A middle-aged woman with grey-white roots got on at Knightsbridge and sat down next to me, although there were plenty of other empty seats. She took out a large photo album from her imitation leather bag, extracted a pencil from her coat pocket and started to write in the album. It couldn’t have been easy, because the bus kept shuddering and stopping and then starting again suddenly. She seemed to be writing captions under the photos stuck in the album. They weren’t recent photos: judging from the garish colours and white frames they dated from the sixties or early seventies. Most of them were of the same man, in his thirties. He had thick eyebrows and a lick of dark hair over his eyes. The woman was frowning, concentrating on her curious task. What was she writing? Whatever it was, it seemed clear to me that it was something sad, oppressively sad, and I looked away.

  I went home, eventually. Marianne was listening to the radio and shelling peas in the kitchen – it’s one of the few things she likes about English produce. She said: ‘I thought you were going to pick up Jessica. When I got home there was a message from the crèche on the answering machine saying no one had picked her up and I had to go along. I had to get a cab.’

  It was true I’d said I’d pick her up. It was a bad thing to forget: one of the crèche supervisors would have had to stay behind with Jessica until Marianne had shown up. It put me on the wrong foot and I started apologising, but Marianne said it’s OK, I understand, don’t worry about it. I noticed that she’d changed her clothes: she wasn’t wearing the cashmere sweater and jeans any more. It was the kind of thing I wouldn’t have particularly noticed before but it set me thinking now. Of course, she’d have had a shower and changed when she got home, I thought. After all, I showered and changed after seeing Charlotte.

  We had dinner then I went into the lounge and put the television on. I was tired, incredibly tired. Jessica came into the lounge and clambered up onto my knees but I was too tired to entertain her. I looked into her face and tried to see myself in it. People have often commented on how much she looks like me but it’s the kind of thing people would say anyway. Now, in spite of my tiredness, I wanted to be able to look at her and see my genes at work. Instead, all I could make out was Marianne’s nose and skin colour. Jessica was playing a new game she’d invented only a few days before, feeling my pockets and trying to guess what I had in them, then reaching in and pulling everything out.

  I said: ‘Where’s Teddy? Why don’t you get Teddy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Teddy’s ill.’

  ‘Well why don’t you go and get Teddy and I’ll see if I can make him better.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Go on Jessica. Go and fetch Teddy.’

  ‘No!’

  She screamed it out, then scrambled off my knees. We haven’t been getting on so well lately, for some reason. She’s got this new trick now, where she speaks to me in French and refuses to speak in English. She’s quite aware my French isn’t up to it – in fact, she deliberately speaks more quickly to make sure I won’t understand. It really pisses me off. Marianne says don’t show you’re pissed off by it, because that’ll just encourage her. What annoys me is that it’s Marianne who actively encourages her. They speak almost exclusively in French together now. I had it out with Marianne the other day. She got quite angry about it. She’d said I want Jessica to be completely bilingual and if I don’t speak to her in French she’ll lose it. I’d shouted: You want her to be French, don’t you, you can’t stand the idea of Jessica being English! I’d stormed out of the house to cool off in the pub. When I’d got back from the pub Marianne had been in an icy mood. She’d said: If you’ve got anything to say to me you say it calmly, or you say it when Jessica’s not around. I don’t want Jessica to hear us arguing. I don’t want Jessica to hear you raise your voice with me.

  Anyway Marianne came into the lounge now and carted Jessica off to bed, while I stared at the television without watching it. I could feel my mind grinding through the events of the day, chaotically analysing, spewing forth senseless questions, spurious connections. Then eventually Marianne came back with a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses. It’s a ritual. After we’ve got Jessica off to bed we knock off a bottle of wine together. Being pregnant doesn’t seem to have stopped Marianne drinking, although sometimes I try and persuade her not to. That night I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t even know any more if the child she was carrying was mine.

  Marianne started talking about getting married, was I really serious about it? I said I was. In a bizarre way I meant it too. I was so tired, I was almost under the spell of the ordinariness of everything – it was as if today’s events were quite a separate affair that had no relevance to my domestic existence. It was the way I sometimes felt about people being killed in Africa. Marianne was saying she thought late July or early August would be the perfect time, that we could ask just a few friends down to Montargues for the wedding – Jake and Natalie, Claudine, Johnny, etc. – then have a big party when we got back. What did I think? I nodded. I may go down to Montargues the weekend after next then, she continued, there’ll be a lot to organise. The priest will be a pain, he’s not going to like it that we’ve already got Jessica. She went on in this vein for a while. At some point she repeated: Well what do you think? About what, I asked. Marianne seemed vaguely annoyed: If we’re going to get married I want you to be involved too, she said. I want it to be us together organising everything, not just me. Yeah I know, I replied, it’s just that I’m a bit knackered tonight … Anyway how did it go with the Belgian dealer? I’m not sure, Marianne answered, it was some guy from Antwerp … Sally Jacobs had told him to come and see my stuff … He seemed taken with the circle series, you know the one I mean? Yeah, I know the one you mean, I replied.

