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know she is wasting.
    ‘But it’s your advice I want,’ she says anxiously. ‘Be straight, as I was with you. Do you think I can return to acting?’
    ‘Are you seriously considering it?’
    ‘It’s the only thing I want for myself.’
    ‘Florence, I read with you years ago but I have never seen you on stage. That aside, the theatre is not a profession you can return to at will.’
    ‘I’ve started sending my photograph around,’ she continues. ‘I want to play the great parts, the women in Chekhov and Ibsen. I want to howl and rage with passion and fury. Is that funny? Rob, tell me if I’m being a fool. Archie considers it a middle-aged madness.’
    ‘I am all for that,’ I say.
    As we part she touches my arm and says, ‘Rob, I saw you the other day. I don’t think you saw me, or did you?’
    ‘But I would have spoken.’
    ‘You were shopping in the deli. Was that your wife? The blonde girl –’
    ‘It was someone else. She has a room nearby.’
    ‘And you –’
    ‘Florence –’
    ‘I don’t want to pry,’ she says. ‘But you used to put your hand on my back, to guide me, like that, through crowds …’
    I do not like being recognised with the girl for fear of it getting in the papers and back to my wife. But I resent having to live a secret life. I am confused.
    ‘I was jealous,’ she says.
    ‘Were you? But why?’
    ‘I had started to hope … that it wasn’t too late for you and me. I think I care for you more than I do for anybody. That is rare, isn’t it?’
    ‘I’ve never understood you,’ I say, irritably. ‘Why would you marry Archie … and then start seeing me?’
    It is a question I have never been able to put, fearing she will think I am being critical of her, or that I will have to hear an account of their ultimate compatibility.
    She says, ‘I hate to admit it, but I imagined in some superstitious way that marriage would solve my problems and make me feel secure.’ When I laugh she looks at me hard. ‘This raises a question that we both have to ask.’
    ‘What is that?’
    She glances at her son and says softly, ‘Why do you and I go with people who won’t give us enough?’
    I say nothing for a time. Then follows the joke which is not a joke, but which makes us laugh freely for the first time since we met again. I have been reading an account by a contemporaryauthor of his break up with his partner. It is relentless, and, probably because it rings true, has been taken exception to. Playfully I tell Florence that surely divorce is an underestimated pleasure. People speak of the violence of separation, but what of the delight? What could be more refreshing than never having to sleep in the same bed as that rebarbative body, and hear those familiar complaints? Such a moment of deliverance would be one to hug to yourself for ever, like losing one’s virginity, or becoming a millionaire.
    I stand at the door of the teahouse to watch her walk back across the park, under the trees; she carries a white umbrella, treading so lightly she barely disturbs the rain drops on the grass, her son running ahead of her. I am certain I can hear laughter hanging in the air like an ethereal jinn.
    The next time I see her she comes at me quickly, kissing me on both cheeks and saying she wants to tell me something.
    We take the kids to a pub with a garden. I have started to like her shaven-headed boy, Ben, having at first not known how to speak to him. ‘Like a human being,’ I decide, is the best method. We put my son on a coat on the ground and he bustles about on his hands and bandy legs, nose down, arse sticking out. Ben chases him and hides; the baby’s laugh makes us all laugh. Others’ pleasure in him increases mine. It has taken a while, but I am getting used to serving and enjoying him, rather than seeing what I want as the important thing.
    ‘Rob, I’ve got a job,’ she says. ‘I wrote to them and went inand auditioned. It’s a pub theatre, a basement smelling of beer