Читать книгу Going Loco - Lynne Truss - Страница 8

Belinda was right to say that Maggie had her own agenda. In fact, Maggie’s agenda was about as well disguised as a Centurion tank in a hairnet. Thus, when she told her oldest friend Belinda, ‘You work too hard’, what she really meant was ‘You don’t spend enough time listening to my problems’. When she said to Stefan, ‘Belinda cares only about her work,’ what was clearly imported by this treachery was ‘I’ll always love you, Stefan, I want to have your babies, and it’s not too late’. Telling Leon she thought Villeneuve was a bridge in Paris translated as ‘You’re a dreadful motor-racing bore and I can’t believe I’m listening to this.’ Indeed, the paradox of Maggie’s life was that the more rudely she semaphored her real message, the more her friends felt it polite to take her words at face value.

When she woke on Wednesday in her Clapham flat, the morning after the dinner party, it surprised her to find that Leon was still there. She assumed it was Leon, anyway. An enormous naked male body was sleeping face down diagonally in her four-foot bed, which was as unprecedented as it was uncomfortable. Blokes who went to bed with Maggie were, of course, not literally ‘all the same’, as she would sometimes complain, but they certainly shared many tendencies, and one of these was the quite strenuous avoidance of sleep. As if obeying house rules pinned to the door, they would resolutely roll out of Maggie’s bed and breast the cold night air without so much as a cup of tea or a post-coital cuddle. It was a strange, inexplicable nocturnal-urgency syndrome she had often remarked on.

‘Gotta go,’ they’d say, hopping about zipping their trousers and cleaning their teeth at the same time, like characters in a bedroom farce. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve got a very, very early appointment in the morning. Is this soap scented? It’s not bluebell or something?’

‘All my conquests are either undead or office cleaners,’ she would tell her mates, by way of brave humour. But in fact her conquests were fathers of small children, of course; fulfilling some sort of universal genetic imperative to cheat on the wife during the first year of parenthood. Maggie made a point of meeting the wives of her Undead Office Cleaners as soon as possible – not to cause trouble but simply to prevent her from becoming ‘the other woman’. Meeting the wife had this curious way of dispelling any self-deluding fantasies about adultery. Before you met the wife in the living flesh, you could imagine you were the real person and the wife was the anonymous incorporeal phantom. Whereas after you met her, the mirror swivelled to offer a truer perspective, in which the wife was the real person and you were the lump of garbage.

Anyway, ask any of her friends, and they could tell you Maggie’s exact emotional pattern on these wham-bam occasions, because she’d described them often. As the taxi roared off at two a.m., she would wave gaily from the doorway in her dressing-gown, feeling all jelly-legged and warm. Then she’d go back to her tousled bed with Ariel and Miranda (the cats), Hello! magazine and a hot cup of something brown and chocolatey called Options (nice touch), and as she brushed the condom wrapper from the sheet, she’d tell herself that no scene could better sum up the freedom of modern womanhood.

Oh yes, Simone de Beauvoir would be so proud. Look, all that money, yet Barbra Streisand still had a hideous home! On the verge of sleep, she might decide it was high time a sexy woman of her calibre had her navel pierced. And then, seemingly a minute later, she woke alone in broad daylight. The room looked dusty; her pillow was caked in dribble and cat hair; she felt ravaged and cheap. The man in question was by now several miles away playing with baby in the bath, and would doubtless ignore her the next time they met, making her feel she’d been punched in the stomach. ‘What have I done?’ she would wail, then burst into tears and phone Belinda.

‘Shouldn’t you be getting home?’ (translation: ‘Get out of my house’) she asked Leon. She kicked his bum, which wobbled. Although she couldn’t now remember all the details, it had not been a terribly successful night, and it was annoying to find him still here. Evidently in Formula One they can refuel a car in under seven seconds – a statistic that was now proving hard to dislodge from her memory. Good grief, she still had her bra on.

