Glover’s Mistake
Nick Laird

To EJ

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Three in the morning

The club

Nutter

The intricate machinery

With a capital A

Collective nouns

The drogue

The recycling box

Like road maps, abandoned

The first person plural

Two in the afternoon

Buddha’s bogus smile

Sixties fittings

What all these people did

All about frustration

Reconciling everything

Jeroboam or something

Pyrotechnics

A red jewel sparkled in her navel

Invisible presences

Exactly what an image does

The republic of no one

Around about one

I carried you

Natural disaster

Menus

Stalwart

Flicking between channels

A series of short rises and swinging stops

Landfill

A toast to Mrs Glover

Where one might pin a medal

Disegno

Variegated bruise

Daggers, crosses, hearts and bells

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Three in the morning

The club

At the kitchen table he’d turned a page of Time Out and there was her face. He’d been so shocked that he’d started to laugh. She was still beautiful—though squinting slightly as if she’d just removed a pair of glasses. Did she need glasses now too? He snipped out the inch-long update with nail scissors, folded it and filed it in his wallet. The exhibition, ‘Us and the US’, featured several British and American female artists, and it opened in three days.

When he reached the drinks table and lifted a plastic tumbler of wine, he noticed, with unexpected anger, how the suits had real champagne glasses. Money grants its owners a kind of armour, and this crowd shone with it. They were delighted and loud, and somewhere among them was Ruth. He headed towards her work and hovered.

There.

She did look good; older, of course, and the hair now unnaturally blonde. Her nose was still a little pointed, oddly fleshless, and its bridge as straight and thin as the ridge of a sand dune; one lit slope, the other shaded. A tall man in a chalk-stripe suit held forth as she twisted the stem of her empty glass between forefinger and thumb. Her unhappy glance slid round the group. As one of the men whispered into her ear she turned away, and her eyes had the same cast as in the lecture hall, when she would gaze longingly over the heads of the students towards the exit.

‘Hello, oh excuse me, I’m sorry, Ruth, hi.’

David used one elbow to open a gap between the speaker and Ruth, and then slotted himself neatly into it.

‘Hello.’ The voice was lower than David would have guessed but instantly familiar. She still dressed in black but the materials had been upgraded. A pilous cashmere wrap, a fitted silk blouse.

‘You taught me at Goldsmiths, a long time ago now.’ He was staring too intently and looked down at her glass.

‘Oh, sorry. Of course, yes. What’s your name again?’

She presented her hand and David shook it firmly. He said there was no reason she’d remember him, but she repeated the name, making an American performance of the syllables: Dav-id Pin-ner. The three men had regrouped, and Chalk-stripe was still mid-anecdote. Ruth touched David’s hand for the second time.

‘Shall we find a drink?’

The queue was five-deep around the table. David knew he should stand in line for both of them, letting Ruth wait at some distance from the ungentle shoving, but to do so would be to lose her immediately to some suit or fan or journalist. Then Ruth stopped a waitress walking past, a black girl with a lip ring carrying a tray of prawns on Communion wafers.

‘Can I be really brazen and ask you for some wine? Would that be okay?’

She appraised them: David left her unconvinced, but Ruth, five foot five of effortless poise, carried them both easily. The wealthy expect and expect, and are not disappointed. When the waitress smiled in confirmation, her lip ring tightened disagreeably against her lower lip and David had to look away.

‘If you just let me get rid of these…’

He was nervous, and kept pushing prawn hors d’oeuvres into his mouth before the present incumbents were swallowed. Ruth picked a white thread from her shawl and said, ‘But what do you do now? Oh, I’ve lost your name again. I’m just terrible with names. I forget my daughter’s sometimes.’

David, chewing furiously, pointed at his mouth.

‘Of course…God, Goldsmiths.’

She said it dramatically, naming a battle they’d together fought in. After swallowing, David repeated his name and said he was a writer. This was not particularly true, at least not outside his private feeling.

‘Huh. So I managed to put you off art. Or maybe you write about it? Is this research?’

David thought she was very gently making fun of him. ‘No, I teach mainly, though I have reviewed—’

She shifted register and dipped her head towards him. ‘Look, I’m sorry for sweeping you off back there. The baby brother of my ex-husband had decided to explain to me how exactly I’d fucked up his life.’

‘God, I’m sure you could do without that.’

The immediacy, the easy intimacy, was surprising, and it had startled him to hear himself repeating God in the same dramatic way she’d said it. Did she mean she’d fucked up the ex-husband’s life or the ex-husband’s brother’s? He could imagine how she might unmoor a man’s existence.

‘You don’t have a cigarette, do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here.’

‘They won’t mind. They’re all very…Ah, here we are. Darling, you’re an angel. A punk-rock angel.’

The ‘punk-rock’, David thought, showed Ruth’s age.

‘It was kind of you to come and see the exhibition, you know. I managed to lose touch with everyone I knew at Goldsmiths.’ Her dark eyes cast about the room. David waited for them to settle on him and they did. ‘It was a very difficult time for me…coming out of one thing, moving into another…Maybe you heard about it.’

David pursed his lips and nodded. He had no idea what she was talking about. Her tongue was very pink and pointed.

‘For so many years London was somewhere I just couldn’t come to, and now I’ve taken this residency here for a whole…Oh, stand there for a second. I don’t want to have to deal with Walter yet.’

Ruth edged David a few inches to the left.

‘Who am I hiding you from?’

‘Oh no, I’m not really hiding. He’s a friend. Walter. The Collector.’

‘Sounds sinister.’

‘Oh, it is.’ She swept her wine glass in a small circle for emphasis. ‘When Walter buys you, you know you’re in demand. And he keeps on buying you until your price is high enough and then he dumps your stock and floods the market. Or’—the glass stopped in its circuit—‘until you die, and then he plays the investors, drip-feeding your pieces to the auctioneer.’

‘A bit like a banker.’

‘He used to be. I think he still owns a couple.’

David glanced around the room. He wanted to see him now. He needed to get a good look at the sort of man who owned a bank or two. Instead he noticed the grey-haired man in the chalk-stripe approaching them. Hurriedly he asked, ‘So are you based in New York?’

‘Ah, there you are. Richard Anderson’s looking for you.’

‘Richard Anderson?’

‘He’s doing a special on young new artists.’

‘I’m neither young nor new, Larry…this is David, an old student of mine.’

‘It’s very nice to meet you.’ David was anticipating nothing, so the warmth, when it came, felt considerable. The man looked like a perfect lawyer, clean edges, something moral in his smile.

‘Larry, where exactly is the club you were talking about?’

‘Oh, it’s just off St Martin’s Lane. The Blue Door. Do you know it?’

He looked expectantly at David, who rubbed a finger on the tip of one eyebrow and pretended to think. ‘The Blue Door? I’m not sure.’

Ruth placed two fingers on David’s arm—he felt it in his gut—and said, ‘We’re going on there later if you wanted to come. There’ll be a few of us. David’s a writer.’

Chalk-stripe’s interest had already passed. He glanced at his expensive watch and was all business.

‘Hmmmm, what time is it now? Half-eight. We’re probably heading over in, what, half an hour? Forty minutes?’

That night her exhibit was a sheet of black papyrus, four or five metres wide, that hung from floor to ceiling in the last room. Up close, its homogeneous black grew to shades of charcoal and slate and ink and soot, and its smooth appearance resolved into the flecked composition of chipboard. Its surface was wounded in a thousand different ways: minute shapes were pricked and sliced and nicked in it. There were Ordnance Survey symbols—a church, crossed axes—but also a crown, a dagger, a mountain, a star, miniature semaphore flags. And tiny objects—all silver—dangled or poked through it: safety pins, bracelet charms, an earring, a pin, what must be a silver filling. The man beside David pointed to the largest object, low down in the astral canopy, and said he was sure that the St Christopher medal, just there, must represent the Pole Star.

The gallery lights at that end of the room had been dimmed, and the work, Night Sky (Ambiguous Heavens), hung a foot away from the wall. Fluorescent strip lights had been placed behind it and shone through the fissures in the paper. As it wafted gently in the convection currents, breathing, it made a far-off tinkling sound. The conversation with Ruth had left him charged. He wanted to be affected, to give himself up to something, and standing a certain distance from the black, and being a little drunk, he felt engulfed. This was Ptolemaic night, endless celestial depths of which he was the core and the centre. Everyone around him disappeared, and he imagined himself about to step into the dream stupor of outer space.

David watched, he drank, he waited. He spent some time in front of a massive LCD sign that took up an entire wall of the gallery. As he watched, a single number rose astonishingly quickly, in millisecond increments. His heart sped. Death may be hidden in clocks, but this was a kind of murder. After a minute or so he felt hunted and light-headed. Every instant added to the total on the sign came directly from his reckoning. And a certain sequence of those digits was the moment of his death.

He slipped out for a cigarette, but at nine o’clock he was Ruth’s guardian angel, floating a few feet behind her as she said her goodbyes. When they climbed the steps to Waterloo Road, Larry strode energetically to the central island to hail a passing cab. You could tell he was born to hold doors and fill glasses, Larry, to organize, facilitate, enable.

The view from the bridge was spectacular. The restive black river, slicing through the city, granted new perspectives. The buildings on the other side were Lego-sized, those far squiggles trees on the Embankment walk. Even though Larry and the taxi driver were waiting, Ruth stopped for a second to inspect the night, and stood gripping the rail. The normal sense of being in a London street, of trailing along a canyon floor, was replaced by the thrill of horizons. The sky was granted a depth of field by satellites, a few sparse stars, aircraft sinking into Heathrow.

