the whole lot of them.

I should explain.

A statistic that one hears from time to time on true-crime television shows is that in eighty per cent of all murder cases, the murderer and the victim know each other.

I sometimes wonder how police statisticians will categorise my crime, when I exact my longed-for revenge on Jean-Philippe Durand. Will they say we knew each other? I, the assassin, know the victim intimately. Too well. He has haunted my dreams for years. Conversely, when I step out of the shadows, my stiletto blade poised to be driven into his heart, he will look at me blankly. Which is a pity, really, because I won’t have time to explain to him exactly why it is that he must die.

Allow me to spool back fourteen years, or thereabouts:

October time. I had recently arrived at one of Oxford University’s less prestigious colleges, looking forward to an indolent three years of studying English. When I realised just how cheap the beer in the college bar was, I resolved to bluff my way through the entire syllabus. Within days of my arrival, unshakeable slothfulness had settled comfortably upon me like a high tog duvet. I spent the days eroding my paltry student grant twenty pence at a time, trying to beat the high score on the college pinball machine. I spent the evenings drinking with my friend Ian. We had met on the first day of term. Recognising in each other a shared depravity, we dispensed with the cautious friendliness that typified most new encounters in those first days of term. We didn’t bother with the usual preliminary small talk, timidly splashing around in the shallow end of the conversational swimming pool. Instead we dived right in to the heavy, do-or-die stuff, and it turned out that we both thought that ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ by the Dead Kennedys was the best song ever. Suddenly we were best friends.

(Actually, I lied about the Dead Kennedys. At the time my favourite record was ‘Such Sweet Thunder’, Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired jazz suite, but I knew that there were occasions when honesty had to be sacrificed for expediency.)

The inevitable descent into puerile loutishness followed. We spent most evenings in the college bar, drinking ourselves stupid. We liked to sit near the door so that we could ogle at all the women who came in. After the barren hinterlands of Hertfordshire, I looked on, agog. The self-confidence, pulchritude and sheer numbers of the females on display left me breathless. One evening Ian and I were sitting in our usual spot when the door opened and a girl walked in.

Whatever it is that triggers the delicious chemical imbalance in our brains that makes us stupid with infatuation, it happened to me just then. Just like that, without warning. I fell in love on the spot. Literally. All of the other girls were instantly eclipsed, fading into lifeless daguerreotypes. In contrast, this girl shone in glorious, crisply focused Technicolor. As I stared at her, I could feel the fissure cracking deep within me as her face carved itself indelibly on to my consciousness. From then on I was branded, a marked man.

The girl wasn’t wearing any make-up. She didn’t need to: her face was radiant, even in the smoky penumbra of the subterranean bar. Looking at her, it was as if someone had opened a window and let the sunshine in.

She was wearing a pair of fantastically tight jeans and a pink twin-set affair which seemed impossibly classy amidst the surrounding sea of Next jumpers and Hard Rock Café T-shirts. She had, patently, the body of a goddess. Her hair was blonde and straight, cut to just below her shoulder. Her black boots emerged alluringly from the bottom of her jeans in an unspeakably erotic way. They tapered from her elegant ankles to mean-looking points. Those boots were foxy. They just looked like trouble.

My mouth hanging open, I watched the girl walk towards the bar until she disappeared into the scrum of bodies. Stunned, I turned to Ian. His mouth was hanging open, too.

‘Holy fucking shit,’ I said.

There was a brief debate about tactics.

‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ said Ian, taking a coin out of his pocket. ‘Heads you go, tails I go.’

I gulped. Surely I wasn’t going to stake all of my future happiness on the toss of a coin? ‘OK,’ I said after a moment. If it was tails, I reasoned, I would go anyway.

Ian spun the coin and caught it on the back of his left hand, covering it with his right. He slowly lifted his fingers, hiding the coin from my view. I saw his face fall. ‘Best of three?’ he said tentatively, but I was already out of my chair, striding after her.

Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that I was some sort of silver-tongued ladies’ man. Quite the opposite, in fact: usually in such circumstances I would be an awkwardly stammering wreck. But this was an unusual situation.

