and because he was still feeling bloated and overheated, suggested they move back to the sofa.
When he had told the story at the Savoy, he had drawn directly on his memory of the experience. Now there were three elements – the events as he recalled them, the fresher memory of his first account, and the desire to tell an after-dinner anecdote and make her laugh and like him more and dispel for the moment their one real subject. Everything he now emphasised or modified or added was plausible enough, some of it was true. He plagiarised himself, borrowing turns of phrase, pauses and pacing he had deployed at the lectern. He made his fellow passenger larger and more threatening, he made himself the complete bumbling fool, impulsive, greedy, quick to blame. Towards the end, at the moment when his luggage was lifted down, he exaggerated the young man's patient, saintly quality. With a feel for narrative art, Beard suppressed any detail that might have anticipated and diminished the moment of revelation, when he put a hand in his pocket and found the unopened bag of crisps.
Withholding information worked. At the right moment Melissa shrieked in amazement. She took his head between her hands and shook it and said, 'You idiot, you nincompoop! Oh, I wish I'd been there!' Still laughing, she fetched her wine, that same two inches, and then they kissed, and laughed together, and embraced. She pulled away and said, 'You thug!' and then, wonderingly, 'That poor fellow!'
Recovering at last, she moved closer beside him and said, 'But do you know, something just like that happened to Ivan – you remember Ivan in the shop?'
He did not care to hear about Ivan. He stood with some difficulty and, making a mock chivalrous gesture with open hand and faint bow, guided her towards the bedroom and there, in silence, undressed her. She liked to begin this way, naked while he was fully clothed. He knew nothing of such things but he was certain that in some other century she would have been considered the ideal of feminine beauty, of perfection in a welcoming softness of form. Narrow at the shoulder, swelling to the hip, heavy breasts, two dimples at the base of her spine above generous buttocks. He kissed these dimples now. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and she turned and lowered herself to sit astride his thighs, arms looped around his neck. She nuzzled and kissed his forehead, he kissed her breasts. But such beauty was not weightless. A fiery pain in his dodgy knee was intensifying, and he thought he had less than a minute before the next move, before a ligament tore from its anchoring in the bone. But she was telling him she loved him, she was whispering how she loved him, and he had to wait.
Finally, with a moan that passed for passion, he took her in his arms and lowered her on her back on the bed, and drew back the duvet for her. The bedroom was cooler than he would have liked. He was out of his own clothes with long-practised speed and lying beside her, caressing her in a manner some women found too clinically expert. At these reunions, Melissa was usually impatient to get started, but although she held his cock, ringing it with looped forefinger and thumb, pleasing him immensely with gentle movements, now she seemed to want to talk. Intent on stroking and kissing her and on the enveloping thrill of her touch, he paid little attention at first. Her disconnected words loomed then drifted past him, vivid and random, the way coral-reef fish might appear to a diver. Then he came to and realised that she was talking about being pregnant. Why bring that up now? But of course – what else? For her it was no change of subject at all. Sex, babies, breasts, love, down through the generations an unbroken golden thread. Not a rope to bind his arms and feet, or with which he could hang himself from the nearest beam, just when he thought his life, in its final active stages, was filling with meaning and grand purpose. But he suppressed his impatience, opened his eyes, directed his gaze towards the ceiling, and listened.
'…like loving someone you've never met, but that's not it either. We have met, we've always known each other, right from the beginning. Michael, I didn't know it would be like this, that it would start so soon. It's already begun, I'm already in love with her, with him, this tiny person coming towards us from nowhere, curled up inside me in the dark, growing larger every hour, coming to meet us. Sometimes I love it so hard I get an ache in my chest. I'm so lovesick I keep sighing out loud. This is stupid, but isn't it strange and wonderful, how one person can come out of another, like a Russian doll? So strange and ordinary at the same time. I'm so happy. I'm not making sense. I love you, I love this baby inside me and I hope you'll love it too, I think you will, Michael, you will, say you will, say you love this baby…'
She had drawn him towards her, and they were making love. Plaintively, she repeated, 'Say you will, please say you will €¦' until it was indecent not to comply, and he said, 'I will,' and he kissed her and thought that perhaps he was not lying because he did not know the future and it was not entirely inconceivable that, in his own way, he might love this child, if it ever existed, and whatever he said now, time and events would scramble, and lovemaking was an enclosed, enchanted world with its own language and rules, its own truth.
