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was an elixir? Drink the brand, find the romance. Perhaps romance by proxywas becoming a way of life for her. She glanced at the famous face staring at her past the rim of her cup.
    The romance didn’t necessarily have to involve a relationship. That would have been a pleasant bonus but she had ceased to take that possibility seriously some time ago. If she was a mouse, she was a well-fed one. It wasn’t that she thought the not-unpleasant roundness of her figure disqualified her from attracting a man. It was just that, in her experience, it had so far disqualified her from attracting the kind of man to whom she would have been attracted. Being perilously close to forty, she found it difficult to imagine that she would attract him now.
    ‘The only talent you’ve got,’ her father had told her more than once (as he told her most things more than once), ‘is your stubbornness. And that won’t do you any favours.’
    Perhaps it hadn’t. She remembered him lying in his coffin, his face having achieved that expression of unchangeable conviction about the nature of things it seemed to have been rehearsing all his life. Told you I was right, it seemed to say to her as she stood in his dim bedroom with the curtains drawn, and especially about you.
    Maybe he had been.
    ‘People who only want to wear glass slippers always end up barefoot,’ he had told her, more than once.
    She reflected what a cruelly sententious man he had been but she stifled the thought, not out of respect for his memory but out of respect for the memories of her own she still hoped to make. She had decided soon after his death that to spend too much time reacting against the powerful effect someone or something had had on you was to recharge that power. You defined yourself against its terms rather than finding your own. It became a continuing necessary part of you instead ofsomething beyond the negative influence of which you could finally go.
    Looking at the holiday brochures showing through the glass of the coffee-table, she wondered again if she shouldn’t have spent all the money she once had on travel. Those two months travelling in Europe after her mother’s death could have been extended into her final freedom, she was thinking. She had enjoyed being in strange places so much. Even visiting the bullfight had been an unexpected thrill. Instead, she had been sensible and taken a mortgage on this flat.
    Now she had to admit that her money wouldn’t last for ever, unless she saw for ever as a couple of years or so. She had decided already that, if she completed her degree, she wouldn’t be going into teaching. And the idea of being at university as a mature student no longer seemed as attractive as it had done, except for the creative writing class.
    Perhaps she could just sell the flat and travel until the money ran out in some foreign place and she quietly brought out the bottle of Valium she had kept as her secret travelling companion. She thought of herself expiring romantically alone, having experienced many places, in a quaint hotel room in Paris or Vienna or Venice. Or Padova. She liked Padova. Especially the little square beside the Basilica of St Anthony. There was a small hotel where, when you closed the shutters, the darkness in the room was total. The staff had been kind to her.
    But she couldn’t quite see herself as a romantic heroine. She worried about ring-marks on the table. Her escape from her stifling dissatisfaction with herself would have to be something more practical. She had always known that she would never have eloped without a road-map. She knew, sitting lumpily beside the coffee-table, that she would never be flyingto freedom. But maybe she could painstakingly tunnel her way out.
    She thought yet again of the box-room. She thought of it as the entrance to her tunnel, had been conscious of it for a long time now as the only place from which she could seriously start. She had lovingly equipped it with the tools she