I didn’t reply.

  Jamie sighed: ‘So where do you want me to start? Jo tells me you’ve become impossible to work with. Fiona says she never knows when you’re coming in or where the hell you are. And what the hell’s going on with the Jarawa campaign? What was that embassy fiasco all about?’

  I remained silent.

  ‘You manage to get a meeting with the ambassador. Great. But then you don’t show up for it. Then, from what I gather, you finally get to meet some guy there whose name you can’t even remember who shows you some documents. But you can’t remember those either. Then you don’t show up here until the following afternoon. By that time some of these documents have been released to Reuters and we’ve missed our opportunity to get in first. Then there’s the Freedom Africa protest which was on Channel Four news and it was reported in the Guardian and the Independent. So when the triple murder stuff comes to light, the press go to Freedom Africa for comment and not us. I mean, Jesus Christ. I thought you were supposed to be co-ordinating this fucking campaign. What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sorry Jamie. I don’t know what to say. I’ve got a few domestic problems.’

  I’d meant to say personal and not domestic – the term seemed hopelessly old-fashioned – but it had come out like that anyway.

  ‘Domestic problems? Well, let me tell you, when you start screwing everything up round here they’re not domestic problems, they’re my problems!’

  Jamie had been almost shouting up until then, but then suddenly he switched and became conciliatory. He started stroking his double chin: ‘Look. I don’t know what’s wrong with your life. And I don’t want to know, that’s your business. I don’t want to lose you because I know you’re good and actually we need people like you, people with a solid PR background. People who’ve worked in the real world.’ He reached over to a pile of newspapers and magazines: ‘Do you read the Economist?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘Well have you read this?’

  He tossed me a month-old copy. Its cover story was about aid agencies and human rights organisations. The library had sent me a photocopy of the article at the time and I’d breezed over it one lunchtime. It predicted a big shake-up in the NGO world – apparently there are too many organisations out there chasing too little money. The drift of the article was that the NGO market was essentially no different to any other, and that to survive the shake-up NGOs would have to adopt a more aggressive, market-based approach to their work.

  Jamie was saying: ‘It’s why this Freedom Africa thing worries me. I mean, we decided to focus on the Jarawa case in the first place to raise our profile. Now Freedom Africa are trying to muscle in on our game. Even if the campaign fails in the end I want it to help us. So we have to play it right. Jo’s been doing a great job and I was expecting a creative approach from you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  I said I did. Jamie went on talking. He said there was a plan he’d been mulling over. He had a niece who wanted to come and do volunteer work for us. But he was considering sending her over to Freedom Africa instead, then getting her to report back to us. You mean she’d be some kind of spy, I asked. Jamie frowned. Freedom Africa are supposed to be working hand in hand with us, he replied, but if they don’t want to tell us what they’re up to I think we’re within our rights to try and find out. He talked some more then ended up saying he had to go to a meeting. We both got up. He put his hand on my shoulder. Sort your problems out, he said.

  I went back to my office and sat thinking. I looked down at my scribbled ideas for the letter to Jarawa then picked up the sheet of paper and screwed it into a ball. A kind of fear was spreading through me. In a way I didn’t care if I lost my job but I definitely wanted to see the Jarawa campaign through first. Jamie was giving me a chance, I realised. I felt angry at Jo for having complained to him about me. It was a nasty thing to do. She should have come to see me first. Then again, perhaps she actually wanted me out and thought that was the best way to go about it.

  I knew I had to sort things out with Marianne. She’d told me she was going down to Montargues at the weekend to see people about the wedding. She was taking Jessica with her. I should seize this opportunity to move out, I thought. I began to work out how to do it. My brother in Tufnell Park could put me up for a while, I don’t see him much but he’d let me stay for a week or two. I began to get excited at the prospect. What had seemed so impossible before was to actually confront Marianne. This way I’d be simply presenting her with a fait accompli. More to the point, I’d be presenting myself with a fait accompli. The more I thought about it, the better the idea sounded to me. In the back of my mind somewhere was Christian. He was the example to avoid.