Larry and Ruth talked for the length of the journey as David roosted awkwardly on a flip-down seat. Ruth’s piece had been bought before the opening—by Walter—though Larry had retained rights to show it. When the gallery owner opened his notebook to check a date, David noticed that $950k was scrawled by the words Night Sky. He listened to everything very intently. Away from the public crowded gallery, a new, personalized part of the evening was actually beginning. Somehow there were only three of them, and he felt nervous. When the cab pulled up he tried to pay for part of the fare, but Larry dismissed him with a rather mean laugh that took the good, David thought, out of his gesture. The club was situated down a narrow alley and behind a blue door that appeared abruptly in the wall. David hurried through as if it might vanish.

Larry flirted with the girl on reception, signed them in. They followed him through a warren of low-ceilinged, wood-panelled rooms. Each had a tangle of flames a-sway in a grate and much too much furniture. And each was full of people in various modes of perch and collapse, laughing and squealing and whispering, demanding ashtrays, olives, cranberry juice with no ice. As he trailed after, David adopted a weary expression: if anyone should look at him they would never know how foreign he felt, how exposed and awkward.

Larry spotted a spare corner table and charitably chose the three-legged stool, leaving David the rustic carver. Ruth settled into the huge winged armchair, arranging her black shawl around her. David realized he’d been unconsciously pushing his nails into his palms, leaving little red falciform marks, and he stopped, forcing his hands flat on his thighs. He normally spent the evenings on the internet, chatting on a forum, but that night he was an urban cultural participant, engaged with the world, abroad in the dark.

‘So what did you guys think of the exhibition?’ Ruth asked.

This was his chance and David began talking immediately. He had given it much thought and started listing pieces and their attendant strengths and problems, then discoursing generally on the difficulty of such an undertaking, the element of overlap and competition with other artists, what the curator should have considered doing differently. Ruth was smiling, but the more he talked, the more solid her mask became. When she nodded in anticipation of saying something, David concluded, snatching his cigarettes with a flourish from the tabletop, ‘But I would say—and I know this sounds a little crawly—but I thought your piece was the most involving. I felt drawn into examining the nature of darkness, how it’s actually composed.’

He found he was sitting forward, almost doubled over, and he straightened up. Ruth smiled and said, ‘Crawly?’ but he could tell he’d talked too much. Larry had a bored, paternal grin on his face, and he waved his hand, dispelling some disagreeable odour. The waitress slouched across.

When Ruth made some slightly barbed reference to pure commercialism, David sensed a chink between them and tried to widen it. He waited ten minutes and then asked about money, about how art could ever really survive it. Larry grimaced, and explained that art and money were conjoined twins, the kind that share too many vital organs ever to be separated. Ruth balanced her chin on her small fist and flicked her gaze from her old friend to the new. David said that sometimes the most private, secretive art is the strongest. It had to relinquish the market to be truly free. Surely Larry wasn’t saying that Cubism started with the rate of interest on Picasso’s mortgage.

Larry frowned, forced to detonate David’s dreams. ‘Well, the fact is, not everyone’s Picasso.’

‘I think Larry’s trying to tell you that minor artists, like me, need to make saleable products. Is that it, darling?’

‘You’re certainly not minor.’

‘I’m certainly not a minor.’

Larry gave a loud guffaw and patted the back of her hand. Ruth ignored him and lifted David’s cigarettes; he passed her the lighter and she drew one out of the packet, pinching it in half to break it in a neat, proficient movement. She noticed David noticing.

‘Can’t stop, can only downsize.’

Watching her, David found himself reminded of the finitude of earthly resources. She expected, and the taking was so heedless she had obviously acclimatized to prosperity at an early age. When the time had come for her to order a drink she’d spoken quickly, astonishingly, in a volley of Italian. The reluctant waitress had beamed, revealing one deep dimple, and replied in the same ribboning cadences. Later, when David leant across and told Ruth how much he liked her charcoal-coloured wrap, she said, ‘Well, that’s really something. It’s a bit Raggedy-Ann now, but you know who used to own it? Audrey Hepburn. She was a great friend of my mother’s.’

Men who own banks and Audrey Hepburn. A sheet of black paper for one million dollars. David lifted the edge of the shawl then, and pressed his thumb in the cashmere. It was soft as baby hair, as kitten fur. He thought of the symbolism of the act, touching the hem of her garment. He had a terrible tendency to think in symbols. He knew it made him unrealistic.

Nutter

Blame is complicated but some of it must be David’s. It was a Thursday night weeks later, and as the tube slid alongside the platform Ruth held tight to the bar, bracing herself for the lurch. She noticed a young man suddenly uncoil, a few seats down, and bounce to his feet. He was right behind her at the barrier, when she couldn’t find her ticket, and she stepped aside to let him pass. Outside on the pavement, the man was peering into the window of an estate agent’s, his head almost touching the glass. She walked down the High Street, took the second road on the left and, after a few moments, heard footsteps and looked back. He’d turned the corner too.

Something in her registered his presence as aggressive. But still, it was possible, she told herself, that he hadn’t even noticed her. Or that he hadn’t noticed he was scaring her. This was England. There was a thing called cultural difference. She quickened the percussive step of her boots and clawed round in her bag, locating her keys and jiggling them into her fist, so the sharp parts faced outwards. There was also a thing called sexual assault. Maybe she should stop and let him pass. But then they’d be only a couple of metres apart. Maybe she should knock on the door of a house, somewhere lit up. Further along, brown leather in street light, a man unlocking his car. Just as she tensed herself to shout, he climbed in and the door of the car banged shut. The words died in her throat.

The car’s tail-lights receded, exited right. She glanced back and the man stopped, and she thought of playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with Bridget in the yard on Sherman Street. The grass had almost been hidden by pink cherry blossom. An image of Bridget’s tiny hands, a doll’s hands, pouncing on her, Bridget screaming and giggling. She started walking quickly again and a white cat slinked out from behind some bins. That did it: she broke into a run, her canvas bag slapping awkwardly against her side. Flight heightened her panic. In the noise her motion made, she was convinced she could hear him behind her, running, and if she turned now he would be there, six foot of shadow coming towards her, coming right for her, and would say nothing, do something…

Number 87. She vaulted up the steps and jammed the button for C, the top-floor apartment. David’s. The man was strolling now, thirty, forty metres away. It was fine. Was it fine? As he approached, she managed to pout disdainfully and stare past him, but kept her finger pressed on the buzzer. He was almost at the bottom of the steps, and then he was there, and he stopped. It was real. He was here to harm her. She stared and he stared back, his face a private smirk, the whole world some obscene joke. He was forcing himself into her consciousness, into her life, and she could do nothing about it. She made a shooing gesture at him, and then suddenly she was out of bravery: her knees went. She grabbed at the doorway for support. The man pulled his hands out of his black anorak and held them out, palms up, as if to say Cool it, let’s take it easy. But before he could speak, she cut in, her voice unnaturally high.

‘No—fuck you. I think you should walk on by, sir, and leave me alone.’ The ‘sir’ took even her by surprise. He took a step back and shrugged, still bemused.

‘Well look, I’m sorry but—’

‘If you try anything, I will kick you. I will kick the shit out of you. I’m not interested…’ She trailed off. Her American accent, minimal normally, sounded loud and false and ridiculous to her own ear, but she held his eye and nodded, to assure him she was serious. He sank his hands back into his anorak and leant against a lamppost as if he could quite happily wait there for eternity.

Upstairs David picked up the intercom handset: ‘Hello?’

‘Open the door. A man followed me and he’s right here.’

‘What? The buzzer’s broken. I’m coming down.’

Three floors up, in a steamy kitchen, David grabbed the first heavy thing to hand and descended the stairs three at a time. When he yanked open the front door, Ruth pawed at his arm, pulled him out onto the porch.

‘This man has been—’

David patted the fist that gripped his shirtsleeve. ‘Ruth, meet James,’ he said, there and then corrupting the future. She made a series of fathoming blinks and offered a panicky smile. David repeated: ‘This is James, my lodger.’

Ruth stood stiff with embarrassment, both hands clutching her shoulder bag.

‘Flatmate,’ Glover corrected, signing Don’t shoot, as he came up the steps. Ruth shook his outstretched hand, and noticed his engaging smile, his steady blue eyes.

‘I’m so sorry about freaking you out. I’d no idea…’

David backed against the hallway wall to let her pass, knocking unclaimed post from the radiator. Behind her, Glover widened his eyes at him as if to ask Who the hell’s this nutter? Ruth tugged the weapon David had picked up, a blue oven dish, from his hands.

‘And what’s with this? Were you gonna make him a casserole?’

The intricate machinery

They climbed the stairs to dinner in procession—Ruth, then David, then Glover. It had been some time since the communal hall had seen any love. Handlebars, furniture, umbrellas and shopping bags had scored and scuffed the once-white walls until now they resembled the notepads in stationers used to test pens. The bare bulb hung limply. The radiator had leaked last winter and rust in the pipes had left a dark blotch, Africa-shaped, on the carpet. The man who came to read the meter had asked David if it was a bloodstain.

‘I’m sorry—James—I’m sorry for getting so hysterical down there.’

‘No, not at all. As much my fault as yours.’

‘You really should have said something and reassured her.’

‘I tried but she told me to shut up. In fact she threatened me.’

