As she stood up to get out, her eyes met his, and Alex thought she neither repelled his attention nor encouraged it. Squeezing past, she was pressed against him, her coat hanging open – coolly she flicked her gaze beyond him, bumping his knees with her bag. In a moment that was truly mad, full of risk – and he was tired, he only wanted to get home – he followed her out of the train although this was not his stop, and up on the escalator. In the street outside there was a sticky drizzle, there were crowds – he hardly knew where he was, Holborn. The girl’s coat was light-coloured – he followed her through the crowd, intent upon her. When she turned into a quieter side street her tall black patent shoes, heavy and punky, clacked on the pavement greasy with wet. She had turned round in the street and challenged him. Was he following her?

— It was stupid of me, I’m sorry, Alex said. — It was an impulse. You’re very beautiful. I had no intention except not to lose sight of you for a short while longer.

Christine had said to him once that women dreaded being called beautiful: it was like cheap perfume, meant either sex or sentimentality – or worse, both together. Yet he thought this stranger was not entirely disgusted, was even curious, receiving the inevitable male tribute with an awkward laugh, her oblique look glancing off him. Perhaps she hadn’t closed off altogether the possibility of his pressing home his pursuit, inviting her for a quick drink before they parted. Or perhaps if he’d tried that she’d have pushed him away, shouted out in the street, disgraced him. When he stepped towards her, she had flinched. He had apologised again and turned around, resumed his journey home – and of course never saw her again.

The other episode went further, yet was more ordinary. A teaching assistant had joined his class, she was pretty and flirted with him, and once, when the staff had drinks after school, they kissed lingeringly in the car park. Then he drew back from her, with some relief. After all he had Lydia now. It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life. When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere. Now, how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity? He thought that he understood his father at last, how he had accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour. Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world. You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.