He was dealing with these points and accepting a second glass of wine, even though he knew it was time for a scotch, when suddenly the lecturer, Mellon, was there, waiting eagerly with trembling beard for a break in the conversation.
When it came he said, 'I'd love to know where you got that story from.'
'What story?'
'You know. The one about the man on the train.'
'As I said. It happened to me this afternoon.'
'Come now, Professor Beard. We're all grown-ups here.'
The fund managers, sensing that one man was calling another to account, pressed in to hear above the din of voices.
Beard said, 'I've lost you. You'll have to explain.'
'You told it very well, and I can see it suited your purposes.'
'You think I made it up?'
'On the contrary. It's a well-known tale with many variants, much studied in my field. It even has a name – the Unwitting Thief.'
'Really,' Beard said coldly. 'How interesting.'
'Actually, it is. Across the variants are some stable characteristics. For example, the wrongly accused is generally a marginal figure, often threatening – a tinker, an immigrant, a punk, even someone with a disability. Your well-built young man with the earrings fits perfectly. The wrongly accused usually performs an act of kindness for the unwitting thief, and this makes the moment of truth all the more agonising. In your case, he lifts down your luggage. One theory is that the tale of the Unwitting Thief – it's known in the field as UT – expresses anxiety and guilt about our hostility towards minorities. Perhaps it acts in the culture as an unconscious corrective.'
'It must have occurred to you,' Beard said, determined to smile, 'that now and then it actually happens, that people's stories are real. You know, in an age of mass transport, people squashed up together carrying food in identical wrappers.'
'What interests us is the way the tale passes in and out of fashion, goes from lip to lip, falls from view, reappears a few years later in a different form by a process we call communal re-creation. UT was widely known in the States in the early nineteen hundreds. We don't have records of it here until the fifties, and by the early seventies it was everywhere. The writer Douglas Adams put a version of it in a novel in the mid eighties. He always insisted it had actually happened to him on a train – and that's another common feature. By claiming it as personal experience, people localise and authenticate the story – it happened to them, it happened to a friend of theirs – and insulate it from the archetype. They make it original, they claim copyright. UT has appeared in stories by Jeffrey Archer and, I think, by Roald Dahl, it's been told as a true story on the BBC and in the Guardian. It's the plot of at least two films – The Lunch Date and Boeuf Bourgignon, and it's also…'
'I'm sorry to disappoint you,' Beard said, 'but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.'
The folklorist had a certain autistic doggedness. 'Yes, what's new about your version is the crisps. I've heard biscuits, apples, cigarettes, whole canteen lunches, never crisps. I might write it up for the Contemporary Legend Quarterly, if you don't mind. I'll change your name, of course.'
But Beard had turned aside to touch a waiter's elbow.
The pale pension funder with the little moustache said, 'So these stories go the rounds like dirty jokes.'
'Exactly.'
'Have you heard this story about Bristol Zoo and the car-park attendant. You see, for twenty- four years…'
Beard said to the waiter, 'I don't care, as long as it's not a single malt. A triple, straight up, one ice cube, and would you mind bringing it immediately.'
It was six forty-five. There remained only thirteen minutes of contracted mingling. That it would soon be with him, in his hand, his first serious drink of the day, was already reviving his spirits. That, and the prospect of an evening with Melissa. Confident that a waiter in such an establishment would take the trouble to track him down, he walked away from Mellon, who was holding forth on narrative subtypes of blameless theft, and crossed the room to talk to a mild-mannered man in derivatives.
She was beautiful, she was interesting, she was good (she was truly a good person), so what was wrong with Melissa Browne? It took him more than a year to find out. There was a flaw in her character, like a trapped bubble in a window pane, that warped her view of Michael Beard, and made her believe that he could plausibly fit the part of a good husband and father. He did not understand and could not quite forgive this lapse of judgement. She knew the history, she had some good evidence in front of her, and there was much else she should reasonably suspect, but she remained steadfast in her delusion that she could reclaim him, make him kind, honest, loving and, above all, loyal. Her longing was not, as he thought she saw it, to transform him as he approached his seventh decade, but gently to return him to his natural state, his truest self, the one he failed to lay claim to. This was an unstated ambition. For example, it was not hectoring or denial that would help him lose weight, but lovingly concocted, wholesome, delicious meals, which would ease him back to the shape he had at thirty – his Platonic form. And if her recipes failed, she would have him as he was.
She endured his absences, the silences from abroad, because she was certain he was bound to see the matter her way in the end. Besides, her own life was busy enough. Her patient conviction was touching, and Beard, never a complete cad, felt it like a reproach. During the period of his press bother she had seen him at his worst and was undeterred. She seemed to love him more. With all the passion of a rationalist, she bore him up through the unreasonable storm. But she never brought her reason to bear on her love. If she had, the affair could have been over in minutes. It troubled him to discover that she was one of those women who can only love a man in need of rescue. And she preferred the rescuee to be much older than her. Was he to fall in line then with her sad troupe of past lovers and one ex-husband, elderly dullards, reprobates, losers, louts – exploiters all – whom her kindness had failed to recuperate and who had cheated her out of a child? None of them had banqueted with the King of Sweden, but they were comrades of a sort. Allowing himself to be Melissa's one success would be a proper mark of distinction, but he did not think he was up to the job. He thought he too would cheat her out of a child.
'Why me?' he once asked, when he lay post-coitally supine on her bed. The question seemed ripe, and complimentary in the suggestion that he was not worthy.
'Because,' was her reply, and she moved to sit astride him and brought him on again, her rotund slow-moving Michael, who had long thought that an encore within the half-hour was light years behind him.
She owned a string – if three was a string – of shops across north London selling dance clothes. Professionals from the London companies were her customers, as well as all kinds of amateurs, including young mothers who had tired of yoga classes, and even men as ancient as Beard, inspired to take up tap or tango in one last throw at feeling young. But at the centre of a barely profitable business was an unageing core of tiny dreamers, an inexhaustible corps de ballet replenished down the generations – little girls with an old-fashioned yearning to be in tutus, tights, leggings, pumps, twirling before the mirror and the rail, under the stern eye of a flinty ex-prima donna with a heart of gold. The dream of hard work on scuffed boards, of the first night, the first breathless leap onstage before astonished gasps, had survived the electronic age, the girl bands and TV soaps. The resilience of the fantasy gave an impression of genetic compulsion. The smallest tutu in Melissa's stock would fit an infant girl of twelve months. The mothers of these girls remembered their own dreams and sometimes spent hard to live them vicariously.
But dancing in the modern age was precarious. In public consciousness, it surged and fell like a futures market, and Melissa had to be quick in response down the line to distant warehouses. A sudden TV documentary, and during one week four hundred men were in her shops wanting a certain shirt to tango in. A certain movie, a certain musical, a clip on MTV could drive an insatiable, transient need. One lavatory-paper advertisement with a Swan Lake theme, and there were more little girls than ever, but clamouring now for rainbow tights, or leggings with a laddered look, or a leotard with an artful tear, just like they wore in the film. And then came lean times when no one danced but dancers and the core of little dreamers, and no one even wanted