  I got home late but Jessica was still up. She was supposed to be having a bath but was running through the house naked. I got hold of her and lifted her up but she started screaming so I put her straight down again. As usual these days I left Marianne to deal with her. Eventually I heard them in the bath giggling and chattering in French together as I watched the news on TV. There was a report on some twenty-year-old kid who was due to be executed in the night by poisonous injection in the state of Florida. For the first time I found myself wondering how exactly Jarawa would be executed if our campaign failed. I was surprised that the question hadn’t occurred to me before. I wondered if it would be by guillotine – I remember Christian telling me once that some of the former French colonies in Africa still use the guillotine – and I made a mental note to check up on it at work.

  Marianne came back into the lounge and opened some wine. We were talking about the garden or something trivial but there was an obvious tension in the air. Some guy called Christian rang for you, she was saying, handing me a scrap of paper on which she’d written down his number. I put the number in my Filofax and asked Marianne what date she’d booked the plane tickets for. She was silent for a moment then said: We need to talk. What about, I asked. We were sitting together on the sofa and Marianne moved away from me a little, as if to give herself room to speak. She said she wasn’t going down to Montargues after all, at least not just yet, in fact she wasn’t so sure we should get married this summer after all. What the hell do you mean, I practically shouted. She scowled at me: For God’s sake, keep your voice down! You’ll wake up Jessica!

  Then Marianne went into a long monologue. She spoke in this artificial manner, slowly, calmly, I could tell she’d rehearsed it. She said that for the past few weeks we hadn’t been getting along, she didn’t know why, she felt that I resented her. She didn’t have any idea why and perhaps I was just taking some other problem of mine out on her. She’d found herself getting angry with me and felt I’d been treating her unfairly. Then there was our sex life. She used to really enjoy making love but something had gone wrong and it was disturbing her. She said either it seemed like I didn’t want to make love any more, or when I did she could feel some strange violence in me as though if she refused me I’d just go ahead anyway and this had begun to worry her. What did I think?

  The dull sound of the television invaded the room. For a brief moment I was ready to tell Marianne everything and then that moment passed. I got up and switched the TV off. In the silence, I could hear Jessica murmuring to herself in her sleep. I sat down and picked up a newspaper. I was shaking a little and in a way that interested me: this business of shaking when I got angry was new.

  Well, aren’t you going to say anything, said Marianne. No, I replied. It was almost as if I didn’t trust myself to speak. I sensed that her little monologue was not over yet. I was scared that she was going to say she wanted to leave me and not give me the opportunity to get in there first. Most of all I was angry that she’d cancelled the trip to Montargues. It spoilt my plan to move out, but that wasn’t the real reason for my anger. What got to me was that she didn’t want to get married any more. It was a stupid thing to get upset about, given the circumstances, but it hurt me nonetheless. It hurt me deeply.

  I pretended to read the newspaper. I didn’t want to look up, I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to start her monologue again. Eventually she said: Jesus Christ – things can’t go on like this. She got up abruptly and went into the bedroom, close to tears. Once she’d gone I put the paper down and breathed out. I stared at a drawing of Jessica’s that Marianne had recently pinned to the wall. I hadn’t noticed it before, it was of a man. It was a very impressive effort for a three-year-old – the man had huge, menacing black eyes that dominated the picture.

  After a few minutes I followed Marianne into the bedroom. She was taking a shower. The bathroom door was open and I could see her through the frosted glass. I sat down on the bed and watched her – I could see her breasts and curved belly. Ever since I found out about her infidelity she’s grown more beautiful. She turned off the shower and slid open the glass doors. Steam poured out.

  ‘Can you pass me a towel?’