I found the girl standing by the bar. And miracle of miracles, she was alone. I stood next to her, deliberately looking the other way. With fumbling fingers I lit a cigarette. Slowly I counted to five, and then pretended to notice her for the first time. I cocked a cool eyebrow.

‘Hi,’ I murmured, exhaling meaningfully through my nose. Unfortunately I was recovering from a bad cold, and the smoke shot out of my one functioning nostril in a single, lopsided plume.

‘Hello,’ said the girl neutrally.

‘I’m Matt,’ I said.

She looked at me appraisingly. ‘I’m Anna.’

‘Well, hello, Anna.’ I stuck my hand out towards her, pleased with how well this was going. She shook my hand with an amused glint in her eye, which I judiciously decided to ignore. I gestured towards the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘No thanks,’ she answered. ‘I’m not staying. Just waiting for someone.’

She did try to warn me, you see, but I sailed resolutely on past the bank of flashing hazard lights, heroically oblivious. Waiting for someone? Pah!

‘So tell me, Anna,’ I said, ‘what are you studying?’ I leaned back against the bar, neatly sticking my elbow into a puddle of spilt beer.

‘Law,’ she replied flatly, cocking her head to one side as she lit a cigarette. (Anna has always been a fantastic smoker. She smokes in an effortlessly glamorous way, as if it’s still the Sixties. I, on the other hand, just puff away artlessly, with no panache, no drama.)

‘Law? Really?’ I hoped that the crippling intellectual and sexual intimidation that I was now experiencing was not manifesting itself too obviously. ‘Wow,’ I said anxiously.

There was a pause. ‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘Me?’ I shrugged nonchalantly. ‘English, actually.’

Anna nodded, apparently not surprised.

I felt my armpits prickle with sweat. I looked down at my cigarette, and tried to compose my thoughts. ‘So anyway –’

‘Hello.’ Suddenly, the most beautiful man I had ever seen was standing next to us. Dark, curly hair fell over his eyes in a messily random way that I cattily estimated must have taken him at least thirty minutes to get just right. He could have balanced a small sherry glass on each of his cheekbones, which jutted out from a texturally flawless face. He had dark green eyes, and his chiselled jaw-line was more gracefully contoured than the leg of a Rodin nude. He smiled at me, revealing absolutely perfect teeth.

This was bad; but then things got unspeakably worse.

‘Hi sweetie,’ said Anna – and then she kissed him. My fantasy world imploded messily.

‘Having fun?’ said the man in heavily accented English.

‘This is – I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten your name.’

Anna hadn’t just forgotten my name; oh no. She had completely forgotten it. I stuck out my hand towards the man. ‘Matt Moore,’ I said.

‘Jean-Philippe Durand,’ he replied.

‘You’re French,’ I said cleverly.

Jean-Philippe Durand looked at me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is.’

‘Jean-Philippe is here for a year on a scholarship,’ explained Anna brightly.

‘Golly,’ I said hollowly. ‘Congratulations.’ My soul had begun to shred itself into tiny, forlorn pieces.

Jean-Philippe Durand inclined his head slightly. ‘Thank you. Matt.’ Was that a small sneer?

Anna looked at her watch. ‘We should be going.’

‘Off anywhere nice?’ I asked, not wanting to let her out of my sight.

‘The cinema,’ she answered. ‘Jean-Philippe insists that only the French make decent films. We decided to put his theory to the test. Yesterday we saw a Truffaut, and today it’s my turn. We’re going to watch The Third Man, which was directed by Carol Reed. Then we’ll see if he still stands by his theory.’ She grinned archly at Jean-Philippe, who had not taken his beautiful eyes off me.

I nodded, hopelessly out of my depth. ‘Ah, the great Carol Reed. One of my personal favourites, funnily enough. I think she’s wonderful.’

Disconcertingly, Anna frowned at me for a moment, then decided I was joking and laughed politely. ‘We really should be going,’ she said again.

‘Well, it was nice to meet you both,’ I said. ‘Have a great time.’

‘We will,’ said Jean-Philippe Durand with such unflappable certainty that I wanted to punch him on his beautifully sculpted nose.

