it a gentle shake, offering it towards Mollie, who shook her head.
'What amazes me,' Mollie said, 'he seems able to drink all the time and never get drunk. '
'He explained it to me the other night,' Tyrell said. 'Claims he attained a state of perfect equilibrium in 1965 and he's been balancing there ever since.'
'What crap!' Mollie said.
'All Curtis has done, like a lot of other piss heads is attain a state of being perfectly unemployable.'
Tyrell was on the verge of arguing back, but thought better of it; no sense in taking on Mollie when he didn't have to. Easing his slim body back into the comfortable chair, he opted for enjoying his tea instead.
As soon as the signing was over, Cathy Jordan had decided what she wanted most was to walk. She didn't know where and perhaps it didn't matter. She just wanted to walk.
'Want me along?' Frank asked.
Cathy gave a suit-yourself shrug and began to push her way through the crowds entering the Victoria Centre. Crossing the road in dangerous defiance of a black and white cab and a green double-decker bus, she hurried past the Disney shop on the corner and plunged into the Saturday afternoon throng.
Frank knew his alternatives: let her go her own way and head off back to the hotel and watch TV; or do what he actually did, tag along several, yards behind and wait for her to slow down, for whatever was irking her, gradually to become less troublesome.
With no clear idea where she was beading, Cathy found herself on a recently re-cobbled road that led towards the castle; dropping down below the sandstone rock, she turned past the Trip to Jerusalem, local bikers and Japanese tourists sharing an uneasy space outside the proclaimed oldest pub in England. Beyond Castle Boulevard, Cathy crossed the bridge above the canal and walked down towards the lock.
Pigeons roosted in the broken windows of abandoned warehouse buildings. Brickwork blackened and cracked. Iron gates bloomed rust.
Idling past, a freshly painted longboat leaked colours onto the oily surface of the water. Mallards, unconcerned, rocked and resettled in its wake.
'I'm sorry,' Cathy said, pausing.
'No problem.'
Ruefully, Cathy smiled.
'Why do we say that? No problem, all the time. Waiters in restaurants, cab drivers, clerks. You. Especially when it isn't true.'
'Hey, I didn't mean anything.'
'Exactly.'
'You mean there is a problem? That's what you think?'
'Don't you?'
They were walking slowly now; heels of Cathy's boots clipping the uneven concrete of the canal path.
'It's not that guy, Marius, is it?'
Marius? What about him? '
'I don't know. Just the way he came up to you at the end, there. I thought maybe he had you spooked.'
'Jesus! It'd take more than a creep like Marius to Spock me.'
They walked on. Between the buildings on the far side of the canal, traffic shunted eastwards in a slow line.
'Is it the letters?' Frank asked.
Cathy sighed.
'I've hardly thought about the damned letters.'
'Then it's somebody else.'
158 Cathy laughed, short and humourless.
'You mean, a man?'
'Unless you've changed a lot more than I thought.'
She shook her head.
'You know you amaze me, Frank. There you are, shaking your dick at anything in sight, telling me it doesn't mean a goddamn thing, where if it's me…'
'There is somebody then.'
She stopped, folded her arms across her chest.
'Frank, you have my word, I have not been screwing the home help.'
'Maybe not. But that might have been better than banging that plastic surgeon.'
Cathy didn't respond. She set off walking again, watching as a pair of ducks, grey-green, floated past along the canal.
'Water under the bridge, Frank. Old water under an old bridge. And, besides, he was interested in offering a little liposuction, that was mostly all.'
'I can imagine.'
'God, I hope not, baby.'
'What?'
'The two of us hacking at it in that hotel room, the size of a domestic freezer. Me struggling with my thermals and Mr Plastic with the kind of all-over body hair that puts King Kong in the shade.' She shuddered.
'Not a pretty sight.'
Frank strode on ahead, putting some distance between himself and his wife's revelations. He didn't know how much she was joking, if at all. After twenty or thirty yards, Cathy caught up with him, touching the fingers of her left hand to his neck, the ridge of muscle just above the collar. 'I'm sorry, I'm a bitch. You don't deserve that.'
'I do,' Frank said.
'Okay,' Cathy agreed, laughing.
'You do.'
Thirty minutes later and they were sitting at one of the 159 wooden tables outside the Baltimore Exchange, staring off towards the water with a couple of beers. Away to the east, where the canal disappeared between low, suburban houses on its way to join the River Trent, the sky was suddenly thick with clouds and the near horizon had misted over with slanting rain and violet light.
'How many years,' Cathy asked, 'have we been together? '
Seven,' Frank said, not looking at her direct
'Eight.' 'I wonder,'
Cathy said, 'if that isn't long enough? '
Twenty-nine Resnick's friend, Ben Riley, had never been much of a ladies' man.
Back in the late sixties, early seventies, when they had been young constables there in the city, there had been girls, certainly nurses from the old city centre hospital, since rationalised out of existence, workers from the hosiery factories strung out along the roads northeast of the city, long since pulled down for DIY stores and supermarkets. Toys R Us. But the drinking, hobnobbing with the lads, to Ben they had always been more important. Until Sarah.
Sarah Prentiss had been a librarian who worked at the central library when it was on Shakespeare Street, close behind the Central Divisional police station. It was a place Resnick himself had liked to wander through, sit in sometimes, reading through the jazz reviews in back issues of the Gramophone. A solid building, thick stone walls, monumental, long corridors and high ceilings, shelves of books that seemed to stretch on forever, a pervasive silence to Resnick, it was the essence of what a good library was about. Some years back, it had become part of the new university and the main library had moved even closer to the city centre. Now you had to push your way through a conglomeration of sales goods, advertising, magazines, videos and CDs before coming face to face with a good old-fashioned book. As far as marketing went, Resnick was sure it was successful, he was certain the library boasted a greater number of clients than before; he just wasn't one of them.
Neither was Ben Riley, who, to Resnick's continuing regret, had relocated to America some ten years ago. He doubted whether Sarah Prentiss visited the library much either, now that she was Sarah something else, and living in Northamptonshire with a husband, kids, and a couple of cars. He had learned this from Ben, with whom she had, for some years. 'exchanged the obligatory Christmas cards.
