I wasted no time buying myself a train ticket. There was never any question of my travelling any other way. ‘Make it a single,’ I insisted, despite the booking clerk’s assurances that a return was infinitely cheaper. ‘Who’s planning on returning?’ I just stopped myself from adding into the steamed up layers of antiseptic glass. That’s what happens when banality and melodrama once enter your life: they race through the blood like a contagion. Not so very long ago I had been leading a quiet, sedentary existence, propounding my final solution to the Brontë problem in the pages of American college journals and in between times combing out the hair that sprouted by the minute from the hottest places of the best of wives. Now that same wife was shaving for another man, getting rounder and rounder in micro-maternity smocks, and from what I’d heard, making the same sorts of raids on the stock of Mothercare in the company of Fitzpiers as she’d once made with me on the matching serviette and place-mat counters of Harrods and Blooming-dales and Galeries Lafayette. My father and Mrs Flatman were living in sin in Hardy’s old place, without a hammock. My mother and Mr Flatman were consoling each other with pasta in Positano. And very soon I would be standing on cliffs, wind-lashed, spray-splashed, admiring the power of the foam-fingered sea.

And this was peace time!

Be warned.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II

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