‘Bye,’ said Anna, flashing me a heartbreaking smile before grabbing Jean-Philippe’s hand and turning to go out of the bar.

And that was that.

That wasn’t that, of course.

The reason why Jean-Philippe Durand will not remember me, why his brow will furrow as he sees my blade swoop down towards him in that darkened side street, is because we never spoke to each other again.

After my humiliation at the bar, I began to brood hopelessly. Anna rapidly developed into a fully-fledged obsession. All other thought or action was suddenly pretty much impossible, and pretty much meaningless. I was hopelessly in love. I spent hours staring longingly out of my window, which gave me a terrific view of the bins at the back of the college kitchens, wistfully contemplating what might have been. Rather than doing the sensible thing and forgetting about Anna by chasing after any of the hundreds of other nubile young female undergraduates, I decided to remain chaste, loyal to the girl of my dreams. I was, rather speculatively, saving myself for her.

In the meantime, I watched Anna and Jean-Philippe parade around the college, holding hands and whispering in each other’s ears. The innocent tenderness that the two of them displayed towards each other in public didn’t fool me for a moment. I knew they were at it all the time. Dirty bastards, the pair of them. They were shagging as if it were the end of the world, with wanton, lustful, pornographic abandon. I just knew it.

It was around this time that I started to write seriously, and I suppose in a way I have Jean-Philippe to thank for it. I sat down one afternoon, intending to compose a tragic love poem to Anna. The idea was that when she read it she would realise just how sensitive I was; she would then dump Jean-Philippe, pledge her heart to me for eternity, and we would live happily ever after. After thirty minutes of doodling I gave up on that idea and instead wrote a terrible and rather bleak short story which culminated in the grisly death of every single character, all of whom happened to be French.

I showed the story to Ian. He sat on my bed and read it in silence.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘I think it’s quite good,’ replied Ian.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I also think,’ he continued, ‘that you need help.’

I nodded. ‘It’s just a first draft.’

‘No.’ Ian shook his head. ‘Not with the writing. With you.’ He waved my story at me and tapped his finger against the side of his head. ‘You are one sick puppy.’

Encouraged, I began to write in earnest. The one leitmotif in all my work at that time was the gruesome demise of a good-looking Frenchman at the end of each story. In this way I killed Jean-Philippe Durand off several times, exacting revenge for the misery he had unwittingly heaped upon me. He was crushed, poisoned, shot, asphyxiated, garrotted, drowned, buried alive, exsanguinated, dismembered, hanged, electrocuted, cannibalised, starved to death, beheaded, pushed in front of an oncoming train, disembowelled, and crucified. As I reached the gory climax of each story, my handwriting would degenerate into an illegible scrawl as I rushed gleefully towards the coup de grâce, cackling maniacally as I did so.

Like Ian said, one sick puppy.

It wasn’t a good year.

I spent unhealthy amounts of time hanging around the college quads, waiting for a sighting of the happy couple. I would gaze at them wordlessly, my heart beating blackly as my envy of Jean-Philippe flourished and developed into fully-fledged hatred. Looking back on it now, I can see that he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. But that was irrelevant. He was having sex with the woman I loved. That was quite enough.

I couldn’t bring myself to approach either of them. Occasionally I would pass Anna as I scuttled through college, but she showed no signs of recognising me after my artless overtures in the college bar. The obvious thing to do was to stay away, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept going back for more, quietly crucifying myself.

Finally, the summer holidays arrived. I escaped back home, and spent three months lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the summer to end. I was unable to think of anything but my return to Oxford, and the chance to see Anna again. I couldn’t wait to inflict more pain on myself.

When we reconvened for the new academic year, Jean-Philippe Durand had returned to Paris, leaving the way open for me to try my luck with Anna again. It took several false starts before I summoned up enough courage to speak to her. Thankfully she didn’t remember our earlier encounter. I did, though. Remembering Truffaut and Carol Reed, I started chatting to her about movies, hoping to catch her interest. It worked. After our trip to see Citizen Kane and a successful dinner date a few days later, we began to see each other regularly. Every time we arranged to meet, I blinked in amazement when Anna actually appeared, clutching her thick, brightly coloured legal textbooks. This was really happening; Anna was walking down the narrow Oxford streets on her way back from the law faculty, thinking about me. Her smiles as we shyly greeted each other stunned me into delirious, weak-kneed awe. I spun with happiness, fizzing with the ceaseless, internal momentum of my raging ardour. My arm was blue from disbelieving pinches.