‘I did, it’s true.’ Ruth laughed. ‘You know what it is? I think it’s that everything’s so terrible everywhere, I’m just waiting for something to happen to me.’

She looked around the kitchen, taking in the slatted calendar for the Fu Hu Chinese takeaway, the cupboard with the missing door, the tannic stains of damp on a corner of the ceiling. David would have felt embarrassed, but he had a hunch that Ruth liked to slum it occasionally. She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.

‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’

He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.

‘It’s great you could come round.’

‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’

‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’

‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’

Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.

‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’

David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.

‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.

‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.

‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’

‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.

‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’

You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.

‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his laughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.

‘Not all the blame, I hope.’

David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.

‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’

They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang. At the sound Ruth looked sulkily around her, then lifted her canvas bag from the foot of the sofa and began to go through it, extracting an overstuffed black leather wallet, two purple silk-bound notepads, a hardback of Chekhov minus its dust jacket, a small Maglite torch, a silver glasses case, and then a phone the size and shape of a silver glasses case.

‘Her mobile’s not very mobile.’

‘It must be twenty years old.’

Ruth ignored them, wincing at the screen before answering it.

‘Hi, Karen, hi…No, that was from earlier. I straightened it out. I just didn’t know which form they meant…Right…No, I’m with a friend…No, I’m at the boys’ flat…Yes, tomorrow’s fine…Okay, great.’ She plunged the phone back in her bag. David realized she’d hung up without saying goodbye.

‘The boys?’ he asked.

After broaching a bottle of Amaretto that Glover located under the sink, Ruth announced that she was going to the National Gallery the next afternoon.

‘Is there something in particular you have to do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, not really. I want to drop in and take a look at a few pictures, and then go somewhere else and think about them.’

Glover slapped his hand loudly against his chest in the gesture of allegiance. ‘Well, I’ve got to work, but David’s free, aren’t you?’ There was a hint of laughter behind his voice; he didn’t even understand that David would want to go.

‘I could check online and see what exhibition’s showing.’ ‘Or we could let it surprise us,’ Ruth said. David thrilled a little at that us.

‘You should drop into the Bell afterwards, sit and have a proper think about those pictures.’

David thought Ruth might take offence, but Glover had judged it finely. Through it all he possessed a firm sense of what people wanted from him.

The evening was out of the ordinary. David felt good. Here was difference and it was fine. Ruth on his sofa. An artist. An American. A woman. When Glover rang her a cab before heading, finally, to bed, there were just the two of them at last. David half-hoped and half-feared that a further intimacy would develop—as if now they’d lean in close and start declaring the stark facts of their lives—but it turned out Glover’s absence bred a vague uneasiness. When he disappeared, the strain of carrying on a one-to-one took hold, and Ruth checked her watch, then leant her chin on her hand, spacing four fingers along her jaw. David imagined them on his fleshy back, indenting. They were waiting for the buzzer and when it eventually went, they both started slightly, relieved. A chaste kiss on her hot cheek and she vanished. In bed he noticed, for the very first time, how the galaxies of Artex on his ceiling all swirled clockwise.

With a capital A

Raining when he woke, and so dark he thought it must still be night. Footsteps scuffled on the stairs and the front door banged: Glover was leaving for work. It was already after ten. A sheet of A4 on the kitchen table:

D, Thanks for dinner. Did you like the way I set you up? I’m on till six if you want to pop in later. God Save The Queen, J

The sign-off was a rejoinder to Who Dares Wins, which David had used on a note about milk and toilet roll a few days ago. It had been proverbs until recently. Had he set him up? Did he mean he’d set up a date with Ruth for him? Or did he mean he’d tricked him into going? David didn’t know. He crumpled up the note and dropped it in the pedal bin.

They’d agreed to meet outside the National Gallery at two, and he arrived ten minutes early. The rain had eased but not stopped, and the vista from the portico was still uniquely uninspiring: London done by Whistler, arranged in black and grey. Ragged, pewter clouds turned on Nelson’s head, so that he alone was all that held the heavens up. Lutyens’s limestone fountains were blown to spray and rain danced on the surface of their pools in time to the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’. Everything today had kept rhythm with the tunes on his iPod: the shunting of his tube carriage through its rock-wall galleries had accompanied The Clash, his footsteps on the underpass at Charing Cross had syncopated perfectly with the Blind Boys of Alabama. And now not even the Great British weather could puncture his mood. He was thinking about Ruth.

He had not been a success at Goldsmiths. Too shy and self-conscious in groups, he had fastened to students who showed him kindness and then been peeled, not kindly, off. Slowly he found a few friends with corners, who like him were awkward, and whose expectations had been comparably reduced. There was Adam, a tiny, witch-faced historian with a tinny, nasal voice; Michelle, a chubby goth who smoked all the time and looked skywards when someone addressed her; and a gentle nervous Chinese boy called Wu, who was almost certainly gay and had, David learnt from the alumnus magazine, hanged himself three years ago. He tried not to think of that time in his life. It was all too ambiguous, shameful and strange. He’d been vengeful then and quick to take umbrage, had found refuge in books and movies, and as a general policy scorned the world. It was only since he’d begun teaching himself and had made his own students laugh that he’d realized misanthropy could be taken for wit, and had found some semblance of pleasure in anger and cynicism.

But he still remembered anyone who’d once been nice to him, and that morning had pulled two cardboard boxes out from under his bed. It was a blue file, its spine entitled From Easter Island to Henry Moore—Versions of the Human. On the inside flap he’d written: Ruth Marks, Visiting Artist—Introductory Module on Sculpture. As he flipped through it, what came to mind was the moment he’d first seen her. He had slid, a few minutes late, into the back row. In various dark layers, with a black headscarf over her blonde hair, the new lecturer was gripping each side of the podium as if she might fall. She had huge dark eyes, deepened with a ring of kohl, and spoke with excessive solemnity, trying to convince them that she was a serious proposition. The sobriety, though, couldn’t stay completely intact. Her voice would crack with emphasis, she’d accidentally enthuse. She had an ardour that came with practising the art, a passion the professional tutors had lost.

David’s own journey to art, or Art as he always thought of it, had been a wrong turning. He was never quite sure why he’d been accepted onto the foundation course in the first place. Even now he was embarrassed by the sight of a watercolour from his A-level year that still hung in his parents’ downstairs toilet: an acid-green sky against which a singular figure in black trekked over the crest of a mountain. All his work had featured a lone individual in a vast backdrop, and only recently had he realized the link with the image of the sage on the mountainside, of Jesus or Muhammad in the desert, of Buddha by himself beneath the Bodhi Tree. He too, David Pinner, had been looking for enlightenment. And it had come, after a fashion: at Goldsmiths he met real artists, those whose panicked relationship with their materials betrayed not a fear of mediocrity, of exposure, as his did, but a recurring, unanswerable compulsion.

He pretended for a while; then stopped pretending. After one of Ruth’s lectures, he decided to stay behind and tell her he was changing courses. The hall’s draughty windows were mirrorbacked by the darkness of the winter afternoon, and stirred with his reflection as he walked towards the front. His steps echoed. Her hair in two Teutonic plaits, Ruth rustled across the stage in a madeira hippy skirt with tassels and small round mirrors sewn into it. She was folding her notes, too tightly to use again, scrunching them into a paper bolt.

‘Ms Marks?’

She looked up, mustered a smile. ‘Ruth. Please.’

‘Ruth. Hi. I wanted to say firstly that I’m finding your course really fascinating—’

She gave a rueful little laugh; the tassels swished as she moved towards her bag. ‘Well, isn’t that kind. I wish they all felt like you do.’

Some of the students had left, noisily, during the lecture. Ruth sometimes got lost in her text and repeated herself. Other times she simply stopped and stared over their heads.

‘Oh, they just want to get home. It happens on Friday afternoons.’

‘Really?’

David nodded bravely, saddened by his fellow undergraduates’ priorities.

‘Still, today’s did not go well…’ A bell rang in the corridor outside and stopped. ‘If it’s the handout, I don’t have any more copies now but next week—’

‘Oh no, I got one of those. It was more of a general thing.’ Up close the long nose became a little sharp, though it contained all the intelligence and glamour of European Jewry and sat, to David’s untutored Old World eyes, a touch uncomfortably with the Aryan hair. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your lectures. They’ve made me think in ways about things…’

She smiled uncomfortably. He realized he was giving the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and stopped. She waited for a few seconds, then swung her velvet bag up onto her shoulder and helped him out. ‘But you wanted to tell me you’re leaving the course?’

He was dropping art altogether and changing to English literature. They ended up sitting on the stage steps and talking for almost fifteen minutes. She asked David about himself and his family, and he found himself telling her. About being the only child of a philistine butcher and a woman fuelled by tension. He had never had any support. He needed the support. Why could they not have given him their support? When he’d begun to cry—for all frustrated artists, for all hampered ambition, for all the sensitive souls in the world—she’d dredged up a tissue stained with make-up from her bag, and had praised the bravery of his difficult decision. He often thought about how kind she’d been to him, and how attractive he’d found her own weird mix of confidence and fear. He’d kept that tissue in his pocket all evening, and the next day had been reluctant to bin it, although he had. Years later, in a second-hand book shop in the Elephant and Castle, when he came upon a glancing reference to her in A Guide to Contemporary American Art, he ran his fingertip along her name and bought the book.