Quite rightly it offended Maggie that while she was fit, pretty, clever, a bit famous and had screen-tested for Titanic, she’d still allowed herself to go to bed with Leon. It was so obvious she was too good for her sexual partners, yet strangely, there was no system of justice governing such matters, no god of eugenics who intervened on her behalf. ‘Stop!’ a voice should have said, as Leon gently placed his big paw on her neck in the car. ‘This coupling goes against nature, and must not proceed. This woman is reserved for clever, attractive males who write poetry and stuff. Kenneth Branagh, at least.’

But Maggie knew that the voice saying, ‘Stop!’ would never be hers. While she waited for Stefan to stop loving Belinda, she made the best of things; responded to advances from all directions; made quite a few advances of her own. Not that she was blind to male imperfections; far from it. But in sexual matters, you are often obliged to take your partner at his own estimation, and it’s a sad fact of life that many ugly, bald men look in the mirror and see Kevin Costner. Consequently, Maggie’s romantic career had encompassed sexual partners who, in former, more brutal, God-fearing eras, would have been stoned to death by mobs.

Leon snored and flapped a big white arm, but otherwise showed no sign of life, so she got up. She could have snuggled down, growled an erotic Murray Walker impersonation to rouse his ardour (she was good at accents). But on second thoughts, a bacon sandwich was more appealing. It was nearly lunch-time. So instead she made unrestrained noise having a shower, getting dressed, playing an oldies programme on Radio Two, and singing. She switched off half-way through Abba’s ‘Take A Chance On Me’ – it reminded her too painfully of her first-in-line feelings for Stefan.

She checked Leon wasn’t dead, of course. Remembering her duty as a hostess, she held a mirror to his lips until she saw vapour. But he wasn’t dead, and he wouldn’t wake up. So, humming ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’, she left him a note with directions to the Gemini corner café, and went out.

At college, Stefan was having coffee with Jago in the library canteen. They had arranged it the night before, when Jago overheard Stefan on the subject of killer tomatoes. ‘We’ll do a genetics supplement and you can be consultant editor,’ he’d told Stefan. ‘I’ll see you at eleven.’ The trouble with journalists (as Stefan had often said to Belinda) was that they couldn’t help regarding you not as a person but as a source.

‘I need some Swedes quick,’ Jago might ring up to ask, mid-thought in his scurrilous weekly column in the Effort. No preamble, of course. Busy man, Jago. Part of his charm.

‘For sure. Ingmar Bergman, August Strindberg, Björn Borg.’

Jago could be heard tapping his keyboard in the background. ‘B-U-R-G?’

‘Well, B-E – which one?’

‘All of them. You tell me.’

‘Ingmar is B-E-R-G, August is B-E-R-G, and Björn is B-O-R-G. The reason for such a high incidence of the name Berg and its variants, of course—’

‘Great. You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘One more Swede who isn’t a Berg, in case the subs don’t take my word for it?’

‘Abba?’

Four more emphatic taps.

‘Good man, gotta go.’

‘That was Yago,’ Stefan would tell Belinda, still holding the dead receiver in his hand.

‘How did I guess?’

The phrase ‘need-to-know basis’ had been invented for Jago. He was only interested in anything when he needed to know. Tell him a fact at an inappropriate moment (when he wasn’t writing an article, or commissioning one) and he literally screwed up his face to prevent it getting in. He was a tabula rasa with a straining Filofax, and other people were the fools who stored primary material until he came along to nick it. Not that your help would earn you any loyalty from him, let alone thanks. You could help him a hundred times, and he’d stitch you up on the hundred and first. The curious thing was, when Jago looked in a mirror he saw George Washington.

‘So how big is this supplement in the Effort?’ Stefan sighed, playing with his specs in a professorial manner.

‘Twelve pages. Minus ads. That leaves room for about three articles and a dozen pics.’

‘Why do you think I’ll contribute to it?’

