Then I met Jacqueline.

I had to lay a carpet in my new flat so a couple of friends came over to help. They brought Jacqueline. She was the mistress of one of them confidante of both. A sort of household pet. She traded sex and sympathy for £50 to tide her over the weekend and a square meal on Sunday. It was a civilised if brutal arrangement.

I had bought a new flat to start again from a nasty love affair that had given me the clap. Nothing wrong with my organs, this was emotional clap. I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody. The flat was large and derelict. I hoped I might rebuild it and myself at the same time. The clap-giver was still with her husband in their tasteful house but she’d slipped me £10,000 to help finance my purchase. Give/Lend was how she put it. Blood money was how I put it. She was buying off what conscience she had. I intended never to see her again. Unfortunately she was my dentist.

Jacqueline worked at the Zoo. She worked with small furry things that wouldn’t be nice to visitors. Visitors who have paid £5 don’t have a lot of patience for small furry things who are frightened and want to hide. It was Jacqueline’s job to make everything bright and shiny again. She was good with parents, good with children, good with animals, good with disturbed things of every kind. She was good with me.

When she arrived, smart but not trendy, made-up but not conspicuously, her voice flat, her spectacles clownish, I thought, I have nothing to say to this woman. After Inge, and my brief addictive return to Bathsheba the dentist, I could not foresee pleasure in any woman, especially not one who had been victimised by her hairdresser. I thought, You can make the tea and I’ll joke with my old friends about the perils of a broken heart and then you shall all three go home together happy in your good deed while I open a can of lentils and listen to ‘Science Now’ on the wireless.

Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives. I should remember my grandmother’s motto offered to the suffering as pastoral care. Not for her the painful dilemma, the agonised choice, ‘Either shit or get off the pot.’ That’s right. At least I was between turds.

Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I’d like done. She came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs or fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.

I considered her. I didn’t love her and I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision. What’s wrong with that? It’s called growing up. Maybe most people gloss their comforts with a patina of romance but it soon wears off. They’re in it for the long haul; the expanding waistline and the little semi in the suburbs. What’s wrong with that? Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?