his twenties, anybody had advanced to him, except as a puerile joke, the notion that one day he would be sixty-not survive to be, just be—he would have told him not to be a bloody fool. Sixty was what all those old people were. It was something he ought to have taken steps to postpone indefinitely, if not evade altogether, while there was still time. Six-oh. LX. What a silly bugger. Well, at least no one could say he was wiser or more sensible or understood anything better along with it.
He made tea, poured some of it into Brenda's favourite Diamond jubilee mug, remembered with a morsel of self-satisfaction not to add milk or sugar as formerly and carried the filled vessel to her, once their, bedroom. She sat up as he entered the room, thanked him and asked if he was doing anything special that morning.
'Not really. I thought I might stroll down to the bookshop in Philby Road. The fellow there has got some stuff for me.'
'What stuff?'
'Eh? Some 'Greece end Rome' back numbers I've been after. Why?'
'Just wondered. There's something I'd like your advice about before you go, if that's all right.'
'Attend me in my sanctum.'
When he turned the corner at the top of the lowest flight of stairs he saw that Mrs Sharp, having let herself into the house with her own licensed latch-key, was standing in the passage with her back to him, a most sensible position to take up if what you wanted was to enshrine in your memory the look of the inside of the front door. As he went down the flight Jake trod more heavily than was his habit and cleared his throat a couple of times, but to no avail. The female turned, saw him and jumped, the third verb to be understood in a more literal sense than the context would suggest. She managed not to cry out, however. Her response would have been about right for one faced by a spectral Cavalier with his head firmly on his shoulders.
'Morning, Mrs Sharp. Sorry I startled you.' Perhaps a leper's bell fastened irremovably round the neck, he thought. Or were those hand-bells they had?
'Good morning, Mr Richardson. Don't worry, it's just my silly way.'
This said, she moved to her favourite station between the foot of the stairs and the kitchen, again hard to find fault with if you assumed that he had been intending to make for the street attired as he was.
'Excuse me.'
'Can you—'
'Just a—'
'There we are.'
'Thanks.'
There were further evolutions in the kitchen while he assembled his grapefruit and coffee and toast and she collected brooms, buckets and other materiel from this cupboard and that, but he got away in the end, even managing to dive into the bog under less than full scrutiny. He was feeling quite good when, shat, shaved, showered and wearing his green lightweight crease-resistant suit, he went into his study to find Brenda already there looking out of the window.
'Sorry the garden's in such a mess,' he said. 'I'll try and make a start on it tomorrow.'
'Good. Darling I don't actually want your advice, I just wanted to make sure of talking to you.'
He nodded, inwardly squaring up. There was a certain amount of ground to be covered and no mistake, not all of it coverable in any cosy spirit.
'I wish I hadn't got to say this. I'm leaving you.'
'Oh,' he said, and went and sat down behind his desk. He saw that she was trembling slightly.
'I'm going away with Geoffrey.'
''What?''
'I know exactly what you're thinking and please don't say any of it or it'll make me hate you, and I don't want to do that.'
'All right.'
'You see .... he can perform, or he wants to, anyway he does.'
'Thanks very much.'
'Jake, I'm not a fool, not completely, I can understand how hard it must be not to take it that way, and of course it is the way, so..... But I'm only stating a fact, no I'm not only doing that but it is a fact. You've lost interest, your sex-drive, but I haven't, and I'm going to be forty-eight in October. I shouldn't think any sort of adventure will ever happen to me again. And it isn't only that. He's interested in me.'
'He's changed tack pretty fast then. At that Workshop I went to he said there were people he liked but they didn't interest him. His very words.'
'You mustn't take things so literally, he was having a gloom. Anyway he pays attention to me and he talks to me.'
'About himself. Sorry.'
'You used to talk to me about yourself and it was fine with me. I used to enjoy it, I didn't mind why you did it, I expect it was mostly because you wanted to impress me, like a clever schoolboy who's still a bit excited by finding out he's clever. In that sort of way you hadn't grown up and you still haven't, which was all right in those days, really rather nice, but it's not so hot when somebody's getting on. Anyway—it wasn't all like that, you talking to me. You thought it would interest me too, sometimes you probably even wanted to know what I thought. There's none of that these days. Do you remember, it must be three or four months ago, you brought a bottle of wine home and Allie was here and she asked for some and you did something in the kitchen, swapped the bottle or—'
'Got you to offer her some actually, and what I did was pour—,
