Martin interrupts him. ‘Take it or leave it. It’s up to you.’
The pause that Andy inserts here is immense. ‘Okay,’ he says finally.
Suddenly, though, Martin seems wary. ‘Have you got a card or something?’
‘A card? Sure.’ Andy hands over one of Watt’s cards. Martin looks at it. Then he says, ‘All right. When can you deliver?’
‘Whenever,’ Andy says. ‘Immediately.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Um. Tomorrow morning?’
Martin laughs. ‘If that’s what you call immediately,’ he says. ‘All right. Deliver tomorrow morning. You know where we are.’
‘Yah.’
‘Fine.’ He slaps his knees and stands up. ‘Well. A pleasure doing business with you, Andrew.’
‘And you.’
‘Not too much of a pleasure, I hope! No, I’m joking. I hope I’ve been able to help you out.’
‘You have.’
A few more pleasantries are exchanged, and then Martin leaves. Andy stands up and walks through the picture to the bar. Only when he returns with a pint does he remember to stop the DVR, and the screen is suddenly void.
Paul watches it once more while he finishes his shepherd’s pie. He wonders whether Martin has since made enquiries about Morlam Garden Fruits — whether he has tried the mobile number on the card, and heard the automated female voice saying that it is not in use; whether he has tried the landline and found it to be a private home in Hastings; whether he has asked directory enquiries for Morlam Garden Fruits, and been told that they have nothing under that name — not in Kent, nor anywhere else in the UK.
He takes a bus to Brighton station and leaves the flight bag in a locker there. With sunlight filtering through the glass roof, he texts Watt to tell him which one. Then he walks down Queen’s Road. He feels unexpectedly melancholy. A sort of emptiness. And it is perhaps for this reason that he spurns the shops of Western Road and walks all the way down to the sea. Success — if this is what it is — seems as sad as failure. Sadder, in a way — without the psychological detritus to moon over, there is only a sad, immaculate sense of transience. He passes the conservatoried entrances of the Grand Hotel and the Hilton Metropole; wind-tousled doormen wait on the steps, and in the still air of glassy restaurants women in white blouses set the tables for lunch. On the other side of the road, the sea and the sky are formed from the same palette of cool blues and greys. What troubles him most, as he walks, is the fact that the fear is still there — fear of the future, fear of loneliness. For a week, he had lost sight of it. So much had happened — he had spoken to Andy on Thursday; on Saturday he had met Watt in Eastbourne; he had spent Saturday night experimenting with the equipment; on Monday morning — it seems a month ago — Andy had turned up. Then the events of the past forty-eight hours … The sea thuds lazily on the tiered pebbles to his left. And now this tiredness, this sense of time passing, this strange mourning sadness, this fear.
He sees Watt on the shop floor two mornings later. Their eyes meet for a moment. They never speak again. Of course he hears from Gerald, holding forth in the night-time smoking room, his version of events. (This is a few days further on.) Gerald says that the fresh-produce manager was called to HQ in London, that he went there expecting to be told that he would be succeeding Macfarlane, and was told instead that there was evidence he was using unlisted suppliers. He was, Gerald said — and even he seemed slightly sceptical — shown a video of himself doing so, and sacked. Freckled Hazel Ledbetter was made fresh-produce manager in his place …
From the night-shift, it seems like thunder over the horizon, someone else’s storm. Paul inspects Heather’s face for signs of it. He sees none. One morning, however, he is watching TV when the doorbell rings. He drops his spliff into the ashtray and stands wearily. Fucking estate agents, he thinks. He inspects himself for a moment in the hall mirror. Then he opens the door.
‘Martin …’
Martin does not look well. He looks like he has had a sleepless night — perhaps more than one. His face is bloodless — all the blood seems to have found its way into his grey-blue eyes. Smiling mildly, with mild perplexity, Paul says, ‘What …?’
‘I know it was you,’ Martin says.
‘What was?’
‘You know what.’
Paul shakes his head innocently. ‘What?’
