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started to fall, brushing the pavements and the parked cars, settling and melting on the sleeve of Karen’s coat, resting, briefly, at the tips of Richard’s eyelashes. He took her arm and they threaded through the thin crowd of afternoon shoppers, until they reached the doorway, bordered with tinsel, of a self-service café and snack bár.
    They sat at a table for two, and for the first time found themselves unable to speak. It was Karen who managed to break the silence.
    ‘So,’ she said, almost laughing. ‘We meet at last.’
    They reached for each other across the table and held hands. The snow began to thicken. Over the café’s speaker system, an orchestral arrangement of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ became gradually more noticeable.
    On the night before Christmas Eve, Richard cooked a Christmas dinner for Karen in his flat on the fourteenth floor of a tower block in snow-swept Coventry. Miles had gone home to his parents that morning, and Karen would be travelling up to Glasgow the next day. They had planned to have a final discussion of the ideology of Christmas, and in particular its pernicious reinforcement of the role of the family as the basic unit of a patriarchal capitalist society, but somehow the subject never seemed to come up. Instead they exchanged presents and argued over the respective merits of apple and cranberry sauce as an accompaniment to turkey.
    What they shared, above all else, by now, was an ache of physical desire, a stretched longing which could no longer be borne, like a gorgeous torture. They undressed each other slowly, fumbling with zips, stumbling over buttons, lingering over the unexpected familiarity of flesh never before seen, never before touched, never before kissed. Then their bodies began a long and intricate conversation, tentatively making their different propositions, elaborating upon them, exploring them, turning them over and over, not hesitating to follow the path of any pleasurable digression, and moving, with inexorable logic, towards a sudden resolution of all contradictions.
    They lay still, for an hour or more, skin against skin.
    ‘Comfortable, darling?’ Richard said, finally.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’
    He went to fetch the portable television and set it up at the end of the bed.
    ‘Still comfortable, darling?’
    ‘Yes.’ Karen was not at all keen on being called ‘darling’, but she didn’t say anything. ‘Are you comfortable?’
    ‘Very.’
    There was a carol service on the television. The camera tracked over the faces of angelic choirboys and came to rest on the glimmer of electric candles against stained glass. Richard and Karen watched in silence.
    ‘Happy?’ she asked, halfway through ‘Away in a Manger’.
    ‘Yes. And you?’
    Before the programme was over, their eyes had begun to close.
    ‘This explains nothing,’ said Ted, barely able to suppress a cavernous yawn.
    ‘No?’ said Robin. ‘Does it not explain why Aparna and I have never slept together? Does it not explain what seems to you to be a curious self-discipline in this respect?’
    ‘No.’ Ted drained his glass; realizing, as he did so, that he had now lost all track of how much he had drunk that evening. ‘I would have thought it suggested, if anything, that you should have done.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Well, this is meant to be a happy ending, isn’t it?’
    Robin looked surprised.
    ‘It’s all a bit euphemistic, I suppose,’ said Ted, ‘but I thought this business at the end – I thought it meant they were falling in love.’
    ‘If you want to be picturesque about it, yes.’
    ‘So surely the whole point,’ he continued, after a difficult pause, ‘is that this Robin person –’
    ‘His name’s Richard.’
    ‘Richard, quite. That this Richard person, and this Katharine woman –’
    ‘Karen.’
    ‘Karen, exactly. That these two people, after messing around talking a lot of intellectual rubbish to each other, finally come to their senses and… fall