David felt abashed on entering the National Gallery. When they climbed the great staircase, the awe of scale meant he was whispering, and by the time they came to the art, entering a room where portraits hung on thick gold chains against the crimson walls, and a cornice was piped like icing around the ceiling’s edge, both had fallen silent. Ruth stared at each picture and he followed, a masterpiece or two behind. David noticed he was walking in a formal, measured stride, much like the Duke of Edinburgh, and he’d even tucked his hands, rudder-like, behind his back.

When he joined her in front of a self-portrait by Murillo, brushing his duffel coat against her shoulder, she gave a raspy little sigh of satisfaction. It was a picture of a picture, with a frame within the frame, and the painter-subject, a lump-faced dignitary with a suspended moustache, reached out of his own portrait and rested his hand on the inner surround in a neat trompe l’oeil.

‘The fingers are very fine, aren’t they? It gives real space and depth, but it’s also Murillo saying’—she raked the air in front of the picture—‘look, I’m the only one who can decide the reality of the art, or the art of the reality.’

David nodded, not quite sure if her chiasmus made any sense. Nonetheless a statement was plainly called for: ‘It looks exactly like a hand.’

She stopped in reverent silence before a Michelangelo. The Entombment showed a naked Jesus being lifted up by John the Baptist and two others. To the front right of the picture was a blank in the shape of someone kneeling. The creases at the top of Christ’s thighs made the upper half of an X, marking the spot where his penis should be, but in its place there was only another blank, a cob-shaped void. I know how that feels, David thought. He put his hand in the pocket of his duffel and pressed it against his unresponsive crotch.

‘There’s something astonishingly modern about it,’ Ruth said at last, picking her words slowly, ‘and his mastery of the line’s incredible. It’s only through these contours’—she gestured again, spell-casting—‘that we experience the figure having volume and weight. It gives me a visceral reaction.’ She shivered, or pretended to shiver. David thought how pointless the phrase ‘visceral reaction’ was.

‘Who’s the missing person?’

‘The Madonna. Isn’t it almost as though Michelangelo couldn’t bring himself to make her visible, couldn’t make her witness her son’s entombment?’

‘Hmmm,’ David encouraged.

‘Though apparently he was waiting for ultramarine to paint her blue cloak. The lapis lazuli he needed could only be gotten from Afghanistan.’ There was a pause and then she tried a little political satire: ‘Nowadays they’d just invade it.’

As they headed past Leicester Square station and up Charing Cross Road towards the Bell and Crown, Ruth, like one of Prufrock’s females, was still talking of Michelangelo. She explained to David just why he was the supreme artist, how he represented the culmination of disegno. Just then a bicycle rickshaw went past, ferrying a bridal couple. The man, his hair slicked back as if he’d surfaced in a pool, grinned idiotically and waved. Poking from a millefeuille wedding dress, a wreath of white flowers in her hair, the bride was tossing confetti at passers-by. A trail of it stuck flatly to the wet road. Their cyclist was pumping his thigh muscles under a flapping, neon-blue rain poncho, and ringing his bell over and over. David couldn’t tell if they were genuine or some kind of publicity stunt, but was amazed when Ruth waved back, and even more amazed when he did too.

Glover acknowledged them with a solemn wink, and they waited and watched him serving. He had an undeniable elegance behind the bar. For a big man he possessed grace. Simultaneously he poured two pints, listened to a customer’s order, laid a banknote in the bed of the till, plucked up change, laughed at something, cracked a comeback, and all the while nodded his head to the R’n’B that slinked from the speakers.

He wouldn’t take money for the drinks, a first as far as David could remember. He just shook his head and mouthed no, though David noticed him glance to the side to check whether Eugene, his slight ginger colleague, was watching. After passing across two glasses of red, he propped himself on his elbows on the bar, flexing his tennis-ball biceps.

‘So how were the pictures? You get plenty to think about?’

There was an edge of banter to everything. Glover and David became her wayward boys, cocky and mocking and sly. It seemed to fit their three personalities, the little hierarchy of ids and egos and superegos. It was flirtation, David supposed, and surprisingly he was good at it. The Bell’s manager, Tom, came up from the cellar wearing a tight silver shirt—David whispered to Ruth that he should be put in an oven and basted regularly—and then Glover finished his shift and joined them on the other side of the bar.

They moved to a table, and when David produced his gift shop postcards Glover stared at each in turn and said, without a hint of humour now, how beautiful they were. Ruth began to repeat some of the things she’d said in the gallery, and her lack of irony drew something similar from him. She talked about painting the way Glover talked about cars, with a personal, urgent pride in what others had made. David told them his own theory of art—which was that the finest pictures by the old masters featured either a monkey or a midget, or even, as in the Veronese they’d seen that afternoon, both. The classic double, he called it.

‘She comes in every day at noon and orders a half of cider. Sits just over there.’

‘With the Mirror.’

‘Right, and her Dunhill Lights.’

‘With a mirror? Why does she bring a mirror?’

‘The Daily Mirror newspaper. And it used to be her husband, Ray, who’d come in for a Guinness every afternoon, but Ray’s dead of a heart attack. I’d never even seen her, Irene, before. Then on the first day she came in she sat and cried.’

‘She’s on pilgrimage really, honouring his memory. Didn’t Raleigh’s wife carry his head around with her for years?’

‘In a velvet bag,’ added David.

‘She likes to do the crossword. And she told me once the flat was just too empty without him.’

David, who had heard the story before, had seen Irene for himself. She’d had her pack of Dunhills propped open beside her and was filling in a puzzle book, pencil poised, one eye screwed shut against the thread of smoke unspooling from the fag clamped between her lips. The mouth itself was caved in and gummy like a tortoise’s. The smoke, and her thinness, had left the impression she might actually be evaporating. Helmeted with a lavender-grey perm, draped in a shapeless maroon cardigan, she had an untied lace on one of her child-sized Adidas trainers, and the loose, lank, trailing thing struck David as desperately sad. The thin gold wedding ring on her finger was not a symbol of devotion but a statement of loss: it said what you love you will lose, and for ever. When she’d shambled to the bar and bought some cheese and onion crisps, the whole effect was somewhat spoiled. According to Glover, Ray had been an absolute bastard: he said Tom had always called him Wifebeater No 1, which led David to presume there were others.

Ruth was meeting Larry at eight, so David walked her down to the cab office on Greek Street. As he kissed her goodbye he pressed his fingertips, ever so gently, against the small of her back. When he got home he googled disegno and wrote an entry about it on The Damp Review. It was the Italian word for drawing but meant, apparently, much more than that. As Michelangelo had perfected it, disegno was a sublime kind of problem-solving, and the work of art an ideal solution, reconciling the often conflicting demands of function, material, subject, verisimilitude, expressivity…David got bored with typing the list out, and cut and pasted the rest of it…formal beauty, unity and variety, freedom and restraint, invention and respect for tradition. He also posted a second entry prescribing a trip to the National Gallery for anyone bored with shopping, or Hollywood, or crappy weekend newspaper supplements.

Collective nouns

On The Damp Review David posted critiques of films mostly but also his thoughts about books, TV shows, plays, restaurants, takeaways, whatever took his fancy. Or didn’t. He found it easier to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still. And it was his: they might have the television, the newspapers, the books, but the internet was his. Democratic, public, anonymous—it was his country and he felt grateful to be born in the generation that inherited it. He didn’t tell his family or friends about his site. Not even Glover knew what he got up to in his bedroom.

He’d begun another little project recently, gathering information on all the people he’d lost touch with over the years. He didn’t contact anyone directly but followed the footprints they left on their strolls through the virtual world. His nemesis from primary school had become a scuba instructor in the Virgin Islands. He found some photos on Rory’s brother’s Flickr account that showed a burnished and shaggy dropout hoisting a tank of air, thick-skinned as a seal in his wetsuit. David and he had been love rivals for Elizabeth S——, who he also found, eventually, on Facebook. She had retained her tragic, android beauty, though she was now holding a kid of her own.

He’d joined Friends Reunited under the pretence of being another boy from his class, the only person he’d ever hit, now a leading banking litigator. David took his bio from the law firm’s website, where a photo showed him still to be the vulnerable and round-eyed, slope-shouldered boy he’d known. Then he searched MySpace for students at PMP, the private college where he taught, at the same time as checking Arts & Letters Daily, where he found an interesting article on the life of Chaucer. He printed out eight copies for his A-level group and was trying to staple the sheets together when he heard Glover come in from church.

An old western was on the television in the living room. Glover had changed his clothes and now lay on the floor with one arm tucked up into his red T-shirt. The shape of his fist bounced gently off his chest, like a beating cartoon heart.

‘I think this is bust.’

Glover looked up as David wagged the black stapler, pulled the arm out from under his T-shirt and motioned for David to throw it. He caught it neatly, sat up and turned it over in his hands, as if looking for its price. Then he snapped it open and nodded.

‘It’s jammed. I can see it. The magazine can’t push up to the top.’

‘The magazine of staples?’

‘Yep.’

‘That’s very nice.’

‘One of the best.’

Last year David had photocopied the list of collective nouns for animals from his old dictionary at school and stuck it to the fridge. Glover and he had got into the habit of repeating them, and occasionally testing each other. (‘A sloth?’ ‘Bears…A fluther?’ ‘Jellyfish.’) David didn’t know exactly why he’d grown so fond of them. They seemed to hint at all the differing ways to proceed. A labour of moles. A zeal of zebras. A shrewdness of apes. With Glover, from the very start, David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both. Glover worked the offending staple out with the point of a biro.

‘Ah, cheers.’

