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This time there could be no mistake between her and David. They had said too much on the telephone for either of them to understand what she had come for any other way. The train stopped outside the station for five minutes; the passengers looked onto a blackened wall patterned with a relief of arches, draped with thick ropes of black cables, painted at intervals with numbers in old white paint. Pale weeds had taken root in the mortar between the bricks. Then the train eased, groaning, alongside the platform.

David was waiting for her where they had arranged, near the foreshortened little statue of Brunel; she saw him before he saw her. He was wearing a shirt she immediately didn’t like, with short sleeves and a fifties retro motif of trellis and grapes in black brush strokes against yellow and green; it tipped the strong planes of his face, the carved prominent cheekbones and jaw, almost into foolishness. He had his shades pushed up, too, into his thick brush of dark hair. She wondered at once, of course, why it was him she had chosen. But then she had prepared exactly for all this, gone over and over the sequence of emotions she must expect: doubt and distance, panic and regret. She was quite prepared even to feel at moments the absolute conviction that she was making a most terrible mistake. None of this must confuse her into forfeiting her chance.

— Hey, babe, he said.

It was all right: he stepped toward her, his expression lit up, he took her in, she looked good (she had starved herself, to be thin; she was hungry now).

— Hey, she said.

She knew they mustn’t wait to kiss; she slid herself into his arms with a movement she had imagined at home but had not been quite sure she would execute with this sureness, this gliding feeling of two fluid pieces locking into their fitted place against one another. He was scorchingly hot where they pressed together.

— Clare, he said, stroking her hair: not asking her anything, but as if he weighed her name. That was very gratifying. She thought, He must have dwelled on my name and sometimes used it deliberately, just as I’ve used his.

He had kissed her before, so she was prepared for the wetness of his mouth and the taste of cigarettes. They stood and kissed for several minutes; he was about her height (Bram was taller). She hung with both arms around his neck; he held her with one hand cupped behind her head and the other, with spread fingers, around her waist, squeezing and pressing, working down until he was molding and pressing her bottom. They began to forget where they were. He pulled his mouth away from her with a gasp.

— Shall we go back to my place? he said. You know Helly’s away. Shall we go now? Why don’t we? We’ll get a cab.

She looked up at the pigeons flying under the roof; Brunel’s vault was turning, swooping rhythmically down past her as if she were drunk.

— There’s no hurry. She laughed, exulting. We can wait just one more hour. I’m so hungry, I’ll fall over if we don’t have lunch.

She couldn’t quite have named the pleasure it was, to stretch out to its utmost the last hour before she had what she came for.

* * *

HELLY ARRIVED at the house just as Bram was packing up the few things for his trip. He had been pulling out the tent from the back of the cupboard in the spare room; when the doorbell rang he sat back, banging his head painfully against the shelf above, and cursed, and almost decided not to answer it.

Helly was the last person on earth he was expecting to see.

She was so far from his thoughts that for a moment he hardly recognized her; also, she wasn’t dressed up in one of her usual spectacular outfits, she was wearing some big shapeless dark sweater and her face wasn’t made up. Her usual beauty — which he thought of, if he thought of it at all, as a kind of remote and dazzling performance in a genre that was of no interest to him — was quenched. She looked ordinary: ordinary and, in some indefinite way that rang a vague alarm, perhaps unhappy or ill.

— Hello, Bram.

— God: Helly, why didn’t you phone? Clare’s not here. She’s away for the weekend.

She couldn’t have come at a worse time; he was all ready, he wanted to get going. He had an exasperated sinking sense that he would be obliged to go through the sociable motions, invite her in, talk with her, perhaps even feed her; and all the while he would be raging inwardly, longing to be alone, stricken with visions of the little sandy field with rowan trees behind the dunes at Ogmore where he planned to put up his tent the first night. Although he already knew he would submit to those wretched laws of sociability — not his laws, but laws whose authority he conceded in the world of Clare and Clare’s friends — he didn’t yet move from his position at the door.

— So what are you doing down here?

— Oh. Oh, she said. So Clare’s not here. And she executed a funny little turn on her feet, looking behind her, twisting her long mouth in a stricken way that put him on his guard: she was portentous with something, with trouble, with scenes, with confidences.

— I’m so sorry. She’s staying at a B and B in London tonight, so she can get lots of work in at the library. You should have phoned. I’m just on my way out. I’ve got to go.

— So you’re here with the kids?

— No: the kids are at Clare’s mum’s.

— That’s such a shame: I really wanted to see them.

— Why don’t you go round to Marian’s? She’d love to see you, and she’d be delighted at a bit of adult solidarity, I should think. He hoped he didn’t sound too relieved as this solution to her appearance presented itself; he even stepped back slightly into the hall and opened the door wider, as if to distract her attention from how eager he was for her to go.

— Can’t I come in?

He sighed; he submitted.

The house looked strange to him as they walked through it: empty of all the presences whose signs still filled it with mute clamor, the usual litter of the children’s toys and drawings, Clare’s desk with its piles of library books built up like walls around her sacrosanct working space.

Helly sat cross-legged and straight-backed in the armchair in the living room and lit a cigarette; he hated smoking, he had to find a saucer for her to use as an ashtray. She talked to him while he made her tea. She always talked as if she were in public, laughing and finding startling and original things to say. Bram’s role was to react as if he was slightly perplexedly amused by her, but he wasn’t sure if he really thought her amusing. She said she was down visiting her parents at Poynton for the weekend: she described to him the effect she had in the Close when she arrived in her leathers on her motorbike. My mother said she wished I would invest in a nice little Nissan.

— Milk? Sugar?

— Black, please. No: actually, why not? I feel like sugar, milk and sugar, make it really sweet, put two. Three. So: Bram. Where are you so eager to be off to? You can’t wait to get rid of me. Where are you going? Are all these piles of macho-looking outdoor equipment yours?

He felt a visceral reluctance to part with the information: his field, his rowan trees, his deep covering night, pregnant with his absence, awaiting him.

— Work. A field trip.

— D’you mean lots of sweaty biologists with worms in jars singing folk songs in a center?

— One sweaty biologist in a tent, in fact. The worms and the folk songs are my secret.

— Let me come with you, she said, in a suddenly completely different voice.

He stopped still, slopping the tea he was carrying in for her. Don’t be ridiculous.

— Let me come, she said.

— Under no circumstances can you come. Or — he remembered to be courteous — could you possibly want to come, where I’m going.