Unfortunately, though, the damage had already been done.

Long after Jean-Philippe Durand had waltzed out of my life, I found myself unable to stop thinking about him, even once Anna and I had begun our own romantic adventure. A year of all-consuming jealousy proved difficult to shake off. His presence lingered on, casting a pall over my happiness. Those perfect teeth haunted me. That alluring French accent kept whispering in my ear: She could have been mine. His mesmerising eyes twinkled on in my memory, tormenting me. I couldn’t shake the ghastly suspicion that I was merely Anna’s compromise candidate. Jean-Philippe had gone, and I was the runner’s-up prize, second best.

In this way the Frenchman left an indelible stain on the crisp white sheet of our romance, an ineradicable reminder of our lives before Anna and I came together. Our fairy tale had been tarnished before it had even begun. That is why, one day, I will wreak my terrible revenge on him.

Of course, Anna knows nothing of all this, even now. I couldn’t bring myself to admit my disquiet to her at the time, terrified that if I even mentioned Jean-Philippe’s name, she would suddenly realise that I was second best, and go straight back to him. Instead I suffered in silence, and the more my suspicions festered, the more impossible it became to broach the subject. Finally I understood that if I was ever to escape Jean-Philippe Durand’s insidious clutches, I would have to do it on my own.

And, who knows? Perhaps, one day, I will.

So, it has been decided. Anna is off to France. She leaves tomorrow morning.

After supper, she spends the rest of the evening packing, unpacking, and repacking. I sit on the end of the bed, watching. As she folds her clothes carefully into the suitcase, she tells me that she will be staying at the Hotel Léon, near the Louvre. She is travelling to Paris with three of her colleagues, Andy, Graham and Richard. They are, she says, all lovely chaps. They enjoy a laugh, good food, that sort of thing, so I mustn’t worry that she will be spending the evenings sitting alone and bored in her hotel room. Far from it. They will, she informs me with a grin, be painting the town a fabulous shade of rouge. I nod, blinking.

A taxi to Waterloo is ordered for the morning; we have a final glass of wine and go to bed. Anna wordlessly turns out her bedside light and pulls the duvet over her, leaving me propped up on an expectant elbow. So. There will be no drink before the war. She leans over and kisses me on the forehead as I slump into my pillow.

‘Sorry. Early start tomorrow.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Well, count yourself lucky,’ she replies, wriggling into a comfortable position, her back towards me.

‘Will you wake me up before you go?’ I ask.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not going to see you for the rest of the week. I’d like to say goodbye properly.’

With a sigh, Anna rolls back over to face me. She looks sleepy and adorable. ‘But the cab’s coming at a quarter to six,’ she says. ‘It’s inhuman. There’s no need to ruin your day.’

I shrug. ‘I’d like to ruin my day, if it’s all the same to you.’

Anna softens. ‘You’re mad,’ she says. ‘Sweet, but mad.’ She smiles. Her hand strokes my cheek.

‘So you’ll wake me?’ I persist.

She rolls away from me again. ‘All right,’ comes the muffled reply. I sense her body relaxing for sleep.

A pause. ‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Night, sweetheart,’ yawns Anna.

She shifts again, and then remains still. Her gentle, sleep-heavy breath soon becomes rhythmic and smooth. I stare at the blackness around me.

I do not sleep well. When I finally wake, pummelled by a bruising sequence of unremembered dreams, I glance at my clock. It is eight o’clock. Anna is long gone.

In the kitchen is a note.

Sorry I didn’t wake you, Matthew. Couldn’t do it, in the end. You looked so peaceful, I couldn’t bear to disturb you.

Hope you don’t mind. I’ll call you this evening from the hotel. Have fun. Wish me luck!