‘Andrew Smith.’
‘What are you talking about? Who’s Andrew Smith?’
‘You’re just a fucking …’ Martin seems to search for the word. ‘Worm.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Paul says again.
‘An envious little worm.’
‘What?’
‘I know it was you, worm.’
‘Yeah, okay …’ Paul starts to shut the door. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Hazel Ledbetter saw you in the Stadium with Watt.’
‘Who’s Hazel Ledbetter?’
‘I knew I’d seen that bag somewhere,’ Martin says. ‘That bag. You had it with you when I saw you.’
‘What bag? What are you talking about?’
‘How can you deny it?’
‘Deny what?’
‘That you and Watt were in it together!’
‘In what together?’
‘You know what!’ He shoves the door open, forcing Paul two steps into the narrow hall. ‘Don’t come in … Don’t!’ Martin hesitates on the threshold. He is wearing his blue tracksuit. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Paul says. He is surprised himself how wounded he sounds. He is shaking. Staring at him, Martin says, ‘Why are you such a shit?’
Paul notices the cold sore on Martin’s lip, the reddish stubble on his jowls. ‘What?’
‘I said — why are you such a shit?’
Paul sighs, and says, in a sort of whisper, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and shuts the door. For a moment, Martin’s tall blue shape lingers on the front step. Then he presses the doorbell. Presses it in. Filling the house with furious livid urgent noise.
He is looking for something in Portslade, south Hangleton or Shoreham. One morning, he looks over some properties — the sort of properties where lonely people die alone; one-bedroom flats in Victorian villas honeycombed with loneliness. Even the estate agents do not try too hard to talk up the small rooms they show him, with single electric hobs, and bathrooms housed in plasterboard boxes, over which dusty sleeping spaces wait at the top of ladders. They study the ceiling, the brown carpet, while Paul steps to the window to inspect the view — train tracks, ivy-filled ex-gardens, allotments.
‘Look, Heather …’ he says. He is hesitant, solemn. They are in the kitchen on Lennox Road. ‘Is there any way …’
She waits for him to finish his sentence, and when he does not, she says, ‘Paul …’ Then, failing to finish her own, she sighs.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘I think these things happen to everybody. Don’t they? I know I’ve been selfish. I see that now.’ She is staring past him, into the garden. It is May. ‘I mean … I can forget about what happened with Martin. I understand. I let you down.’
Looking at him — sober, afraid, unshaved, pale — she worries. Worries that if she surrenders — to herself, not to him — they will soon find themselves exactly where they were. Her sadness — which once seized her with something like fear in the clamorous solitude of Martin’s shower — is intensified by her sense of Paul’s fragility; it pained her physically, when she stepped from the vaporous stall and pulled Martin’s unfamiliar towel towards her, to think of him at that moment, on his own, preparing his porridge. Martin was waiting downstairs in a kimono, opening packs of Madagascan crevettes and a bottle of champagne. The more she thinks about Martin, the more he seems to be something unknown, a vague outline only, a worrisome shadow. He wept when she did not see him for a few days, when she punished him for phoning Paul. Since then, she has found a peevish, wheedling, even threatening side to him, a side new to her, which has made her realise how little she knows him; his emails and voice messages — several a day — seem veined with impatience, with irritation, with self-pity. And now, in the last week, with a sort of hysteria. Something seems to have happened to him. He has started to talk of quitting his job, of taking up gardening. He has stopped shaving. And he wants her to move in with him. Whatever happens, she has made up her mind not to do that. Where will she live then? With her parents? Will she sleep in the single bed from which she once set out for school, through grey suburban streets, through swirling orange chestnut leaves? Will she live as she once did, a sort of asylum seeker in her parents’ house? Everything the same as it was then? Thinking of the house in Hounslow, she finds herself thinking of a younger Paul — it was there that she was living when they met; there that she first spoke to him on the phone, taking it into the hall for privacy. Thinking of this younger Paul — this fusion of hope and nostalgia, memory and imagination — has often made her tearful these last few months.