‘Interesting yesterday, with Ruth.’

‘Was the Bell not pretty empty for a Saturday?’ David clacked the stapler lightly a couple of times.

‘I know it sounds stupid, but I never considered a painting as representing, instead of just straight depicting.’

David thought it did sound stupid and it made him feel fond of his friend—it was these little reminders of Glover’s very average mind that made his good looks so much easier to stand.

‘If I’d had a teacher like that I might have done my homework.’ Glover lay back down on the carpet, where two cushions angled his head to the screen. They watched four men on horseback ford a river, then arrive in an empty one-street town. A man dived through the window of the saloon and began shooting at them.

David said, to no response, ‘Sugar glass.’

Glover had slipped his hand back up into his T-shirt and was gently tapping on his chest again. The cartoon heart. He was always in such a good mood after church. David didn’t think it was righteousness particularly, or smugness; more that he’d done his duty and could now relax. Still, it was intensely irritating. David felt excluded from his happiness, his secret. Over another burst of gunfire he said, ‘How was God today?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’

‘What did you learn? What was the sermon?’

Glover sighed and blinked hard at the screen.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Ermm, something like, without a shepherd sheep are not a flock.’

‘Correct. They’re not. They’re autonomous.’

‘They’re sheep.’

‘Autonomous sheep.’

An outlaw was hiding in a barrel with a shotgun, staring out through a knothole in the wood. David prodded again. ‘You don’t have to sneak off, you know.’

‘I don’t sneak off. You’re not up when I leave.’

What’s the opposite of coincidence? What’s the word for nothing happening that might suggest a hidden plan? Glover found significance in the darkest corners of his life. Whatever found him could not have missed him, whatever missed him could not have found him. Once, when David had been turned down for the job of Deputy Head of the English Department, Glover had assured him that everything happened for a reason. David hadn’t protested, but at that moment some deep tectonic movement had occurred. They might share the same flat but they lived in different universes. Folk-tale determinism! David was not surprised by much in the routine progress of his days, but that surprised him. If life turned on any principle it was haphazard interaction and erratic spin. He thought it much too obvious for argument: you make your own luck.

They were silent as the adverts came on. Glover and David considered themselves expert judges of the female form. There was an unspoken question when a woman was sighted which required a binary answer. It seemed as if they were simply being honest, and it made David feel masculine—not macho, not manly—to talk that way. Often, if they were in a bar or on a street, it would be a nudge or a directed glance to alert the other’s attention—although Glover was picky. A beautiful Indian girl in full sari was selling teabags to them now and, without prompting, Glover said no, her shoulders were too wide.

The drogue

They had met in the Bell two years ago. David was trying to mark essays when the barman put some folk music, extravagantly loudly, on the stereo. Miming how to twist a dial, David said, ‘Sorry, mate, could you turn it down a bit? Too much accordion for me.’

‘My dad used to play the accordion.’

David smiled weakly, showing no teeth, trying for polite dissuasion.

‘He met my mum at a church concert. Without the accordion I wouldn’t be here.’ The barman grinned—a kind of slackening that made his face charming.

‘Does he still play?’

‘On state occasions.’

Wearing a grey T-shirt and dark blue canvas trousers of the sort David associated with plumbers, the barman was athleticlooking with very square shoulders; and these he hunched forward as he rested against the glass-doored fridge, so his T-shirt hung concavely, as if blown on a washing line. The hair on his head was short, black, artfully mussed with wax. David’s mother would have said he had the forehead of a thief, meaning it was very low, but his eyes would have won her over. They were widely spaced and a light, innocent blue. The way his heavy eyebrows sloped towards a neat, feminine nose seemed to grant his face sincerity. David liked him—James Moore Glover—at once. A friendship, too, is a kind of romance.

Glover did all the newspaper crosswords when it wasn’t too busy, and since David always sat at the bar, marking at lunchtimes, or for an hour after work, he was often on hand to help. And talking in the sardonic, ruminative, unhurried way of two men who happen to be in the same place, they discovered that they made each other laugh.

A few months after Glover had started in the Bell, he looked up and scratched unthinkingly at his cheek, where light acne scars were still visible, and David noticed he wasn’t working on a crossword. He was circling flat-shares in Loot. He’d been staying with his boss Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, but the couple were splitting up and selling their flat; he had to move out.

After a pint and a half of German lager David said, ‘Mate, you know, I’ve a spare room. You could stay there if you’re stuck.’

Glover arrived with Tom, his worldly goods in the boot of the bar manager’s BMW. It turned out the bar manager was also Glover’s cousin. David and he disliked each other instantly. Tom remembered him from the pub, he said, as if that was somehow damning and odd, and he walked round the flat with a cursory, dismissive air; he’d seen it all before, or if not exactly this, then something close enough. He said, ‘Going to make tea for us then or what?’ and as David carried the tray through to the living room, he heard him whisper to Glover, ‘You’d best make sure you’ve a lock on your door.’ After he’d left, David had made it plain that this certainly wasn’t that kind of set-up, and Glover appreciated, he thought, his candour. James had six wine boxes of books, several bin bags of clothes and a five-foot bay tree in an earthenware pot. The tree had a slim trunk and a perfect afro of thick, waxy leaves. The pot got cracked on the door jamb and they replanted it into the plastic red bucket David used for the mop. It was still there now, in David’s living room, in its temporary home.

Glover’s stopgap fix also settled into permanence. Initially circumspect, tidying up, knocking on doors, apologizing for polishing off the milk, they quickly developed the shorthand of flatmates. Glover came from Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast and his low-pitched voice had the slightest suggestion of an East Anglian accent: he lengthened vowels and weakened the second syllable in thinking, drinking, something. He didn’t take sugar in his tea. His sudden violent sneezes seemed to come in threes.

He was muscular, and stayed fit by running every day along the river and the wind-picked streets of south-east London, his iPod strapped to his waist, his footfalls keeping time with his soundtrack of deep house. Glover claimed that he used to be a lot bigger, meaning fatter, and then at the end of his first year in college at Norwich he’d taken up jogging, and now greeted each day with the devotions of a hundred press-ups and sit-ups. David disliked and admired and envied that disciplined part of his flatmate. Glover’s orderly mind was dominated by its left hemisphere. His toiletries stood grouped at one end of the windowsill, all their labels facing forwards; David’s were scattered throughout the bathroom, or propped upside down in various corners, distilling the last of their contents into their caps. While Glover wired plugs, changed fuses, replumbed the leaky washing machine, David made cups of tea and hovered. He could ask Glover about cold fusion, about the white phosphorus the Americans were using, about a car’s suspension, about enriching uranium, and Glover would explain it with a nerdish enthusiasm. The television occasioned some of his greatest triumphs. A programme about land speed record challengers led to an explanation of how those parachutes that shot out behind the vehicles worked. He fetched an A4 pad and a pen from his room, drew some diagrams to illustrate the dynamics of a drogue (his word). His measured speech, with its tiny lilt, sped up with excitement, and David felt he was one of those swollen, empty parachutes, dragging behind, slowing him down.

David liked the fact that Glover knew, that someone knew, how everything functioned. It was reassuring. These exchanges of information were interspersed with the usual male distractions: anecdotes, comparisons and lists, the one-upmanship of clambering humour; someone would say something funny, and the other would take the conceit one step further. And when Glover cracked up, the husky rev of his laugh never failed to ignite David’s. Watching him put up the shelves that had been leaning in the hallway for three years, David asked if he ever thought he might go back and finish his degree: he’d dropped out of a mechanical engineering course. Glover had a screw in his mouth, and it fell on the laminate floor, hitting his foot and skittering across to the doormat.

‘Yeah, thing is, I came back after the first summer looking a bit different. It was weird. I’d lost all the weight and was taking these antibiotics for my skin—and I couldn’t get over the fact that people suddenly changed. People who wouldn’t give me the time of day in the first year were now all over me like a rash. I didn’t feel like anyone was real. I hated it.’

The recycling box

Monday morning began with a double period of David’s A-level group, where he distributed his printouts and they discussed the symbolism of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Lunchtime brought no respite.

Aside from occasionally letting a student borrow his cigarette lighter at the steps by the side entrance, PMP’s debating society was David’s only extra-curricular activity, and since the teacher who ran it had gone on maternity leave, he was now required to attend every weekly meeting. This House Believes that America No Longer Leads the Free World.

The in-house genius in the debating society was little Faizul, the Egyptian. He proposed the motion, voice fluttering between outrage and plea, hands frantic as shadow puppets. The rebuttal was provided by myopic, ungrammatical Clare, Queen of the Home Counties, and David watched the fifty golden minutes of his lunchtime tick away.

Before afternoon class he checked his email in the computer lab and found Ruth had replied to his message thanking her for the trip to the gallery. He’d also asked her if she fancied catching the latest ridiculous Hollywood remake—she’d mentioned her inexplicable weakness for blockbusters—and she suggested Wednesday night. And did he want to ask Glover, since he’d said he wanted to see it as well?

The movie was exceptionally poor, David thought, though Ruth claimed to agree with Glover’s verdict of ‘silly but fun’. As David walked out onto the pavement ahead of them he was already writing The Damp Review’s post in his head: Never remake monster movies. It’s always a mistake. One can upgrade certain things—special effects, sets, costumes, even the actors—but one cannot get the better of nostalgia. One can’t improve on memory: that subtle, slanted light.

