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sleep.”
    “I wasn’t dozing,” he said gently. “At least, I don’t believe I was.”
    Poor man. It happened to the majority of us; might even happen one day to myself. All the more reason then to be patient and not yield to any base temptation to exclude. I raised my voice still more.
    “I mean, imagine. Having your... thing cut off! Stuffed inside your mouth! And then they start the disembowelling... ”
    He stared at me, wordlessly, and I knew that I’d made contact: his eyes were showing something of the horror.
    “Your stomach cut open, your entrails pulled out... ”
    I suddenly realized just how loudly I was speaking and registered the relative, indeed unnatural, quietness of the whole carriage. I glanced about me. Along the full length of the compartment, heads were craning round, people were looking over the tops of their seats. I heard giggles.
    I coloured and smiled apologetically at the old man. I picked up
Pride and Prejudice
again. I felt such an idiot.

8
    “Sunday, bloody Sunday!” declared Sylvia. “Bloody awful fucking Sunday!”
    I hated it when she talked like that.
    “But why? Why are you taking it this way? You’ll very easily find someone else to share the flat with.”
    “I must say it’s so lovely to be missed!”
    “Naturally I’ll miss you.”
    “Oh, pull the other one! I don’t suppose you’ve ever missed anybody in your entire life—not if you want to hear the truth!”
    We were meant to be digesting our lunch. I had thought that while we were sitting over coffee and struggling with the crossword it might be a relaxed and opportune moment in which to reveal my intentions.
    But my Sunday lunch—as I found so often happened with any meal eaten at home—was turning to a lump.
    “That isn’t true,” I said, both angry and ashamed. I tried to think of all the people I had ever missed but unsurprisingly the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to compiling lists. For the time being I could think of only three people: my father and Tony Simpson and Paul (whose second name I’d never known), the young picture framer with the rabbit. “And of course I’ll miss you, Sylvia. But you speak as though—oh, how can I put it?—as though we were
married
,” I said.
    And for the first time I suddenly wondered whether just possibly... But, no, the thought was too incredible; too remote from anything in my own experience. Lots of women had slightly mannish ways, didn’t they? Even the fact of my having formulated the question was startling and ridiculous. I rapidly dismissed it.
    “And if it were a goddamned marriage,” she was saying, “I know just what kind of marriage it would be! The kind that breaks down the moment the bloody man becomes successful. Which is precisely, if you want to know, what happened to my own mother.”
    And then—most awfully—she began to cry.
    I was amazed. I was the one who cried, did so quite often, cried with the quiet grey desperation of it all. Not Sylvia. Sylvia didn’t cry. I felt not merely amazed, I felt inadequate. Here she sat and blubbered unrestrainedly and all for what? Surely it had to be about more than just our current situation? I had so very little idea; and that seemed terrible.
    During those ten or fifteen minutes I came my closest to giving in. Yet she wasn’t my responsibility—no one was—and I found an inner core of strength, of self-preservation. This both surprised and saved me.
    Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me.
    Later that afternoon we had some further conversation. “You know you’ll never get another job?”
    “Well, there’s always the dole,” I answered brightly. “And I
have
got a bit of money set aside. For ages now I’ve been quite careful.”
    “Not to mention mean.”
    There was a silence. I thought of how just the previous morning I’d overtipped the chambermaid and of how, on the evening before
that
, I’d even more absurdly overtipped the waiter. He had actually been rather cute.
    Cute
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