  I got up and found her a towel. I was suddenly overcome with emotion. I’m sorry, I said, I’m really sorry. She put her wet hand to my face, started stroking my cheek. I started gently rubbing her with the towel, drying her. For a moment or two she seemed to like it, but then she took the towel from me and I realised that she didn’t want to make love after all. I went back into the lounge. If I’d stayed and watched her any longer she’d have thought I hadn’t understood, but I had.

  VIII

  I called Charlotte on the mobile on my way to work. I asked her if she wanted to meet me for lunch but she said she was busy. What about tomorrow, I said, but she couldn’t make that either. Well when can you meet I asked, shading my eyes with my other hand and steering practically with my elbows. Charlotte said something but I had the sun roof up and it was hard to hear. Sorry what, I shouted. She said: I think it’s better if we don’t see each other any more. No you don’t understand, I replied, I need to see you, it’s urgent. I need to see you. There was a long pause. Finally she said OK, come round at twelve thirty. Don’t be late though – I’ve got an appointment straight after lunch. She sounded pissed off and hung up without saying goodbye.

  It was muggy and crowded in the West End. I didn’t go straight to work, I sat and had a coffee at one of the cafés in Old Compton Street. I sat there for half an hour, listening to conversations at other tables and watching people as they walked by. I was wishing I hadn’t rung Charlotte. To distract myself I started playing a game – I’d pick out some face from the passers-by and try to imagine what would happen to the person in ten, maybe twenty years’ time. The trouble was that I kept on coming up with these depressing narratives: the plump girl in the lycra dress would end up marrying some football bore who abused her … the young gay guy would overdose on his thirty-fifth birthday … the old woman with the strange hair would die by herself stretched out on the kitchen floor … it was as if this morbidity wasn’t so much in me but all around me, forcing itself onto me.

  I got up and wandered up Charing Cross Road until I found myself in Bloomsbury. I just didn’t feel like going to work. What I decided to do was go to the library in Senate House and check whether they had any of Jarawa’s books. I’d never bothered to track them down before. It amazed me now that I hadn’t shown the curiosity. There were three books listed in the catalogue. Two of them were political treatises and the third was a volume of poetry. As I went off to dig them out I could feel a disproportionate sense of excitement building up in me. There was that poem I’d read about, the one Jarawa had written about the kid with Down’s syndrome. All of a sudden it seemed desperately important that I should read it. Its title, The Eternal, had stuck in my mind for some reason. I ran my eye down the contents page of the poetry volume but it wasn’t there.

  The books were a disappointment. The political treatises were written in that convoluted, unreadable Marxist jargon that had been popular in the sixties and no longer meant anything at all. The poetry, on the other hand, sounded dully conventional, like Victorian verse. Perhaps it had been badly translated. I idly flicked through the pages for half an hour or so then gave up. I sat there thinking, trying to analyse my feelings of excitement, then disappointment, and now anger. I wondered why I’d been expecting anything else from his books and why Jarawa seemed so absent from his own writing. There was a picture of him on one of the dust-jackets, that by now familiar image of him in the three-piece suit. I tore it out slowly and put it in my wallet next to the photo of Jessica in Marianne’s arms, taken just after she’d left the maternity ward. It was the first time I’d ever defaced a library book. It was almost as though I wasn’t in control of my actions any more.

  It was too late to go into work by then so I sat reading a magazine for a while then drove over to Charlotte’s place in Camden. I pushed the intercom button and she took ages to answer. Finally she buzzed me in and I made my way upstairs but her door was closed. I knocked and she shouted out: Hang on a minute. I waited there for maybe five minutes or more. I could hear her moving about behind the door. As I waited I could also hear someone coming down the stairs, extremely slowly. Eventually this incredibly old guy rounded the corner. He was taking each step as though for the first time, concentrating all his energies on getting it right, like a toddler. When he got to the landing outside Charlotte’s door he looked up and noticed me for the first time. What seemed so extraordinary was that his enormous girth should be held up by such spindly-looking legs. Afternoon, I said, but he didn’t answer, he just squinted at me with his clear blue eyes which contrasted so strikingly with the ruin of his face. I recognised him almost immediately, of course: somehow I wasn’t at all surprised to see him there outside Charlotte’s flat. He was the old man who’d been swimming in the pool the day of Susan Tedeschi’s death.