Ruth and David lunched the next week, and he met her for a drink after she’d been to a gallery opening. And so it continued. He would sit opposite and watch the internal weather of her emotions play on her beautiful face. She lived at the surface of her life. Nothing yet had happened between them but David felt the sheer intensity of their interactions precluded his role from being the usual one of confidant. Sometimes she held his look for a second or two longer than necessary, and sometimes she smiled in an impudent, daring way that David would think about later. In the meantime she was laden with a great deal of emotional baggage—this dancer called Paolo, still calling from America.

One chill November night the three of them saw Othello at the Globe and, after hailing a cab on Blackfriars Bridge for Ruth, the flatmates began the footslog back to Borough. The streets were almost deserted, plucked clean by the cold, and the icy pavements glinted like quartz. The play had not been good and David was extemporizing. After a pause, occasioned by his comparing the director to a back-alley abortionist, Glover said, ‘How do you really feel about Ruth? I mean honestly.’

‘I really like her,’ David said, mimicking his emphasis. ‘Why, don’t you?’

‘Of course, but I was wondering if you were going to do anything about it.’

David knew what he meant immediately, but something in his tone—some hint of irritation—offended him. Glover was always trying to push him into the world, offering to try internet dating with him, suggesting they reply to the newspaper personals, telling David to walk up to girls in pubs. He thought Glover considered him inert, as if he just needed a shove in the back to start rolling forward, but David was acquainted with rejection. He could only proceed at his own pace.

‘We’re old friends, you know? Really old friends.’

A crisp packet scraped along the pavement, worried by the wind, and Glover kicked at it. It flipped up over his track shoe and settled back, face down.

‘I suppose the question is whether you’re attracted to her.’

David bristled again and sighed with impatience. ‘Anyone can see she’s attractive.’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

He didn’t reply. What was it to Glover? They’d reached the front steps of their flat and the conversation was parked there, by the wheelie bins and the recycling box in which someone had dropped a half-eaten kebab.

Like road maps, abandoned

On a wet, dark, interminable Wednesday, one of those winter days that lacks an afternoon, Ruth emailed to invite David to dinner. He’d never been asked to her flat before, to the Barbican, and Glover’s email address didn’t feature in the recipients’ section. Her note was casual and he matched the tone, replying with one line: Sure, that’d be nice. Probably nothing would happen, but the night before he was due for dinner, he ironed his skyblue shirt. This action carried a certain evidential weight: he loathed ironing, its peculiar blend of fussiness and tedium, and got away with wearing round-neck jumpers at school. However, that particular shirt, according to his mother, brought out his eyes. He was childishly excited to see Ruth’s natural habitat. He’d never known her to cook before and was envisaging something plain, unfussy. Italian perhaps. Zucchini. Basil. Pecorino. Fruit to finish.

The day itself was a write-off. The only thing achieved was managed after hours when David, on the rota to supervise study group from 4 to 6 p.m., helped Susan Chang, who smelt of vanilla ice cream, remove a paper jam from the photocopier. He felt delighted by his small victory, and to celebrate, and in preparation for the evening, he decided to smoke some of the emergency weed he kept hidden in the locked drawer of his desk. He visited the staff toilet, perched on the edge on the flippeddown lid and skinned up. The joint was small, heavy on green, pointy as a golf tee, and would take the edge off the nervousness he was feeling. It was not beyond reason that it might be tonight. Ruth was unaccustomed to being alone.

He slipped the joint inside the pocket of his jacket and, at six o’clock exactly, headed up the ribbed linoleum stairs, wedging the fire-door ajar with an empty Coke can. Out on the roof of the school the evening sky was enormous. Tidal night was rolling in across the rooftops and the horizon was stacked with sinking bands of oranges and reds and pinks.

Sometimes David saw things and wanted to tell someone about them, face to face, eye to eye. He had had a girlfriend once, Sarah, years ago. They’d met in the students’ union in their last term at Goldsmiths: she’d spilt his beer and then insisted that he buy them both another. Over the next four months it happened that nothing became real to him until he’d told her about it. If they weren’t together, they rang each other in the afternoon to describe what they’d done in the morning, then spent the evening recounting their afternoons.

Back then David still had hair, and one stoned lunchtime Sarah had used her flatmate’s clippers to shave it off. David saw what he would look like bald: insane and shiny, a spoon with eyes. In her bedsit, above a fried-chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, they watched a lot of New German Cinema, lit joss sticks and had clumsy, vehement sex. In the moment he’d once accidentally caught her fish-shaped earring and her ear had bled on the sheet. She hadn’t cried but had squirmed below him faster, panting, and then slapped him on the shoulder hard, saying, ‘Now hold me down. Now put your hand across my mouth. Now hurt me, hurt me.’ When she went to India for six months, she wrote to tell him it was over. It did not escape his notice that the letter had been posted, presumably from Heathrow, on the same day that she left. He had only been in love once, and it wasn’t her.

Queuing in the student cafeteria, in his first week at Goldsmiths, he had reached the checkout before discovering, in a hot flush of shame, that he’d forgotten his wallet. The girl in the line behind him had tapped him on the back, and when he turned had pressed a five-pound note into his hand, saying, ‘Take it, really, it’s fine.’ He had never seen anyone be so kind. She didn’t know him at all. He ate his lunch directly behind her and couldn’t take his eyes off her hair. Thick and dark and shiny as an Eskimo’s. Natalie was a third-year, he found out, and when he met her the next day to pay her back, they’d ended up eating lunch together and he’d made her clear green eyes close repeatedly with laughter.

David leaned against the red-brick chimney stack and lit his spliff. He thought how he was growing old and odd, how he was falling prey to calcified and strange routines. The thick unfiltered smoke began to spread its anaesthetic chill throughout his head. Two pigeons sat on the bitumen lid of a water tank, cooing and soothing the traffic below. He moved towards them and they fluttered off, settling on a lower ledge. In the distance the British Telecom minaret rose above the hum, and the satellite dishes on the roofs stood out like white carnations fixed in buttonholes. He stubbed what was left on the lid of the tank and was halted for a second by the presence of the moon. It was cinematic, scaly and yellow, and had crept up silently behind him as if it meant to do him harm.

On the pavement, foggy but relaxed, he put on Elgar’s Sea Pictures and caught a 38 on Oxford Street up into the City. The Christmas lights had been erected, but were not yet switched on. He was going to be early, so he got off by Turnmill Street to walk. This was the hour before the evening started, the hour when anything might happen. It was the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly refolded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses. It was the hour when the smell of cumin and curry would waft across his parents’ garden in Hendon. It was heaven. It was the dog-walking hour. It was the hour of a million heating systems clicking on and thrumming into life, the hour of a blue plastic bag whipping above the building site on Clerkenwell Road in spasms of desire. Would Ruth be wondering, right now, about tonight? Would she be looking down at London in transition, and thinking anything could happen? This hour must once have been the kingdom of the lamplighters, and subject to their piecemeal, point-by-point illumination, but now the street lights all came on in a single instant pulse, a blink, as David stopped by Smithfield meat market to spark his Marlboro Light, where the floors had been hosed down and water ran in rivulets out into the street, creating tiny eddies round his sensible brown loafers.

Natalie had graduated a few weeks after the incident in the cafeteria. She’d found work in a graphic designers in Ascot, though she came back to London at weekends to stay with her boyfriend in Clapham. Every so often she spoke to David on the phone but was always too busy to meet. So on Friday evenings and Monday mornings David took to hanging around in Waterloo station—along the route where she’d have to walk from the overground train from Sunningdale down into the Underground to catch the Northern Line, and back. He did that for two months and never saw her, not once. He had wanted her so much he could barely think straight. He wrote her hundreds of poems and letters that he never sent, and a few that he did. He wanted her in his arms, in his eyes, in his kidney and spleen and heart. He wanted to unbutton her white shirt and slide the snakeskin belt out of the loops of her Levi 503s. Jittery with excitement in the station, he would take up his position by the ticket machines and scrutinize for an hour or so the unknown faces passing through the barriers until, eventually, he would give up, and move off with a grimace and a heavy gait, as if some part of him ached when he took a step.

As the lift ascended the twenty-three floors to Ruth’s flat David stared at himself in the mirror. Here was the elliptic face. The joint had left his eyes watery and the walk had taken it out of him. His sweaty head shone like a conker, and his cheeks were watermelon-pink. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blotted himself. At the second knock, he heard Ruth shout from inside, ‘It’s open.’ He tried the door and here she was, walking towards him in dark skinny jeans and a black kimono jacket. Her hair was still damp, swept neatly into a side parting, and such unfussiness lent her face a new authority.

‘Hey hey hey,’ David said, for no good reason he could think of, lifting his arms like some favourite uncle.

‘Wonderful to see you.’ She offered her cheekbones to kiss in turn and then presented a cordless telephone, the mouthpiece covered by one of her palms. ‘I’m just in the middle of something.’ He mouthed Sure and she said, ‘The living room’s through there,’ nodding up the corridor, before pushing the door shut with a naked foot. David noticed that her toes were not beautiful—misshapen as pebbles—but the nails were painted electric blue.

He propped himself on the arm of a massive maroon sofa. It ran the entire length of one glass wall—the exterior walls of the living room were ceiling-to-floor windows, and an outside walkway ran along them, enclosed by a chest-high barrier of hammered concrete. In the corner of the living room there was a huge battered travelling trunk—the kind of thing a seven-yearold in a peaked cap and uniform, going back for Michaelmas term, might sit on in a railway station in the 1950s. There was an armchair that matched the sofa and was functioning as a filing cabinet of sorts—papers were divided by being stuck behind, or to one of the sides of, the seat cushion. Ruth was at the other end of the hallway—in the bedroom he assumed—talking loudly.

