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the face of the direst predicaments — divorce, lost jobs, homelessness — still go around smiling happily in the confidence (quite unfounded) that ‘Something will turn up’; that ‘It will work out somehow’.
    It looks idiotic, feckless to the last degree: but is it? The more closely I observe such people — as I was now closely observing Sally — the more certain I am that such unreasoning optimism is not really unreasoning at all, but at a deep and possibly unconscious level is profoundly rational. It’s not that ‘something will turn up’ — it probably won’t. Rather it is that the person in question is deeply aware of qualities within themselves which will lift them out of trouble no matter what happens. I looked across at Sally, relaxed and lovely against the dark green of the sofa cushions, her young, firm breasts lifting her casual tee-shirt into top-model class, and I saw clearly what her unquenchable optimism consisted of. Warmed through and through by a lifetime of being loved and admired and sought-after, something inside her knew, and knew for certain, that whether her husband came back or didn’t come back, whether he died tragically or lived happily ever after, she, Sally, would be OK. She would be loved again, she would be sought-after again; her own capacityfor love and happiness was still intact; nothing had happened in her short life to damage it. She was in a no-lose situation, and at some level, conscious or unconscious, she knew it.
    And so, perhaps, did her mother-in-law? Was this an extra twist of the knife as she confronted the girl’s blithe and unrealistic hopefulness?
    I felt I would like to meet this older woman who was facing squarely and alone the realities of her son’s dreadful situation. But not yet, not until I had some sort of news to give her. I could see how my apparent inertia, my limp incompetence at extracting information either from Edwin or from some official source, must be just as infuriating to her as her daughter-in-law’s idle optimism.
    “Tell Daphne — tell your mother-in-law that I’ll phone her the moment I hear anything,” I said to Sally as the two of them left — Barnaby triumphantly retaining possession of a glittering trail of paper-clips which he had painstakingly been linking together, one into another, until it was several feet long, glinting and quivering. I had wondered what he was being so quiet about under the table all that time, and so I think had Sally, but we hadn’t wanted to find out in case it was something we would have to stop him doing. Then he’d have been on our hands again, fidgeting, interrupting our conversation.
    “But I can’t promise when it’ll be,” I finished, re the putative phone call. “You see, until I can actually talk to Edwin …”
    “Of course, of course,” Sally reassured me, climbing behind the wheel of her Mini and leaning over the back of the seat to fasten Barnaby into his safety-straps. “She’ll quite understand. And at least I’ve tried , haven’t I? I’ve actually come to see you, she can’t say I’m not doing anything, can she?”
    With which slightly disconcerting pronouncement she was off. I turned slowly back indoors, Edwin’s imminent arrival weighing heavily on me somewhere right next to my heart, like indigestion.
    On top of everything else, there would now be the paper-clips as well. What would Edwin say when he found them all gone, not one left, except for a few maltreated rejects, twisted too grossly to beany use? And below and beyond this lay the more basic, the more frightening question: how would Edwin be when he arrived home? What sort of problem would I have on my hands? A man who gets into a jittering state of nerves about a mistreated paper-clip — how would he have stood up to the fearsome and unprecedented ordeals that must have been his lot in the last few days?
    That was the most unnerving thing of all; that I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect of our