“You don’t do anything! You’ve got all of those women doing everything for you!’
“There’s the child to talk to,” he said. “It was you who said I shouldn’t ignore her. To talk to her like an adult.”
“How is she?” asked Serena eagerly.
“Nine going on forty-nine. I’ve had to buy her a huge computer so she can… surf the net. If that’s what they call it, but she’s shown me what it can do and really, it’s more like paddling. She’s writing a horror novel, drawing some horribly lurid pictures. She’s going on about something called Girl Power and starting to fret about her weight because she’s getting teased at school. I pay a fortune to keep her at that school and this is the treatment she gets.” He squished his cigarette and took up a fresh one. “Ow. I’ve got a headache. She isn’t fat, by the way,” he told Wendy. “But girls at that age, I’m sure you know, can be poisonous. Katy is just tall and rather well-made, even if I do say so myself.”
“Your best accomplishment,” said Serena.
He pulled a face. “You don’t create children in that way. They just happen. I don’t believe in biology.”
“That’s ridiculous!” She seemed to be angry with him.
“Don’t give me your pre- or post-feminist rubbish, Serena. I can only speak for myself and, to me, it seemed that Katy just happened. Although I’m glad she did. She’ll be a good companion in my old age. I warned her, though, not to grow much more. She looked at me so seriously. I said, women should be like the best books. Not too long, and certainly not padded out.”
“You’re a horrible father.” Serena tried to pour more tea for us, but I’d had enough of the flowery stuff and Joshua’s cup was still full.
“I’m more like a brother to her. Free not to tell her all the things a parent should tell her. I can tell her all the wrong things and she loves me for it. She’ll be fine and rebellious and thoroughly cynical.”
Serena looked dubious.
I realised that she and Joshua knew each other very well and that they had talked this through many times. Perhaps by now it was ritualised, or a performance for my benefit, as I sat listening and not saying much. For the first time it struck me that it might not always be for the best when two friends knew each other that well. It could even be inconvenient.
‘Will you come and see us?” Joshua asked me suddenly. “We live in Greenwich. The deep, dark South of the river. Serena will bring you. Katy would love to meet you. Outside of her ridiculous school she hardly sees anyone nearer her own age.”
“Wendy’s twice the girl’s age!”
“I bet she can still get on with her though,” said Joshua. “Will you come?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
Then he was drinking down his tea, tugging his clothes straight, and preparing to leave.
“And you,” he told Serena firmly, “had better act more fondly next time you see me. I think Scotland has made you hard and cold.”
“Oh, rubbish,” she snapped. Then he pulled her into a sudden warm hug and was gone.
Serena lingered thoughtfully over collecting up the tea things. “I’m sorry if Joshua is a bore. He’s in a world of his own. You don’t have to go round there if you don’t really want to…”
“I meant it,” I said. “He’s all right.”
“I worry about my friends meeting up like this. I’ve had some awful disasters. And in the disasters, Joshua is usually involved. He met a friend of mine once at a wedding and she was so nervous about a dress she’d bought months earlier for the occasion. He came striding over— he was clad in midnight blue velveteen—and told her she looked like a hooker and had that been the point?” She smiled her lopsided smile at me. “He seemed to take to you, though.”
“I liked him.”
“He seems different. Rather downcast. He was slower, too, in his way of talking. As if he was on Prozac, maybe. He did say last year he was thinking of giving it a whirl.”
Our trip to Greenwich was fixed for the following Friday. We saw him sooner though, and with his daughter, when we went swimming at an old-fashioned pool that Serena insisted I had to see. I had to see the mosaic walls and the Art Nouveau ceiling. She wore a black one-piece and sat smoking at the edge, tapping her ash into a sea shell and gazing at the glass ceiling with its swirling peacock design and I swam lengths, loving the warm choppiness of the water, its voluptuous pull. This was exactly how I had imagined the place under Astrid’s launderette on Leith Walk, even down to the rows of green changing cubicles along the side of the pool.
We had taxied all the way across London just to be there that afternoon and we had come, without realising it, quite near to Joshua’s house. The first I knew that he was there with the child, as he sometimes called her, was a cry that went up from Serena. She was waving and I stopped at the deep end, watching heads turn to see her hurrying across the wet tiles to talk to the new arrivals, who both had rolled orange towels under their arms. Joshua was in white linen today, with a soft pink shirt. His daughter looked sullen in cycling shorts and a Strange Matter T shirt. I plunged back into my lengths, trying to follow the madly distorting lines painted at the bottom of the pool.
When I stopped next I caught my breath and drifted over to where Joshua and Serena sat talking. He wasn’t even wet yet. His soft fair hair, all over his chest, round his tiny, pale nipples and on his