‘Um, because if you don’t, I’ll go straight to Laurie Spink?’

Stefan smiled but didn’t reply. Laurie Spink made television programmes about genetics. He had a column in The Times.

‘OK, forget that Spink blackmail thing, that was tacky. If you do this for me, Stefan, I promise never to tell Belinda how I know you’re not a natural blond. What more can I say? Copy is by next Friday. A thousand words on anything. Is there a gene for monstrous boobs? Could you look for it between now and next Friday? I’m only thinking of the picture desk.’

‘Do people actually read these supplements, Yago? I’m afraid I am a doubting Thomas.’

‘Well, I’m glad you asked that. Research shows that, yes,’ he screwed up his face, as if trying to remember the exact figure, ‘one million, two hundred and twelve people read these supplements.’

‘But really they’re thrown in the bin?’

‘In a New York second.’

Stefan checked his watch and stood up. Jago took the hint. Besides, he’d arranged to call Laurie Spink in five minutes’ time. ‘I’ll be off,’ he offered. ‘So you’ll do it?’

Stefan shrugged. ‘No. It’s not really me, I think.’

‘Of course it’s you!’

‘I’m not a writer, Yago.’

‘No problem, big guy. We’ll write it for you in the office. I’ll ghost you. Happens all the time.’

‘Monstrous boobs may be for some the cat’s pyjamas, but – no.’

‘Stefan, why are you doing this to me?’

‘Because it’s a free country.’ Stefan shrugged. ‘East is east and west is west. Genetics is not all beer and skittles.’

Jago was confused, but more than that, he was hurt. Journalists always pout if you puncture their plan, even if they’ve only had the plan for the last ninety seconds.

‘Why do you call it copy?’ Stefan asked.

Jago looked puzzled.

‘Call what copy?’

‘Copy. I mean, the writing is supposed to be one-off, I think?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. This is journalism we’re talking about.’

‘I mean, would you ever say, “Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy”?’

Jago had had enough. ‘If I ever said, “Gosh, hey,” at all, I’d lose my job, Stefan. As should you, I might add.’

He strode out of the canteen, and extracted his mobile phone from an inside pocket. Stefan had just completely wasted his time. What a two-face! ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’ he said, with Stefan’s careful accent. He couldn’t wait to get back to the office to try that one on the guys.

Belinda spent the morning writing an imaginary riding-in-Ireland piece for Jago’s paper, and wondering what had happened to Neville. He was not his usual bouncy self. Even when the phone rang and it was her mother (eek!) there was only a twitch or scuttle from Los Rodentos. Someone phoned up to ask Belinda to appear on radio (she declined, but felt agitated); she remembered Stefan’s birthday was next week; the usual pressures most certainly applied. But no trampolining by small furry bodies. The rats were on a go-slow. Ever since she’d decided to hire Linda, she’d felt like the proverbial sinking ship. ‘Psst, Neville,’ she whispered. ‘Are you all right?’ Not a scuttle; not a squeak. Life was odd without his wheeling and bouncing. She pictured him with little round spectacles, like John Lennon. But no matter how much she hummed ‘Imagine’ to encourage him, he simply wasn’t interested.

Belinda always had a marvellous time alone with her imagination. Having invented quite a good travel piece, if she said so herself (‘Wind and soft rain whipped the ponies’ fetlocks; my hat was too tight, like an iron band’) she was now plotting the next Verity novel, Atta Girl, Verity!, in which Verity’s impoverished mum would break the terrible news that she couldn’t afford to stable Goldenboy at the Manor House any more – or not unless Verity took a backbreaking after-school job pulling weeds in Camilla’s mummy’s seven-acre garden.

