She and John had always used to argue when they went out. It was something to do with the ritual of spending money on formalised pleasure — it begged to be despoiled. Once, in a restaurant, he had spied a female friend on the other side of the room and had gone to stand at her table like a suitor, talking and waving his arms animatedly. Their food had come and still he did not return. Agnes had tried vainly to catch his eye but he hadn’t looked at her. She didn’t dare to go over there herself and drag him back to the table. She had waited for over half an hour in a sweat of embarrassment and jealousy, ridiculous and alone at a table laden with food, like a mad old divorcée. Eventually she had begun to cry. When he returned to find her like that he had been disgusted and had left the restaurant, flinging a ten-pound note down on the table.
She took off her clothes and chose different ones, but was distressed to find that they would not fit her. She had put on weight. She climbed back into the first outfit. Merlin called up the stairs to her. She fumbled with a lipstick, sweating with panic.
‘I feel like I haven’t seen you for ages,’ said Merlin when they were ensconced in a velveteen booth. The table before them was scattered with unused beer mats, beside which crisps floated soggily in dark liquid circles. ‘You’ve got a secret life. You never come home any more.’
‘Overtime,’ said Agnes. It sounded more like a comforting hot drink than a spiritual struggle.
‘Really?’
Merlin regarded her with grinning amazement. She stared back at him, and was disconcerted at her sense of having never really looked at him before. He had new glasses.
‘You’ve got new glasses,’ she said.
‘What?’ He looked bemused. ‘Oh, these. No, I’ve had them for ages. Come on, Ag, don’t change the subject. Tell me about your secret life.’ He peered at her suspiciously. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh.’ He seemed disappointed. ‘So why don’t you ever come home?’
‘I told you. Overtime.’
‘Oh. I thought you were joking.’
‘Well, what did you expect me to say? I’m having some affair that I can’t tell you about?’
‘I’ll admit I was thinking along those lines.’
‘God, well, I’m sorry I can’t give you anything as exciting as a man to talk about. It’s just my boring old job.’ A gorge of anger rose up into her throat. ‘Maybe you’d like to find someone more desirable to have a drink with, Merlin. I mean, God forbid that I should dare to talk about my boring old life. I probably shouldn’t be out, should I? I should be in purdah. I should ring a bell and shout “single”!’
Merlin, to her surprise, began to smile. His reaction would have driven Agnes to further excesses of outrage had she not soon perceived that he seemed to be looking at someone else. He smiled again and waved his hand.
‘Friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Hang on a second. I’ll be back.’
He got up and went to a table where a blond girl was sitting. They greeted each other effusively. Agnes fiddled uncomfortably with a beer mat. A man came into the pub and sat down at the bar. He was looking at her. She looked back defiantly. She felt rather audacious after her outburst. He was bearded and wore a respectable suit. Presently, he got off his bar stool and came over to her table.
‘I suck girls’ cunts,’ he said calmly, standing before her.
Agnes looked at him dumbfounded. His choice of vocabulary left her own impoverished. She managed to shake her head. He shrugged, smiled at her briefly, and then turned and went back to the bar.
‘Who was that?’ said Merlin, sitting down.
‘I don’t know.’
She was still in a state of shock. She had never heard anything so disgusting in her life. One never knew. Really, one knew nothing at all.
‘I want to go home,’ she said.
‘Oh. Whatever you say.’ Merlin drained his glass, his Adam’s apple moving up and down like something alive trapped in his throat. ‘Okay, let’s go.’
They got up to leave. The man turned around and stared at her; like someone normal, someone in a crowd, his face boarded up like a derelict place.
‘It’s happening to me,’ Agnes told Greta. ‘What happens to you — you know, when people come up and say strange things? Well, it’s happening to me.’
‘Maybe the world’s just getting meaner.’ Greta shrugged.
‘But there must be more to it than that!’ Agnes cried impatiently. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why it happens? What makes people think they can just come up and — and say anything they like?’
‘Yup, it’s a mean old world,’ sighed Greta. ‘All you can do is be mean back.’
Agnes gave up. She sat down at her desk and found herself too distracted to work. Finally, she got up and decided to get some fresh air, albeit at the risk of further accosting.
‘You can’t show people you’re sad,’ Greta announced as Agnes reached the door. ‘What goes around comes around. They sniff it out. Like goddamned dogs. Then they give it right back to you, only worse.’
The crack in the wall now stretched from floor to ceiling. Agnes had tried to camouflage it with posters but they peeled off with the damp, resulting in a worse defect on display than the concealed original. It was November now, a month of iron skies and stormy nights. As the cold seeping into the house turned from an invigorating freshness to a disturbing presence, Agnes felt the sensibility of change being forced upon her; for she saw in the long, cavernous fault intimations of the irretrievable sundering of future from past.
‘Why do you worry so much about where you’re going to be after you die?’ John had once said to her. ‘You never give a second thought to where you were before you were born.’
Nina was usually at Jack’s house in the evenings, but when he went away for a few days she came back. When Agnes came home she found Nina in the kitchen cooking supper.
‘Do you want some?’ Nina asked, indicating a pile of as yet unassembled ingredients.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Agnes, taking off her coat. She hadn’t spent time alone with Nina for weeks. She wondered what they would talk about.
‘Jack tells me you had a contretemps with his friend in Hampton Court,’ Nina announced presently, resolving Agnes’s dilemma.
‘That’s right.’
‘So have you heard from him since then?’
Nina removed a cucumber from its cellophane packaging and began to slice it.
‘Who says I was expecting to?’
‘I dunno. I just supposed you were. You do have a history of post-coital obsession, you know.’
Nina began cracking eggs to make an omelette. Agnes looked at the empty egg carton which read LAID AND PACKED THE SAME DAY, and thought of how many times she had been.
‘I don’t want to hear from him,’ she said.
‘Fine. I think you’re well out of it.’
‘Well, fine.’
Agnes tried to remember the last time she’d had a warming conversation with Nina. There was something gritty and abrasive between them which rubbed every time they spoke.
‘So what was he like in bed?’ said Nina presently, obviously mistaking the moment for one of intimacy.
‘Fine!’ Agnes gushed.
It irritated her that after everything she still felt a residual loyalty to him. It was almost atavistic, like an instinct that should have been phased out by years of evolution and feminism. Nina was facing her expectantly, apparently awaiting further revelations.
‘Actually, it was strange,’ she confessed.
‘What do you mean?’
Agnes contemplated her position. What if Nina should take the side she herself had just deserted, and conclude that his dysfunction was no one’s fault but her own? She seemed strangely alerted to the presence of a mystery, in any case, standing there with arms crossed, waiting.