There was no answer. I let it ring for several minutes. On the wallpaper beside me some numbers were scrawled in pencil. One was for mini-cabs, another was for somebody called Jock. Perhaps I should phone one of them instead; it wouldn’t make much difference. A stranger would be kinder to me than my own wife.

Where was she? Perhaps she lay, legs locked with his, duvet over their heads, willing the phone to stop. Perhaps she was out. I had no idea where she would go, now. Her life had changed so completely; overnight she had become somebody I could hardly recognize. All these years she had been waiting for a man to make her into this new Eleni—houseproud, for a start. Maybe she could talk to him about the things I’d only feigned interest in—her ice-skating; Bernice at the salon where she used to work, who still made her jealous; which diet she should try next. I had only nourished a small part of her, as she had done me. I realized this now, but was it the same for everyone? Was Shirley and Jim’s understanding deeper, even though she said the place drove her round the bend? I had been like Jim, tinkering with engines. There must be more to them than that. I hoped there was, or else everything became too thin to bear.

I paid the bill. My coach was parked in the empty shopping centre. A faulty streetlamp flickered. What now? For once in my life I wasn’t sleepy. Besides, I didn’t feel like dossing down on the back seat and being woken by housewives’ stares.

I started the engine. Its first small coughs reassured me now, they were as familiar as my father’s in the morning. My coach was becoming more human to me than people I saw in restaurants. I reversed out, with Ricky dangling. Some people call him Rick, I know, but he’s always stayed Ricky for me. That was the end of him now, anyway—no more songs from Ricky.

I drove down south, and then I swooped up an overpass and joined the M25. The football rolled across the floor. London was an orange glow, out-glowed by the arclights above me. It was two in the morning and there was no traffic. I nearly turned left into London but cowardice stopped me. I couldn’t face my dirty dishes in Costas’s flat, and I’d forgotten what I’d left in the fridge. Then of course there was Reg. I’d lost my job for sure.

Out in Orpington, beyond that sleeping city, my own wife slept, deaf to my telephone calls. Perhaps she was murmuring into a male ear: He wasn’t up to much. Mrs Selwyn’s words. Perhaps she was nuzzling a male moustache and murmuring, like Shirley: You make me feel alive. On his oily, handsome, prat’s face he had that smug look.

Thirteen