How she enjoyed visiting pain and anguish on Verity, these days. She beamed as she considered Verity’s fate. Ho hum. By the rules of such fiction, Verity must, of course, come back from a perfect hack on Goldenboy, and be rubbing him down with fresh-smelling straw when in the distance, eek! splash!, Camilla falls into the ornamental fishpond! Run to the rescue, Verity! Don’t care if your plaits get wet! Recover Camilla unconscious, apply life-saving techniques, and after a feverish period awaiting Camilla’s recovery, receive as reward (wait for it) free stabling for the rest of your life! And not forgetting double oats for good old Goldenboy!

The children’s book world was mainly supplied these days with grim stuff about discarded hypodermics, but Belinda knew her own smug little readers would lap up the free stabling plot all right, mainly because they had already proved themselves stupid with no imagination. How easy they were to manipulate, these little princesses. Psychoanalysis might never have been invented. ‘Camilla cuts off Verity’s plaits,’ she wrote now, mischievously. ‘Verity caught cheating in the handy-pony. Shame increases when V investigated by RSPCA; maltreatment of G Boy exposed on national TV by Rolf H. V’s mother seeks consolation in lethal cocktail of booze and horse pills, and is shot by vet. Camilla wins Hickstead.’

Just then a key turned in the front door. Mrs Holdsworth? Belinda felt stricken. She’d been so busy torturing Verity! What was the etiquette for sacking a cleaning lady? Did you let her do the cleaning first, or what?

‘Only me,’ called Mrs H, coughing as she slammed the front door, and struggled out of wellingtons.

Belinda stayed paralysed at her desk, panicking. ‘Hello!’ she called, and waited.

‘“Come into the garden, Maud,”’ sang Mrs H, coughing between words. ‘“For the black bat night has—”’ Here a great explosion of phlegm-shifting, culminating in ‘God almighty, Jesus wept.’

She popped her grey head round the study door, fag in mouth. Here goes, thought Belinda, then noticed that Mrs H’s left arm was suspended in a rather grubby sling.

‘Don’t fucking ask,’ said Mrs Holdsworth gloomily. ‘Doctor says six months. I tell you what for nothing. My fucking brass-polishing days are over.’

‘That’s awful,’ sympathized Belinda. ‘And when they’d hardly begun. What a shame. I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. No grip, you see.’

‘I’ve been thinking—’ Belinda began.

‘Fucking stairs are the worst, of course.’

Mrs H scratched her knee through her overall, using her one good arm. Recollecting that there were three floors to her house (plus attic), Belinda didn’t see how an injured wrist stopped you from going upstairs, but she said nothing. Asking Mrs Holdsworth to elaborate on an intriguing statement was a mistake she’d regretted on too many occasions, and she now had a policy of restricting herself to a noncommittal ‘Mm’ wherever possible.

‘Mm,’ she said now, with as much of a funny-old-world tone as she could manage.

Mrs H continued to stand in the doorway. It always grieved her to spend less than half of her allotted three hours telling people how long it was since she bought a scarf. She tried again. ‘Bleeding great ’urricane on the way, apparently.’

‘Mm.’

‘That Salman Rushdie was in the butcher’s again. I said to him, “Very good, mate. Disguising yourself as a pork chop, are you? That’s fucking original.”’

‘Mm.’ Belinda pretended to be deeply engrossed in her notes.

‘My boy says he’s written a new book called Buddha Was a Cunt. Is that true?’

In the café, Maggie read last week’s Stage from cover to cover, filling time before her therapy appointment at two p.m. Maggie had run the gamut of therapy over the years. She’d done Freudian twice and Jungian three times, but had so far avoided Kleinian because Belinda had once said, ‘What, like Patsy Cline?’ which had somehow ruined it. Belinda had an awful way of belittling things that were important to you, by saying the first thing that came into her head. Kleinian therapy would now only involve singing maudlin I-fall-to-pieces country songs, which was what Maggie did at home anyway without paying.