A

PS It’s Noon’s birthday on Saturday. Can you please send her a card from both of us? Thanks. (She’ll be 93.)

Noon is Anna’s grandmother. Everybody in her family dotes on her, which I find bemusing, as she is the most vituperative, cantankerous old crone I have ever met. Still, sending the rebarbative old trout a birthday card won’t kill me, I suppose.

I make myself a cup of tea, wishing that Anna had woken me before she left. This isn’t the first time she has gone abroad on business, of course; she’s flown all over the world in the past few years. But this trip feels different. Her absence needles me. It may be due to the lack of fond goodbyes, but I cannot help wondering whether there is something wider than just a stretch of water between us now.

I walk back into the bedroom and open the wardrobe. Anna’s work suits are hung neatly in a row, a palette of demure pastels, muted greys and blacks, and one or two startling blasts of primary colour. I find yesterday’s choice, an elegant charcoal trouser suit, and pull it out. My fingers dip fleetingly into the suit, as nimble as a pickpocket’s. As I perform my search I hum tunelessly to myself, as if this were quite the most ordinary thing in the world. There is a book of matches in the left jacket pocket, glossily embossed with the name of a restaurant near the Barbican. I open the flap. Four matches have been pulled out from the right hand side. Four cigarettes after lunch? Perhaps more. Maybe less. I stare at the matches, willing them to reveal their meaning to me. What conclusions should I draw from this? What do four post-lunch fags actually mean? Shouldn’t Anna have mentioned that she went out for lunch yesterday? Who did she go with?

I hang the charcoal suit back in its place. This amateur detective work is ridiculously self-destructive. It just sends me into vertiginous tailspins of bewildered despair. But I am powerless to resist the call of those untended pockets; every day, the possibility of new information draws me back, like the cruellest addiction.

I wish Anna were here now. There is so much I want to talk to her about. We used to have endless, earnest conversations which stretched on long into the night, as we forgot the time and the rest of the world – everything except each other. But those talks are a thing of the past; all Anna wants to do now in the evenings is collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine and watch television until it’s time to go to sleep.

I open my saxophone case and begin to practise for this evening’s rehearsal, but I cannot muster any interest for the pretty patterns of notes that I am producing. The saxophone keys feel heavy beneath my fingers. I am relieved when the telephone interrupts me. It is Sean.

‘Hey, fella,’ he chirps.

‘Sean. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. But the six million dollar question is how are you?’

‘All right, I suppose. Anna’s gone to Paris for the rest of the week, and the world hasn’t exactly been set alight by the publication of Licked, but other than that I’m fine.’

‘Shouldn’t lose too much sleep about the book,’ says Sean carelessly. ‘These things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know. Has Anna gone to Paris on business?’

‘No, Sean, she’s gone with her fucking knitting circle,’ I snap. ‘Of course she’s gone on business.’

‘Anyway, listen,’ says Sean blithely. ‘I’ve got some news that’s going to make your day.’

‘OK,’ I say, seriously doubting this.

‘I’ve arranged a reading for you.’

I almost drop the phone. ‘That’s fantastic, Sean! Where?’

There is a pause. ‘In a bookshop.’

‘OK. Where’s the bookshop?’

‘Look,’ says Sean, ‘before we go any further, can we discuss dates?’

‘Sure. I’m available pretty much any time.’

‘Ah. Footloose and fancy free. Lucky old you.’

‘When is this all fixed for?’ I am delighted. One thing is for certain: Neville never would have dreamed of arranging anything as vulgarly populist as a reading. Good old Sean. For a moment, I find myself almost liking him. Thanks to him, I’m going to get to read my work to a real audience. Who, at the end, will clap.

‘Probably in about a week or so,’ answers Sean. ‘There or thereabouts.’

‘Great! Where’s this bookshop?’

‘And I think we can safely assume that you’ll be guaranteed a good reception. I’ve been talking to the manager of the shop, and he’s very keen on the book.’

‘God,’ I exclaim. ‘Someone’s actually read it. Miracles will never cease.’