‘Look, all I’m saying is you can do all of that stuff after you’ve graduated…No, no, I think it’s incredibly important that you do it, you have to do it, but after you’ve graduated…Honey, I understand that completely. But you’ve spent three years working towards this thing…I don’t care what he says.’

David shrugged to let his satchel fall from his shoulder. It landed on the oatmeal carpet with a jangle of the keys inside.

‘He did not pay for your education. Did he say that? Who paid the fees at Wellsprings? Who pays for your apartment?…No, all I care about is you making a mistake now that in ten years or ten days, you might regret…’

David stepped into the galley kitchen. It was pristine and impersonal as a show house, except for invitations to art events that patched a cork noticeboard. How could she already have received so many? A door shut at the far end of the corridor but no footsteps approached. He slipped outside to the balcony; he could then at least pretend not to have been listening. London laid out like a postcard, like its own advertisement. The Millennium Wheel, Big Ben, Tower Bridge. A light blinked on the pyramid top of Canary Wharf to warn migrating birds and gazillionaires in helicopters not to come too close. He sat down on a plastic folding chair that dug into his back. From this level he could only see the sky, its baggy cloudlets and scatter of stars. He fastened his duffel coat and retrieved his satchel from the living room, skinned up again and smoked, and waited. He listened to a few Leonard Cohen tracks on the iPod, then some early Sinatra to lighten his mood. When he went back in again to get a glass of water, according to the wooden sun-clock hanging above the sideboard, twenty-two minutes had passed. The flat was silent. Down the hallway the bedroom door was open and inside the bed was huge and white, the tangled sheets and duvet ski runs, snowdrifts, ice crevasses. He faked a little cough to warn of his approach, but it dislodged something solid in his throat and by the time he reached the closed door of the bathroom he was hacking noisily. He knocked, needlessly gently now—a tap was running within.

‘Ruth, everything all right?’

‘Oh no, fine. Sorry. I’ll be out in two minutes. Sorry.’

He turned to pad up the corridor but the lock snapped back and she appeared. She’d taken her jacket off and was wearing a yellow vest that showed her shoulders, freckled and thin but tanned, un-English. Her eyes were just cuts now in marshmallow puffiness. She’d been crying and had washed her face; she still gripped a small black towel.

‘I’m so sorry, David. This is sort of embarrassing for me, and probably for you too. Bridget is being so difficult and her father…’

She began to cry again and then moved towards him. The actual contact came as a shock. He’d kissed her cheek many times, and even once lightly pressed his fingers on her shoulder as they parted. But now they embraced, and he arranged himself in it, and felt her shoulder blades sharp on his forearms. Things were changing. He knew he would never see her in quite the same way again. In an instant she had grown beyond the abstract; desire was no longer theoretical. Touch is much more dangerous than sight, or little smiles, or honest conversations, or whispers about pictures in a gallery. Touch is how the real thing starts. He felt an overwhelming urge to protect her, to gather her up and keep her safe. Her slender body shivered as she exhaled a long sigh, and he gripped her tighter. She was so light. He could lift her so easily. The smell of coconut soap came off her hair and he breathed it in deeply, willing it to fill every cell within him.

When she straightened up and stepped away he was almost surprised to find his body hadn’t retained the indentation of her form. Immediately she busied herself—arranging the towel on its rail, tugging off the bathroom light. She walked quickly and he followed. When she pulled a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge he leant against the kitchen counter, watching. It seemed to him then that leaning against a kitchen counter was obviously the embodiment of style. He felt enormously powerful. If he so desired he could run a marathon or lift that fridge and throw it. Instead he handed her the corkscrew, the only visible utensil in the room, with a courtly flourish of his wrist. A hypnotic spell of domestic familiarity had been cast between them, then she broke it.

‘God, I’m sorry, David. I hope I didn’t make you feel…awkward.’

Did he look awkward? It wasn’t awkwardness he felt. She gave a sad laugh, took a sheet of kitchen paper from a roll hanging on the wall and blew her nose loudly. This depressed him. He disliked hearing a nose being blown; he always attended to his own in private. A little of her mystique disappeared into that piece of kitchen roll, and it annoyed him that she didn’t care. He tucked his blue shirt back into his waistband where her hug had pulled it out, realized he had pushed it inside his underpants and rearranged it.

‘Oh shit, I’ve got mascara on your shirt.’ She raised a hand to brush at it and he stepped back, aware suddenly of the softness of his chest.

‘No, no, it’s pen, I think, it’s fine.’

‘Let’s get some glasses, sit down. Do you have cigarettes? Oh poor Bridge…She’s such a wonderful girl. But sometimes…’ She sighed and clinked the bottle down onto the coffee table, then turned back to the kitchen.

‘Teenagers!’ David half-shouted after her, and then regretted his banality.

‘Christ—she’s twenty. I think this is the way she’s going to be. Headstrong. Like her mother.’ She allowed herself an indulgent half-smile as she reappeared in the room, holding filled glasses.

‘What’s the actual issue?’ David said professionally, taking one from her and settling back in the sofa.

‘She wants to drop out of her acting course. Well, change to a teaching programme. And I don’t think it’s the best idea she’s had.’

‘You know, I came to see you once when I wanted to change courses. I stayed behind after a lecture. I’m sure you don’t remember.’

David had always wondered if she recalled their conversation, and now he saw she didn’t, although she wasn’t going to admit it. She walked to the balcony door and looked out.

‘Of course I remember. You were going to switch courses…’

‘You were very supportive. You said I should do the thing I thought was right for—’

‘Oh, I know but, David, this is my daughter. You were some…’

She couldn’t choose a noun and her indecision seemed to spark something unpleasant in her: she cried, ‘Oh, be realistic!’ and waved a hand at the window, the walls, anything that might be secretly encroaching on her life. David, mortified, stared hard at the arm of the sofa. He had become Bridget’s surrogate in the argument. Ruth sighed, then added softly, as if it should be a comfort, ‘I wouldn’t have cared what you did. I didn’t even know you.’

She was upset. And even though he hadn’t for a moment thought her version of their chat would coincide with his, he felt her admission as humiliation. Here was his pedigree, here was his rating. He could go ahead and fuck his talent in the ear, he could give up art, teach English, but the meagre flame of Bridget’s gift should be somehow sheltered from the buffetings of salaries and standardizing test results, from buses and marking papers and the merciless alarm clock. A still, clear moment in his life. A kind of emotional vertigo—becoming suddenly aware of someone’s real opinion. Unsteadily, he set his glass on the carpet and stood up. Ruth was staring out of the window as he walked over to the shelving unit with its untidy stacks of books, piles of prints and photographs. As lightly as he could, he said, ‘I know that, of course. I just mean that maybe, you know, you should listen to her arguments and then—’

‘Her arguments consist of telling me I don’t know what the world is like. Look, David, I didn’t mean I didn’t care. I just meant—’

‘No, of course, I understand. It’s fine.’ He grinned enthusiastically, multiplying chins.

‘She has this thing,’ Ruth continued, swerving back to her own road, ‘that she wants to teach inner-city kids and change to an education major—she’s just spent the last three years in drama.’

‘Is this her?’ He’d lifted a small photograph off a pile of four or five of them on the top shelf. A stringy girl with long chestnutcoloured centre-parted hair. She had her hands in the praying position and was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table. Behind her, the columnar trunks of vast redwoods formed a solid backdrop.

‘God, no. That’s about twenty-five years old. Those are flares, David. That’s Jessica. You remember. She lives in New York. Her partner Ginny edits that journal—you should send some reviews there.’

‘She was very pretty.’

He set it back on the pile. She had told him once about sharing a flat in the Latin Quarter with a girl named Jess.

‘Oh, she still is. Bridge is too, but even darker, like her father. Dark and mean.’

She sat down neatly on the sofa and pulled her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest. David had just realized that there was no sign of food preparation, no preheating oven, nothing. He felt his stomach tense. It was listening very carefully as he asked, ‘What about dinner?’

‘Ah, that’s the other thing. Can we cut out and grab something?’

The first person plural

Ruth had seen a little Chinese place, the Peking Express, not far from her flat and wanted to try it. That they were the sole customers became apparent only after entering. David wanted to leave but Ruth had already settled on a table in the corner, beside the aquarium. The tank was coffin-long and faintly stagnantlooking, and as various fish twisted their sad eyes to David, he got the definite impression that he was there for their entertainment and not the other way round. In greeting he parted and closed his lips at the glass. A scarlet fantail jerked away, billowing flamenco skirts.

Just as the waitress arrived at their table Ruth was telling David about Bridget’s mad plan to marry her boyfriend, Rolf, and she lifted the palm of her hand to ensure quiet until she’d finished. The waitress, a Chinese girl of about seventeen, dutifully stood there, head down, as David tried to shoot her a pleading, apologetic look. When Ruth delivered the kicker—And I said, darling, I remember what it’s like to be twenty, but no feeling’s for ever—the waitress palmed a small gold lighter from a pocket in her skirt and lit the stubby candle, then gave a neutral lethal smile.

‘I think we need another minute.’

Ruth had a knack for touching on questions that encouraged self-examination, and over dinner she asked about David’s relationship with his parents. He found himself talking about rejection, about disappointment and resentment. Ruth interrogated softly, and as he was speaking he realized he was actually learning certain things about his life.