Nowadays Maggie was working with a new therapist, Julia, who was the best she’d ever had. The idea was to work on isolated problems, and correct the thinking that led to inappropriate behaviour or beliefs. For example, Maggie had a problem about other people being late. ‘So does everyone,’ pooh-poohed Belinda. ‘Not like me,’ said Maggie. And it was true. Maggie not only got angry and worried as the minutes ticked by, but after a while she started to imagine that the other person was not late at all. He had actually arrived on time, and was standing at the bar or something – but that she had completely forgotten what he looked like.

‘But he’d recognize you?’ Belinda objected. ‘So you’d still meet up.’

No, said Maggie. Because it was worse than that. He’d forgotten what she looked like, too.

‘That’s mad,’ Belinda had said, helpfully. ‘You should never have become an actress if you can’t handle the odd identity shift, Mags.’

Luckily, the therapist took a more constructive approach.

‘Now, since this non-recognition event has never occurred in reality,’ said Julia, ‘we must uncover the roots of your irrational anxiety, which I’m afraid to say, Margaret, is your sense of total unlovability. It’s not your fault. Not at all. Your needs were never met by your parents, you see.’

‘You’re right.’

‘You were made to feel invisible by those terrible selfish people, who should never have had children.’

Maggie sniffed. ‘I was.’

‘They looked right through you.’

Tears pricked Maggie’s eyes. ‘They did.’

‘Did they tell you to stop dancing in front of the television, perhaps?’

It was a lucky guess.

‘Yes!’

And so Maggie had wept and signed up for six months, figuring that she had very little else to do, and Julia was local (in Tooting). Besides which, she couldn’t keep sitting stock-still with panic in theatre foyers with a sign pinned on her chest: ‘It’s really me! Is that really you?’

Professionally, things were a bit bleak for Maggie, and this didn’t help matters. Her total unlovability was being confirmed in all quarters. The Pinter had been good experience, though incredibly badly paid. She’d had a job on Casualty, classified in the script as ‘Bus crash scene – a woman moans’. But all the while her ambition to rejoin the Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to nothing. For the time being she must comfort herself with memories of two years ago, when she’d peaked in Stratford as the Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, getting a review that singled her out as ‘quite extraordinary’ and ‘probably quite good-looking’.

She had really loved that production, which was very loyal of her because it was generally reviled. Playing to paltry houses who sometimes booed, it did not transfer to London. But Maggie loved her Olivia. Never one to argue with a director’s concept, she even loved her Olivia’s Mongolian peasant costume and comical clog dancing. (‘Nobility is relative,’ their director Jeff told them.) Jeff, whom the Financial Times described as ‘an idiot’, had bucketfuls of bold ideas, including the unprecedented notion of casting as Viola and Sebastian (identical twins) two actors who looked absolutely nothing like each other. ‘Most wonderful!’ Olivia would say each night in the last scene, doing a hilarious double-take through bottle-glass specs. Even the critics liked that bit. She wished now she hadn’t slept with Jeff, especially as he was married to the famous TV actress who had played Viola. But he’d done her a great service with that casting of asymmetricals. No one usually finds Olivia’s final-act confusion the least bit funny.

Leon pushed open the steamy door, and wiped his shoes. Oh God. He looked slightly less enormous than she’d remembered, and had washed his hair. Maggie fiddled with her teaspoon in the sugar, glancing up occasionally. But though he looked round carefully, he evidently failed to spot her, so she carried on reading the Stage – or pretended to, having read it all already.

She heard Leon order a cup of herbal tea and braced herself. He brushed past her (‘Sorry’), and sat at a nearby table with Time Out, studying the ballet listings. She stared at him until finally he looked up. ‘Well, hello,’ she said pointedly.

He frowned.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Penelope Pitstop. You must be Muttley.’

He took a sip of tea, and looked behind him. ‘Sorry, were you sitting here?’ he suggested, at last.

‘What?’

‘Were you sitting here?’

His voice sounded funny. But it was definitely him.

‘No.’

He tried to look away again, but couldn’t. She was staring at him, and clearly getting angry with him, too.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know you? I’m afraid I’m terrible at forgetting people. I meet such a lot of people in my work, you see.’