‘Oh, he hasn’t actually read it,’ replies Sean, ‘but he loves the idea of it. The whole, you know, stamp thing.’ Sean is on thin ice here, since he hasn’t read it either.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Stamp enthusiasts are OK. I’m not fussy. If my audience calls, then I must go. Where did you say the bookshop was again?’

‘And this, I would think, will be the tip of the iceberg. Once you get a few readings under your belt –’

‘Sean,’ I interrupt. ‘Where’s the fucking bookshop?’

There is a long pause before Sean finally says, ‘Preston.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Pardon?’

‘It’s in Preston. The bookshop.’

‘OK,’ I say evenly. ‘Why Preston, precisely?’

‘Well.’ I hear Sean weighing up his excuses. ‘Basically, they’re the only place so far that’s agreed to have you.’

Jesus. A fine time for him to start telling me the truth. ‘I was hoping for something a bit more, I don’t know, local. At least within the M25, say.’

‘All in good time. Everything comes to he who waits. But at the moment it’s Preston.’

‘Christ.’ I take a deep breath. ‘All right. I’ll do it.’

‘Oh good. Stuart will be pleased.’

‘Who’s Stuart?’

‘He’s the shop manager. My cousin, actually. He owes me a favour.’

‘Ah.’ So Sean is press-ganging one of his family into hosting my first reading. What am I saying? My only reading. In Preston. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind. ‘Thanks, Sean,’ I say, far too late for him to believe that I could possibly mean it.

‘Right, then,’ says Sean. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I have a date.’ He rings off.

I put down the telephone and survey the flat. Now that Anna will be away for a few days, there seems little point in carrying out the usual battery of daily domestic tasks. I can live like a pig, and nobody will know. The prospect fills me with a hollow thrill. I wonder what Anna is doing right now.

Suddenly I remember that in all the excitement caused by the announcement of Anna’s trip to Paris last night, I never asked her about the cufflinks in her underwear drawer. I was so relieved when I realised that she wasn’t leaving me for ever that my brain must have subconsciously decided to shelve that issue for a more apposite occasion. I swear softly to myself. Now I will have to wait until next weekend. I walk into the bedroom for another look at the cufflinks. Anna’s underwear drawer is emptier than before; she has packed a lot for her trip, including, I notice, some of her more alluring items. I begin to riffle through what is left.

Minutes later I sit down on the bed, lost.

The Tiffany bag has gone.

Anna has gone to Paris with Andy, Graham and Richard, her colleagues, lovely chaps all. They are, she told me last night, all up for a laugh, that sort of thing.

My mind whirls.

What sort of thing?

I stare into space, my heart racing.

Anna has gone to Paris, and she has taken a pair of Tiffany cufflinks with her.

Each piece of the jigsaw slams into place with a resounding smash. The dreamy silences, all those late nights at the office – suddenly everything begins to make terrible sense.

Is one of her Paris-bound colleagues a gym enthusiast with a thing for Ravel?

It would explain why Anna was hiding the cufflinks in the first place, and it would explain why she didn’t wake me up this morning. She wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a flamboyantly uxorious goodbye if she is off to Paris to shag like a jack rabbit with somebody else.

I spend the rest of the day struggling to find alternative explanations for everything I’ve seen, everything I know. The more I wrestle with the facts, the more they obstinately shape themselves towards the unthinkable.

Is Anna having an affair?

I haven’t even got to the gut-busting punch line yet, the little detail that makes this all so especially sad:

We went to Paris on our honeymoon.

See? You couldn’t make it up.

Our jazz quartet rehearses every Tuesday evening at Gavin’s loft. At six o’clock I pack up my saxophone and catch the Tube to Old Street, numb from a dayful of worry.

Gavin is a graphic designer of some sort. He’s obviously good at it, because he’s loaded. He lives in a vast loft conversion on the fringes of Clerkenwell, all exposed brick, double-height ceilings, and stripped pine floors. There’s a baby grand piano in one corner. He even has a Raiders of the Lost Ark pinball machine. It feels more like a film set than a place where a real person should actually live. It’s every bachelor’s fantasy wankpad.

