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pinch-mouthed and less attractive majority. ‘It’s a horrible thought but do you think they’re an item?’ He said he didn’t know what they were and didn’t care if he never found out.
    The Millstream’s workers drove them to a bistro, where they ate grilled monkfish, the pale, black-clad manager opted for the vegetarian platter, and Brenda ordered more and more bottles of Australian Long Flat Red on Llama expenses. She was particularly sparkling, as though to underline the horror of the Gothic fans from whom she had rescued Felix, and amused the table with the adventures she and her author had on their many book tours. She told them how she pinned the Booker winner’s name on Felix at a sales conference and assured the half-intoxicated reps that the prizewinning author had changed her sex; how she had been bursting for a pee while they were marooned round Spaghetti Junction and Felix had nobly drunk up the Methode Champenoise presented to them by a Writers’ Circle in Stoke-on-Trent. Felix remembered with a stab of lust that she had held the bottle decorously under her skirt and he had heard the splash and little gasp of relief above the sullen murmur of traffic. She told them that Felix had stood signing books in Harrods with his zip undone, and later he had shown an unsavoury interest in an insolent girl with pert breasts from the Godalming Times until she had ordered him, with the full authority of a publicist from Llama Books, to ‘put her down because you never know where she’s been’. At all these literary anecdotes the table laughed, another bottle of the Long Flat Red was uncorked, and Felix revelled in the legend that his life had contained a strange and exciting number of events.
    Later, as they went up in the hotel lift together, a contraption lined and quilted like the inside of a sedan chair, Brenda was still giggling at the memory of some incident in the course of their invasion of the country’s bookshops. Felix found the courage to say, ‘You’ve told them all the things we did. What about the things we haven’t done?’
    â€˜You’re not inviting me to your jacuzzi again?’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because I’m exhausted.’ She put the back of one slim-fingered hand to her mouth and acted an enormous yawn. ‘Do you think I’m being unfair?’
    â€˜We can’t just leave it in our imagination.’ He fell back, as usual, on a literary argument. ‘I mean, my books have to get written. They just can’t float about in my brain for ever.’
    â€˜But isn’t it hard work writing them?’ They’d reached the third floor. His arm was round her waist and she wasn’t altogether steady on her feet.
    â€˜Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s quite enjoyable.’
    â€˜Sometimes?’ She gave him her wistful look, as though gazing back at a distant and ever-receding point.
    â€˜You don’t think we ever will?’ They had reached her door and she fumbled in her bag for the key which was no longer a key but a piece of plastic which caused lights to flash and the door to buzz open. She said, ‘It’s against Llama Books’ policy for publicists to sleep with authors. In England, anyway.’
    â€˜We shan’t always be in England.’
    â€˜Shan’t we?’
    â€˜If we ever went abroad for the book that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’
    â€˜I suppose it would.’
    â€˜We’ve got a date then?’
    â€˜Yes. We’ve got a date.’
    She put her small mouth to his and her lips seemed dry and brittle, like the body of an exotic insect. Then a green light glowed on her door and she left him in a mood of unusual triumph. The lonely days and solitary nights, the hours of staring at the grey sea and white paper, the arranging of objects on his desk, the walks to the end of the pier in search of stories – all these aspects of