She took her pleasures easily, she was a loud, big-hearted lover of the back-clawing school, which was to his taste, but not tonight. As they bucked and turned, and her silky skin turned slick and her cries grew louder in his left ear, he found he could no longer abandon himself completely, and he was troubled, distracted. He wished she had not reminded him of her pregnancy. After many uncountable minutes, the moment was approaching when sexual etiquette required that he time himself, get in step with the shrieking downhill dash to her final orgasm, and he knew he was not ready and might not make it. And so, in those closing seconds, he entered a familiar empty theatre, sat in the stalls and auditioned some women he knew, bringing them onstage in merging sequence at the impossible speed of thought. They appeared in experimental attitudes, in different tableaux that magically involved himself. He summoned and dismissed the girl from Milan, then an Iranian biophysicist, and then Patrice, an old stand-by. But at last he settled on the right choice, the immigration officer with the withered arm. He let her step out coolly from behind her station, and there they stood, fucking against her desk in front of five hundred bored passengers ready with their passports. To Beard, sex in public among indifferent lookers-on was a fantasy of unaccountable appeal, and it worked. He made it just in time.
When he returned from this affair to Melissa's bed, she was kissing his face and saying, 'You're my darling. Thank you. I love you. Michael, I love you. You dear, dear man.'
He thought it was a police helicopter that disturbed him as it hovered a couple of streets away, but by the time he was fully awake it was receding northwards across the rooftops and it was a neighbour's deep-throated dog making all the noise. His hand was tangled in Melissa's hair, her right leg was crossed over his. He extricated himself, then lay waiting while she murmured in her sleep on a querulous note. When she was settled he slipped out from under the covers. There was never much darkness in a city bedroom and he crossed quickly to the door and went naked along the hallway to the bathroom.
The black slate floor was heated all night and felt good beneath his cold white feet. Let the planet go to hell. Remembering that there were several mirrors – one of them covered an entire wall – he turned the dimmer switch down before he went to the hand basin to drink from the tap. Then he urinated, and afterwards lowered the wooden seat and lid over the bowl. Before he sat, he put on a scarlet dressing gown she had bought him three Christmases ago, and tied it at the waist.
Orgasm sometimes brought on a bout of insomnia. He might have been more comfortable in the sitting room, but to go in there would be a concession to wakefulness, to the next day, the next subchapter of his existence. His mood was sour. He wanted oblivion, and the bathroom was a provisional place, an anteroom to sleep. He did not understand why he felt so rough. He made a tally of the previous day's drinking – just about average – and began to form the familiar resolution, then dismissed it, for he knew he was no match for that late-morning version of himself, for example, en route from Berlin, reclining in the sunlit cabin, a gin and tonic to hand. And what had he been reading on the plane? What other concerns could a rational man have? Three reports in succession. First, an early draft from oil-industry insiders calculating peak oil production in five to eight years. So little time to turn this matter around. Second, also a draft, to be published in the autumn: a quarter of the planet's mammals under threat, a Great Extinction already under way. Third, an academic paper sifting data on Arctic summer ice, proposing 2045 as the disappearance date.
Was he unhappy, reading of this man-made mess? Not at all. He had been content, a frowning serious man at work, not even thinking at that point of the lunch to come, marking significant passages or his professional dissent with pencil underlinings, arrows, balloons, while an oval window framed the azure stratosphere to his left, and ten kilometres below, the treeless north-German plain, flattened and smoothed by centuries of bloody battle, which yielded eventually to treeless Holland and its Mondrian fields. Also to his left, the southern sun, too high for clouds, sent its photon torrent to illuminate and elevate his labours. How could he ever give up gin?
But he was unhappy now at 4 a.m. on his oak and porcelain pedestal, hunched like Blake's