  I’d watched her carefully as she spoke. It interested me how she’d been able to weave a whole narrative in just a few casual words, it was quite an artistic achievement. I wondered whether she’d worked out what she was going to say in advance or whether it had just come out like that, spontaneously as it were. I could hear Jessica crying. You go, I said, I’m just not getting on with her at the moment.

  VII

  Lately I’ve been spending a fair amount of time outside a block of flats in Holland Road in West Kensington, where Marianne and her lover rent a bedsit. I follow Marianne there maybe two or three mornings a week. I can sense at the breakfast table whether she’s going to meet the guy that day or not. Sometimes I can even sense it the night before. What amazes me is how before I’d failed so comprehensively to pick up on all the little signals which seem so blindingly clear to me now.

  I’ve discovered the man’s name, but I don’t seem to be interested in finding out much more about him. I suppose I know everything I need to know. I probably knew everything the moment I first saw him. It’s his middle-aged ordinariness that troubles me most. If he’d been some handsome young guy perhaps I could have forgiven Marianne. No, that’s not quite right. There aren’t any circumstances in which I can imagine forgiving her, but at least I could have understood her better. I’ve thought about this a great deal. The problem for me is that the man is just so unlike myself. I’m young and physically in good shape, but in the end that works against me. They’re the visible advantages that are so easy to dismiss, precisely because of their visibility. What Marianne’s lover has is hidden, enigmatic, in the end far more potent. I watch his face as he talks to Marianne and it’s quite clear that this is a man you could trust – that even I could trust.

  I know which window is theirs, I can see it from the pavement. Sometimes I catch glimpses of them moving around. Once I saw Marianne semi-naked and I was overwhelmed again by the peculiar aching feeling I’d experienced watching them have lunch in the pub. More often than not though they draw the curtains – Charlotte used to draw the curtains too before we went to bed those afternoons. I tend to take this as my cue to leave. Mostly I go straight to work, but sometimes I go for a swim first. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I feel as if I can get rid of something in the pool. But that doesn’t seem to work any more, not in this case anyway. The swimming tires me out though and helps me get through the day, I suppose that’s good.

  Things have changed at work as well. I’ve let Jo take over a lot of the things I used to do. I don’t work the phones any more for example, or at least not the way I used to. I haven’t been canvassing Labour MPs, I haven’t been going to the meetings, I haven’t been playing squash with Jamie. The Jarawa case still preoccupies me but in a different kind of way. There are things that mystify me. When I was first put in charge of the campaign I’d had this idea that I could save a man’s life; now I feel more helpless.

  I think about him often – when I’m not thinking about Marianne, that is. Before, I might have been interested in the politics of it all but now that seems tangential. If you’re going to be put to death what does it matter why? Surely your mind would be focused on that point in the near future when you will be no more. You’d be looking forward in a way, and not back to how you got where you were. That’s how I see it anyway. I sit at my desk and wonder what it must be like for him, in a prison cell and preparing to die. Would there be a constant tension and anxiety or would that dissipate after a while? Would it come and go? Would there be hope? Would you end up getting used to the situation, in the way that ordinary people can seemingly get used to anything?

  I’ve got used to things that would have been completely unimaginable not so long ago. After the initial shock of finding out about Marianne I’d been fairly clear as to what I would do. I would leave her of course, but on my own terms, in my own way, engineered so that I would get the maximum benefit out of the separation. Jessica was certainly a problem and there was the house as well. Everything was very complicated. But I had the upper hand since I knew about her lover and she didn’t yet know I knew. However things haven’t panned out as they might have, or at least not yet in any case. I started following Marianne and now it’s difficult to see the way forward. I think about Christian sometimes and his faithless wife and how he lost her. I wonder why he hasn’t called me and what exactly it was he’d wanted to say to me. I realise that my immediate response, to leave Marianne, was a vestige of my old self, the one I sloughed off at Paddington station. What Marianne’s infidelity has brought me is a sense of the complexity of things. It occurs to me that in some strange way separation might merely be another way of being together.

  Yesterday the routine was a little different. Marianne caught the tube to High Street Ken as usual but then instead of walking down to Holland Road she turned right and went up to Kensington Park. It wasn’t so easy to follow her in the park – I was too exposed – and I contemplated abandoning the chase. And yet I was intrigued, I couldn’t leave it alone. I let her walk a long way ahead until I could only just make her out and then I set out after her. That way I could be sure she wouldn’t spot me and if I lost her then too bad. She continued walking way to the east. Then finally I saw where she was headed, she was going to the Serpentine Gallery. I wondered why she’d got the tube to High Street Ken and not to somewhere closer. I spend a lot of time wondering about these matters, the logistics of Marianne’s affair.