  Charlotte opened the door. Her hair was wet, she’d obviously just had a shower. She stood there with her arms folded under her breasts: ‘It’s only twelve. I told you to come round at twelve thirty, for Christ’s sake.’

  She let me in. The flat had changed. It wasn’t the tip it had been when I’d last been there – it was much tidier than usual and she’d put up some photographs and paintings on the wall as well.

  I said: ‘Why were you so off with me on the phone?’

  ‘I wasn’t off with you.’

  ‘Yes you were.’

  ‘OK then, I was.’ We stood facing each other confrontationally in the middle of the lounge. ‘You don’t ring me for weeks, not that I wanted you to. Then all of a sudden you insist on seeing me. And then you come round.’

  ‘I wanted to see you again.’

  ‘Well you’re seeing me. What do you want?’

  ‘Why don’t you want me to ring you any more?’

  She sighed: ‘You’d better sit down.’

  I sat down. Charlotte sat down beside me. She put her hand on my knee and started talking in an annoying, ‘patient’ tone of voice: ‘Listen. We had lunch a few times. We slept together a few times. It was nice. If you’re feeling insecure about that, well there’s no need. I enjoyed our time together. But at the end of the day you’re not my type and I’m not yours. You know that. You knew it from the start …’

  ‘I don’t know it. I want to be with you.’

  ‘No you don’t … don’t be absurd!’ She exhaled sharply through her teeth in exasperation: ‘What the hell’s all this about, anyway?’

  I didn’t answer. Instead I said: ‘What attracted you to me that night at the gallery? Why did you seek me out?’

  ‘For God’s sake … I don’t go round analysing every move I make …’ We stared at each other. ‘I liked the way you … I don’t know. But now look at you. You’re like … I don’t know.’

  ‘We could be together.’

  Charlotte started getting really annoyed: ‘Of course we can’t. What the hell’s got into you? We can’t be together, not now, not ever. You’re already with someone and you’ve got a kid. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Charlotte was silent for a moment. Then she started nodding slowly to herself: ‘Right. I get it now. I get what this ridiculous conversation is about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious. You’ve found out, haven’t you?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘You mean Marianne and …’

  ‘Yes.’

  I looked away. I put my hand to my Adam’s apple and swallowed. Charlotte got up from the sofa, picked up the packet of Silk Cut on the table, lit a cigarette and drew heavily on it. She’d smoked about a third of it before I spoke again: ‘How did you know? I mean, how did you know?’

  She shrugged her shoulders: ‘I didn’t know. I guessed. You get a feeling for these things.’ She spoke lazily. She took a drag of her cigarette and stared at a blurred photo on the wall. ‘Or maybe I did know. Maybe I heard some gossip. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Gossip? You don’t even know her.’

  ‘I work with artists. Marianne’s an artist. You hear things. People talk.’

  ‘What were people saying?’

  ‘I told you, I can’t remember.’

  I could feel my heart jolting against my ribcage and the sweat again. What hit home more than anything else was the terrible banality of it all. That was what seemed so grotesque, so humiliating. I noticed I was shaking as well, my left hand in particular. I pressed it against my thigh to try and stop the shaking.

  ‘So you knew all this time. All this time we were sleeping together, you knew Marianne was … and you didn’t say anything.’

  ‘What was there to say? I mean … it’s not as if you were acting like a saint, was it? What the fuck did you think you were doing with me, for God’s sake?’ She came and sat down beside me again. Her tone softened a little: ‘I’m sorry. But you’re the one who wanted to come round.’

  She put her hand on my knee again. I put my hand on her shoulder then moved it down to her breast. I could feel her tensing up, ever so slightly. We sat like that for a while then I turned to kiss her.