He didn’t think her interest was compensation for her earlier, peremptory response. Unlike David, she couldn’t feign successfully, or not for long. She was not nice, that damning adjective, and her curiosity, when it came, was undiluted by politeness. Instructed since birth in the cardinal virtues by a joyless Calvinist mother, David barely knew what interested him any more. He was sure of how he should behave, of the questions he should ask, of suitable responses. But he’d had enough of that. At least if Ruth appeared intrigued by something, it was simply because she found it intriguing. She might be a slave to her id, to insistent desires, but she wasn’t boring. There was no ritual in her conversation and no taboo. Nothing was beyond analysis and articulation—over dinner she told him that she thought his mother probably hated him on some subconscious level because he tied her to his father. David felt Ruth and he were pulling close, aligning themselves, and the fit was remarkably good.

This was why men went mad for her. She looked at David with such intensity that he could believe he was the centre of her universe. It was not need: that would have been off-putting. But she gifted him the rare belief that he was special. He was the millionth visitor. He was the only one who understood, the only one she wanted, the only one to save her.

Her continuous low-level anxiety was brought to the surface by the usual liberal flashpoints. The environment. Her own ageing and death. American foreign policy. She assumed his politics, of course, as she assumed most things, but he didn’t mind. The waitress appeared with more wine and her assassin’s smile. David watched two tiny neon-blue fish dart like courtiers around a large black catfish. It slowly turned its ribbed underbelly towards their table and began grubbing on the dirt that clouded the glass.

As they left the restaurant, the two waiting staff and three chefs lined up like the hosts at a wedding (‘Goodbye, we see you soon’). Ruth had insisted on leaving the change from her fifty, which meant the staff got a tip of fourteen pounds eighty. The food was completely average, but if the mood took her, she could be crazily generous—although her absent-mindedness, more often than not, left a wake of insulted and unthanked, the doored-in-the-face. She may have lacked intent, but culpability resides also in neglect: David was sure of that. He felt several things about her simultaneously. Her worries and concerns were all near the brim, so he found he forgot how fucked up and desirous, how petty and distraught he himself usually was. She let him know that he was not abnormal, by which she meant alone. The two of them were in this thing together. It was seductive, that, to be appropriated to someone’s side. He could imagine that his interests tied in entirely with hers. As to what she saw in him, he wasn’t sure. He knew she thought him entertaining. He was one of the amusingly crucified, and plainly devoted to her. He figured that she might enjoy his obvious delight when the conversation turned to art, to books, to anything that might broaden and sustain the mind. And maybe she was lonely too.

Out on the street she slid her arm into his. He squared his shoulders and straightened his back, possessive of this creature by his side. A cairn of black bags was heaped on the pavement by an overflowing litter bin and they swerved to avoid it. The last few yards had passed without speech. David was in a small reverie of contentment, thinking how he had, belatedly at thirty-five, met someone he found interesting, met someone who was doing something. His life had turned a corner. Their footsteps made a pleasing beat, which he was about to mention when she drew his arm a little tighter and said, ‘I need to say something. I know you’re going to think it’s crazy, and I do too…believe me…’

Her tender tone and the wished-for words accelerated regions in his heart. He squeezed her arm back as she whispered, ‘Do you think…I mean I think there might be something…’

She paused and David felt the shiver rise within him. He lifted a hand to his chest as if that might be enough to keep the blood pumping and the whole thing in place.

‘Something between James and me…’ She stopped walking then, pulling him to a stop, and looked up into his face to examine his reaction. He yanked a fierce smile from somewhere. He felt cold, distant from himself: the real David was a many-legged scuttling thing, climbing up inside his body and now peering out with sad despair through the windows of his eyes.

‘Oh God, you’re outraged, right? Is it outrageous? I know it’s a little crazy, but…’

‘The thing is…’ He started walking again, looking forward, almost dragging her down the street. ‘And I know, because we’ve talked a lot, he finds it hard to trust…’ David made a preposterous gesture of holding a weight in his open hand. It might have been his ousted heart.

‘Yes. He’s told me about that, about college.’

Had he? When? Each time David left the room did they change gear to intimacy, then slow up again to casual acquaintances when he returned? Were they telepathic? Email. They were chatting on email. How nice for them.

‘He’s such a sweet man. He’s so…sincere.’

‘Earnest, you mean? Yeah…not like us.’

She turned her head and gave David a curious look—it was almost a flinch of injured pride; but then she saw the vanity of that move and turned the thing into a joke on herself.

‘No, exactly, not like us. We’re cynical old things.’

David wanted to disentangle his arm from hers but thought that might reveal too much. He succeeded in jollying himself along, but all he wanted was to be out of her presence, to get home and climb into bed with a pint of wine and a spliff. Things began to draw clear. She had asked questions about the two of them living together, about how David had met him, about where Glover was from, but stupidly, idiotically, shamefully, he had thought he was the focus. She chattered on emptily now about how ridiculous it was, and she was sure that nothing would transpire but she just wanted to say something, she needed to say something, she felt something between them, and what did he think? Over and over. And then the childish denouement: he was sworn to secrecy. Then they were standing at the bottom of the rock face of her apartment block, and over-eager to prove himself unfazed by the news, David found he had asked her round for dinner next week. When they had settled on Thursday, he added, ‘And I actually will cook for us.’

Ruth laughed and then there was an elongated pause, as the first person plural hung in the air and both of them wondered if it might include Glover.

Two in the afternoon

Buddha’s bogus smile

David decided not to tell James about dinner, but it made no difference. Maybe she emailed him and mentioned it, or maybe Fortuna, in the earthly guise of the Bell and Crown rota, decided to give him the night off. David didn’t know and never asked. By the time he’d dragged the shopping home on the Thursday evening, he was sweating and tired and dejected. The shower was running and a few minutes later Glover appeared in the kitchen doorway. Relaxed, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, he seemed fresh and new, the hair glossy and spiky, and he watched as David unpacked the groceries. On hearing that Ruth was coming for dinner, he acted neither surprised nor especially pleased, rubbing a palm up and down the door frame as if sanding it. He offered to help with the cooking but David said no, he was fine, and the TV went on. When the intercom gave its buzz of static David ignored it and Glover took the stairs down one by one, in no particular hurry.

He was listening hard as they ascended but heard nothing until they entered the flat. The dynamic felt immediately different. When he came out from the kitchen Glover had already taken her coat. Her perfume seemed stronger, a pleasant, singed citrus, her hair was newly cut and dyed, and he was sure her make-up was more pronounced. Black form-fitting satin trousers showed off her trim behind. Leather stack-heeled boots added an inch or two of height. A large tiger-stone pendant drew the eyes to the V of her grey cashmere V-neck, and its deep cut of tanned cleavage. Time had been taken. Money had been spent. It was premeditated, David thought, like the worst kind of crime, but she did look good, and she did smell good, and when he kissed her hello and gave her a hug, platonically quick, she felt wonderful too.

As he finally slotted the casserole dish in the hot yawn of the oven, David thought that this was easily the nadir of his year so far. He had another month for it to get worse, of course, but tonight he was on a date, as the chaperon, in his own living room. He was about to watch the only woman he’d been even vaguely interested in for years make a play for his flatmate. And he was cooking for them. He downed a glass of Something Blanc and reluctantly went in. The conversation was about Suffolk. Ruth tended to talk, David knew, to one person. When you were chosen you became her solace, her intimate confrère in some subtle plot against the whole thick-witted world. She watched you and read you, responded only to you. Such was the exclusive nature of her consciousness, operating in daily life through a series of mini-love affairs. David knew the intense joy of being concentrated on like that! Together they would sit and worry at a subject until something, however small, was clarified, but if you weren’t elected, if you were secondary, then it meant you had to sit and wait, woebegone, and watch, and throw remarks like popcorn at the principals.

He flopped down by the stereo and scanned his eyes up and down the stacked CDs. They were so taken with their conversation they hadn’t even turned the music on.

‘But when you were growing up, did you think the town was dying?’

Glover noticed David looking at the CDs and said, ‘My Blood on the Tracks is there somewhere.’

‘Oh yes, play that,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s his best.’ A male thing to say, so definitive and presumptuous. David saw she was taking charge with Glover. Whatever would happen would happen tonight. As she plucked at the stitching of the red cushion on her lap, she was scrutinizing Glover’s profile from beneath her calculated lashes. David found the CD and set it in the stereo’s extruded tray, intruded it, pressed play. The opening chords of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ came through the speakers.

The evening went slowly. David found himself irritated when Glover cracked some joke that made her laugh, and laugh excessively, or when she asked him yet another question. He was too familiar with the sense of being overlooked not to feel it keenly. When he went to check on dinner, he unzipped his hooded top and took it off, and wished emotions were like clothes, that he could remove them, fold them, set them somewhere. He laid the table and stood at the sink, then pressed his hand on the steam of the windowpane, where it left a perfect print. He went back in and downed a lot of wine and smiled.

It was true enough: Glover was handsome. His physique was nothing but tendon and muscle, and he fitted it entirely. He couldn’t imagine the ugly-duckling version, fat and acned, though there was no doubt he was a swan now. David had been an ugly duckling too, and had then grown into a penguin. Or a dodo. A booby. He had never seen Glover drop or fumble or break anything, and that capability could be seen in his hands: they were large, graceful, lightly veined. His movements had an easiness, and because he was not physically false, he also seemed not personally

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