ONE

At breakfast they had cornflakes, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, another helping of cornflakes (with banana), the rest of the liver sausage, two more bananas, a peach (slightly rotten) and a half-pound bar of fruit and nut chocolate.

They had not eaten for twenty-four hours. Graham, naked but for a faded blue T-shirt which was a good two sizes too small for him, leapt around the kitchen, flinging open cupboard doors and tossing knives into the sink, humming snatches from early Bob Dylan songs and explaining some of the more accessible poems of John Donne.

Literature, he told Margaret, is all about sex, as was borne out even by a lecture-course as conservative as his own. On the other hand, one could just as well argue that sex is all about literature, which was precisely what Graham was doing in his book, or trying to do, at least, and which he would explain in greater detail once he had managed to get these eggs turned in one piece. Oh, dear. She didn’t mind her eggs broken, did she?

Margaret looked on from the living-room, too happy to laugh. That huge bald head, that rather literary goatee beard (a trifle too neat, perhaps, but still making him look like some strange compound of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Chekhov), those strong, spatulate fingers and those shapely calves: he was indeed a most attractive man. ‘Calves fit for tragedy,’ as he himself had said, whipping off his underpants and holding them to his heart in mock-grief.

And yet he looked so young, so boyish: something about his movements and the impish glitter of his eyes made her see him in cap and blazer and short trousers, running across a school playing-fields on a damp November afternoon, his socks around his ankles and his pockets full of conkers, cigarette cards, bubble-gum wrappers … Not that she would ever tell him that: for all his joking, Graham had a keen sense of his own dignity.

But it was his mind that she admired so – the quickness of his thinking, the clarity of his expression, and of course his wealth of knowledge: he had a first-rate mind, there was no doubting that. It made her feel as though her own head were stuffed with rags and petals, a storehouse for a million useless things with nothing to unite them but the accident of their being all in one place. She lacked the power of analysis. Yes, that was it: she could not analyse. Whereas Graham’s mind was like a tool for taking things to bits and putting them back together again. It made his physical clumsiness seem all the more appropriate, somehow. The cupboards slammed and the china rattled and the lid of the waste bin had already got broken, but Margaret didn’t care about any of that. She just looked on. She was perched on the edge of an armchair in the little living-room, wrapped in a somewhat tatty towelling dressing-gown. She felt as wise as her thirty-four years and as young as her new heart. When the dressing- gown fell open she did not automatically cover up her legs but let the breeze from the window play upon them for a while. It was not yet September.

This tiny flat, with its low ceilings and dreadful 1950s furniture: she had grown to loathe it in these last three years. Ever since her divorce she had been living alone here, putting her watercolours on the wall and decorating the shelves with dried leaves and acorns, hating the lack of light, and the noise from the street below, and the loneliness. She was obsessively tidy, a nest-maker of a very particular and practised kind, but she had never succeeded in making this place into a home. It remained as strange now as it had been when she first moved in. And all those evenings spent listening to classical concerts on the radio, those Sunday afternoons walking up the Royal Crescent on her own: there had been times when she actually wanted to run up to the nearest person in the street, a woman pushing a pram or an old man with a walking-stick, and grab them by the lapels and stare into their face and say: ‘I am so lonely.’

She felt no shame thinking about it now – no shame, and no self-pity. It was all so far away: the Margaret she could see running through the streets with her coat flapping in the wind and her hair coming unpinned round her ears existed still, but only somewhere very far away. She didn’t matter any more. The Margaret who mattered was the one who was sitting here, the new Margaret who was full of love and silence and who had made up her mind, watching the haze from the frying-pan as it drifted out of the kitchen and turned blue in front of the open window, to buy a kimono for herself. A real one, made of silk, with dragons on the back.

Graham manoeuvred the eggs onto the plates and said: ‘My God, you’re going to love this.’ Fussily he arranged the rashers of bacon around the eggs, shifting them this way and that until he was satisfied with the optical effect. ‘I would like,’ he suddenly began, his hand on his heart, ‘I would like to thank the Egg Marketing Board for all their kind assistance; the Teflon Tufware Organisation for the magnificent way in which they have coated the frying-pan – I need not say that without their contribution it might have been a very sticky business –; the Made in Sheffield people, but for whose unstinting efforts there would have been no spatula …’.

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