Gavin’s homogenised but expensive taste is derived in large part from the glossy magazines to which he is addicted. I have seen him rip open the latest edition of GQ, salivating as he gazes with barely suppressed ardour at the most recent techno-gizmo or the newest Paul Smith loafers. You can see his eyes glinting with deranged lust as he compulsively turns the pages. He just loves labels. He just loves stuff.

I press the doorbell, gazing anxiously in both directions as I wait to be buzzed inside. The entrance to Gavin’s building is shrouded in dark shadows which give me the creeps. Shifty characters with tattoos on their arms hang around on street corners, talking into mobile phones and staring menacingly at passers-by. I am waiting for the inevitable day when I am robbed and brutally murdered, all within pressing distance of Gavin’s doorbell. The atmosphere of palpable violence doesn’t seem to bother Gavin. Perhaps the attendant dangers of living here are immaterial, given the hipness of the milieu. Perhaps the attendant dangers of living here are the reason for the hipness of the milieu.

Gavin’s voice crackles out of the small metal box by the front door. ‘All right,’ he says cheerfully. He knows it’s me; I am being scrutinised by the unblinking eye of a small security camera above the intercom. I make sure the front door closes firmly behind me before climbing the stairs to Gavin’s loft.

He is standing by the door, waiting for me.

‘Hi Gav,’ I say.

‘Matt. How’s tricks?’

‘Tricks are dandy. My novel’s just been published, actually.’

‘Really,’ says Gavin.

‘It’s called Licked,’ I tell him.

‘Nice title.’

I perform a playful shuffle. ‘You could buy a copy if you liked,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ agrees Gavin, laughing. ‘Course I could. Come on, the others are already here.’

I follow Gavin in. The twins, Ronnie and Abdullah, are setting up their instruments at the other end of the room, next to the piano. ‘All right Matt, you poncy fucker!’ shouts Ron Fries from behind his half-erected drum kit.

‘Do you want a beer?’ asks Gavin. ‘I’ve got this fantastic bottled stuff from Korea. It’s made by albino monks in this isolated monastery on top of a mountain. They trample the hops with their feet.’

‘Yeah, go on then,’ I reply doubtfully.

Gavin goes to his beautiful open-plan kitchen and opens an enormous Smeg fridge, which is taller than I am. Apart from about twenty bottles of beer, the fridge is empty. He takes out a bottle, prises the cap off, and hands it to me. I take a tentative sip. As I swallow, I start to believe the story about the monks trampling the hops. The beer has a distinct odour of smelly feet. I carry my saxophone towards the twins at the far end of the room.

As twins go, Ron and Abdullah Fries could not be less identical. Ron is a huge, stocky bear of a man; Abdullah is tall and thin. Abdullah’s wild shock of unruly red hair and mash of orange freckles make him look at least five years younger than his brother, but in fact he is the older of the two, by about forty-five minutes.

‘All right, Matt,’ says Abdullah as I approach. He raises his own bottle of Korean beer to me in friendly salute. I’m sure that Abdullah isn’t supposed to drink: he became a Buddhist years ago.

The Fries twins were born in East London in the middle of the Sixties. For newly-born twin brothers it was an unfortunate confluence of time and place, as there were only ever two names that they were going to be given. Ron was all right, but the subsequent proliferation of McDonalds restaurants, and Abdullah’s adoption of a Muslim name, has always led me to suspect that his conversion to Buddhism was due less to any spiritual conviction than a simple but heartfelt desire to change his name from Reg Fries.

Ron finishes setting up, and pulls out his drumsticks. He plays a few press rolls, and then puts on a pair of dark glasses. As soon as the shades go on, Ron is firmly installed in his own jazz dream world, where he is American, and black. While he acts out this peculiar fantasy, he insists on speaking some ghastly argot of his imagination, an excruciating cocktail of bastardised Harlem jive and flat estuary vowels.

‘You sorry-assed bitches ready to get down and play some shit?’ he drawls, sounding like Sammy Davis Jr marooned in Basildon. Gavin and I exchange glances.

‘Getting there,’ says Gavin, riffling through pages of sheet music by the piano.

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