  Anyway she went into the gallery. I waited behind a tree by the road nearby that cuts through the park. She was in the gallery a good while and eventually came out again with her lover – he must have already been inside before she’d arrived. He had a wicker basket with him: they were going to have a picnic in the park. It was warm and sunny, the guy’s jacket was flapping gently in the breeze. He put the basket down, got out a blanket, spread it on the ground and Marianne lay down on the grass. Normally I would have left at this point – it seems that I have to know whether she’s with the man or not, but generally my curiosity stops there. However this time I couldn’t move, the tree I was hiding behind was too close and Marianne almost certainly would have seen me.

  As I watched them I remembered the last time I’d come to this park, not so far from this spot, that day Christian’s wife was killed. I remembered the extraordinary feeling of well-being that had surprised me, had washed over me, and just the memory of it brought a little of it back, but not much of it, and not for long, just the time to realise how far I’d travelled since then. They’d finished eating and Marianne was lying down with her head in the man’s lap. She was wearing a white T-shirt and the man had pulled it up a little to expose her belly – her slightly swollen belly. He put his hand on it then she put her hand on top of his. The meaning was clear enough.

  I hadn’t really seen them together, not since that first day when I’d followed them to the pub in Kensington. Normally I would just watch them embrace then disappear into the bedsit on Holland Road. Or sometimes she would go into the building by herself – either he’d already be there or he’d arrive shortly afterwards. I’d looked through Marianne’s handbag one night for the keys she used to get into the Holland Road building but I hadn’t found them. She keeps them apart from her house and car keys. She must hide them somewhere. That fact made me feel good for some reason, it made me feel she was doing something because of me, that it required some effort to hide her liaison from me and that she felt it was worth the effort.

  Anyway I watched them now, her head in his lap. What struck me was how at ease they seemed to be with each other, how unlike a clandestine relationship it was. Perhaps it was the sexual urgency that was missing. When Charlotte and I met up, for example, it was never more than a few minutes before we had to touch each other, start to undress each other. Marianne and her lover, on the other hand, looked like a happily married couple expecting their second child. How long had they been together? Years, perhaps? I wondered when and how they’d met. Then I remembered how Marianne and I had first met, on a beach in Portugal. These things have no deeper sense, I said to myself. Again, the thought passed through my mind that perhaps I could have forgiven Marianne a quick fling but not this. Again I corrected myself. Of course, there could be no grounds for forgiveness.

  Eventually they got up and wandered off in an easterly direction, which meant they weren’t going to the bedsit in Holland Road after all. They walked right by the tree where I was hiding, and I had to slowly curl round it so Marianne wouldn’t see me. I felt a relief after they’d gone and no desire to follow them any further. I went into the gallery. One of the artists showing was that German woman Charlotte manages, Karla whatever. I looked at her photos, large black and white images of dead children kitschly done up to look as though they were sleeping. I remembered Jarawa’s supposed interest in contemporary art and I wondered if by any chance he’d been to Joseph Kimberly and seen any of Marianne’s stuff, and if so what he might have thought of it. It was an absurd idea of course, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking it.

  Afterwards I walked to Hyde Park Corner and got the tube to work. I don’t know what time it was when I got there but it was getting on, maybe one o’clock. Jo passed me in the corridor without saying a word. I was almost looking forward to getting to my desk as I had this new idea to work on, it had come to me on the tube. What I thought I would do was write a letter to Jarawa. I had no idea whether it would be possible to get it to him, of course, but I could work out those details later. I sat down in front of my computer screen but that was no good so I cleared my desk of all the piles of stuff people had left me and started scribbling thoughts on a sheet of paper. The trouble was that although the idea of writing to Jarawa excited me I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of it was. My writing a letter to him wouldn’t make it any more likely that his sentence would be commuted. Perhaps it would give him strength though, knowing that there were those outside, those in foreign countries who were trying to help him. Then again, whether Jarawa had strength or not would hardly change his fate.

  I stared at the sheet of paper for a good while then looked away. There were plenty of other things to do. I still had to get in touch with Jarawa’s wife, for example. I’d written her a letter and left several messages on her answering machine but she had never replied. It was odd, even unpleasant, to be rebuffed like that. The image of the man’s hand on Marianne’s belly came back to me. Of course, if she’d been trying to get pregnant with her lover I could never forgive her for using condoms with me. I was almost shaking with hate just at the very idea. To try and calm myself down I gazed out the window for a long time. Then eventually Fiona tapped on the door: ‘Jamie wants to see you.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m busy right now.’

  ‘He said he wanted to see you as soon as you came in. He said it was urgent.’

  I went along to Jamie’s office. He was talking to someone on the phone and waved at me to sit down. He was saying to whoever it was, I don’t give a damn about the cost, I want our name there. Then he put the phone down and stared at me for about a minute without saying a word. It was an old game, the wordless stare. I remembered teachers at school doing it.

  Eventually he said: ‘OK. Now can you tell me what the hell’s going on?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I fucking mean …’