He starts to walk. Not, however, in the direction of the tube station — not Blackfriars, not Temple, not Chancery Lane. He is walking towards the Penderel’s Oak. Underestimating the distance, however, it takes him more than ten minutes, and he even starts to wonder whether it is worth it. Michaela might not even be working tonight, and he feels deeply fuddled, what with everything that has happened. Washed- and whited-out with drink and dope. He has allowed an idea to form in his mind, an idea of his status with Michaela which has little or no foundation in the observed world. While with Claire, for instance, his imaginings are tempered by the melancholy knowledge that nothing is ever going to ‘happen’, the idea that he has formed of something secret and mysterious involving Michaela and himself permits him to hope that, in spite of everything, something might. He has no memory of when exactly this idea formed — she had been working in the Penderel’s Oak for weeks, or even months, when it did — but it has been there, never far from his mind during his waking hours, and intense and immediate when he drinks, for over a year, a year in which she has split up with one man, and started to see another. (Paul’s smile, when she told him that particular piece of news, was probably the least expressive of happiness ever to shape his face.) Sometimes, in the bruised, unforgiving reality of a hangover, he sees the folly of his imaginings, sees that they are only imaginings — that she is fifteen years younger than him, and that her lovers (extrapolating from the two he has met on various occasions in the pub) seem typically to be handsome young men, strong-jawed outdoors types — not much like him. Usually, however, he manages to overlook these things. And if she sometimes sees, when he is very drunk, the intensity and scope of Paul’s preoccupation with her (once, worryingly, he squeezed her hand and would not let it go for several minutes), it may be unnerving, but she prefers not to dwell on it. She is able to pretend — very successfully to pretend, to herself — that she suspects nothing, that he is simply nice.
He peers through the windowed front of the Penderel’s Oak into the dim, carpeted interior. The pub is not very full. Quiet, even. She is there. He sees her behind the bar, and with a sudden sense of uplift, as well as an enjoyable nervous quickening of his pulse, he opens the door and goes in. She is talking to someone, someone sitting on one of the high stools … And suddenly recognising the squarish head with its dirty bronze hair, the shapeless back of the blue suit, Paul stops. He had not told Murray that he was meeting Eddy Jaw because Jaw had specifically told him not to. (It had seemed strange at the time.) He had said that he was tired, and going home. Murray, too, had said that he was going home, and yet here he is, at almost ten, in the Penderel’s Oak, talking to Michaela. Normally it is obvious to Paul that Murray, in his own preoccupation with her, is pitifully mistaken if he thinks that it might lead anywhere. She is obviously quite scared of him. (When, several hours earlier, Murray had entered the pub alone, she had watched him approach the bar with dread, which intensified when she asked if Paul would be in, and he said, ‘Not tonight, my love. It’s just you and me tonight.’) Paul’s shock at seeing him there unexpectedly, however, tips him into total paranoia — the idea that he and Michaela might actually be lovers suddenly takes on a sort of horrific plausibility. It is like a nightmare. From where he is standing in the shadows he watches Michaela’s face, small and white, slightly pinched, her ski-jump nose — she seems to be listening intently to what Murray is saying, staring into his eyes, nodding. He feels as if he is seeing something that has been specifically hidden from him. And he is sure that Murray must not see him, must not know that he is there — in his fuddled state he would be unable to explain why he is not in Hove. For a few minutes he watches them. Then suddenly sickened with himself, he leaves, lighting a cigarette as soon as his feet hit the pavement outside. Still in turmoil, he walks quickly away. He needs another drink, he needs to get his whirling thoughts together, so before descending to the tube at Chancery Lane, he goes into the Cittie of Yorke. The long, high, loud interior is surprisingly full. There is hardly room to move. Sweating, Paul struggles to the bar. Some sort of event — a graduation of some kind — seems to have taken place nearby because the pub is full of young people in black academic gowns and older people who are obviously their parents. Lots of photos are being snapped, and looking around disorientedly he is hit full in the face by a flash and dazzled. He shuts his eyes, squeezing them shut, and opens them again. ‘You being served?’ someone yells at him over the din. He orders a pint of lager, and only then notices that he has a headache.
5
IN THE GREAT grimy cavern of London Bridge station, facing a soiled wall, a finger in his left ear to block out the roar of bus engines, faintly aware of the smell of urine, Paul phones Eddy. It is five to nine on Tuesday morning, and he is not feeling well. He did not get home until nearly two o’clock, on the filthy, forlorn eleven fifty from London Bridge, stopping at East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, Three Bridges, Haywards Heath, Brighton and, at twenty-five past one, exhausted and empty, the silent little station at Hove, where Paul tumbled alone onto the ghostly platform. The air was sharp and cold. In their dark bedroom, Heather was already asleep (he had phoned, hours before, to say that he would be late), and he undressed as quietly as he could, losing his balance as he pulled his trousers off, dismally tormented by the knowledge that in five hours he had to get up and go back. And, of course, it was torment. Hypnotised by fatigue, he was in the train again — the train full now — as daylight started to appear through the drizzle, over the dark fields and estates and industrial parks. He knew now that he was going to take Eddy up on his offer. The decision seemed to have been made overnight, while he slept. Or perhaps it had never really been in doubt. It seemed possible that his moral tussle of the previous evening had been nothing more than a hypocritical show, hastily staged at the insistence of his mouthy but ultimately ineffective conscience, and that having seen the show, it had been more or less satisfied — as if the show itself were enough, were all that was morally required. Distantly aware of this, in a detached, indifferent state, he had waited for the train, and sat slumped in a corner at the back of the carriage, with small lip movements husbanding the moisture of his mouth. His eyes closed, his bad head bumping lightly against a schematic representation of ‘London Connections’, he remembered, in a hazy, dreamlike way, walking in on Murray and Michaela in the Penderel’s Oak — and, with a pang of private embarrassment, the feelings and ideas that seeing them together had stirred up in him. In the sober morning light, he no longer thought it a serious possibility that they were lovers — though the awful idea would not now be entirely dispelled, and he was still angry with Murray for seeing her in secret, no matter how deluded and futile his intentions.