At which point, the door opened again, and a blonde woman came in, smiling directly at Leon. It was Julia, Maggie’s therapist.

‘Ah, there you are, Julia,’ said Leon, with relief. ‘Perhaps…’ and he gestured awkwardly towards Maggie, evidently hoping his wife could identify her.

‘Margaret?’ she began, but in a second Maggie had pushed past her, left the café and was outside.

Verity, high on crack cocaine, was just being bundled into a police van (they were manhandling her plaits) when Belinda wondered whether it might be time to ease up a bit.

‘Phew,’ she said, shaking her head proudly as she perused the last two pages of notes, and wishing she smoked cheroots. ‘What a scorcher.’

The phone rang. It was Viv. ‘Am I interrupting something?’

‘Only a drug bust. So I see you’re still talking to me? She’s only a cleaning lady, Viv.’

‘It’s about you and me,’ Viv said. ‘I was wrong, you were right.’

Belinda paused to take this in. ‘And who is this impersonating Viv, please?’

‘Belinda, listen. I was wrong to interfere in your life. If you want to be bad at things and disorganized and never tidy up, you can do that. You’re nearly forty, after all.’

‘I’m thirty-six, the same as you.’

‘You see, Linda isn’t what you think. I know I’ve always said she was Mary Poppins and all that, but the truth is I’ve been covering up for her.’

‘Viv!’

‘No, it’s true. She’s got a terrible self-esteem problem. You have to bolster her all the time. And you end up—’

‘Viv, I can’t believe you’d stoop so low.’

‘You haven’t sacked Mrs Holdsworth?’

‘That’s a point. Hang on.’

Alerted to the telltale sound of vacuum cleaning in the hall, Belinda popped her head round the door and found Mrs H pushing the Hoover back and forth on the same spot, apparently lost in thought. ‘Fucking disgusting!’ she yelled to Belinda, over the din of the Hoover.

Belinda gave her a thumbs-up and went back to the phone.

‘Not yet. I thought if I gave her a month’s money—’

‘Leave things as they are, Bea.’

Belinda harumphed grandly. Nobody harumphed as grandly as Belinda.

The doorbell rang.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘If it’s Linda—’

‘I’ll ring you later. God, you’re so interfering. Why do you always think you’re responsible for other people’s lives?’

‘Perhaps because I’m a bloody anaesthetist, in case you’ve forgotten!’

Belinda pursed her lips.

The doorbell rang again.

‘If it’s Linda—’ Viv began.

‘I’ve got to go.’

Belinda felt rather good about standing up to Viv. Letting Verity’s behaviour go haywire had obviously given her a boost.

‘Atta girl, Belinda,’ she said to herself on the way to the door, stepping over Mrs H’s wellingtons – and opening it found, in a pool of afternoon light, carrying a very thoughtful bunch of chrysanthemums, the woman who was going to change her life.

Mid-afternoon, Jago rang Laurie Spink again. Spink was now body and soul the property of the Effort, because it was easier to give him an extremely well-paid regular column than think of someone else to write for the supplement. And now that Jago had his number, he could expect the usual Jago call.

‘I need some geneticists.’

‘I’ve got a tutorial.’

‘I need them this minute.’

So Spink had reeled off a few names, some of them with phone numbers. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he added. ‘Copy by Friday, yes?’

‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Stefan Johansson’s work? He hasn’t done anything on monstrous boobs that he’s keeping quiet about?’

‘Oh, a lot of his notes were lost, unfortunately.’

Jago had been doodling. He stopped. ‘Lost when?’

‘When he died.’

‘Stefan Johansson died? Since this morning?’

‘No, no. Three or four years ago. Tragic. A fire. Best cloning brain outside the US. I suppose most people don’t know about it. He used his own genetic material for research – ghastly end. Led to all sorts of enquiries and bans, but it was mostly hushed up. Wife went mad, terrible stories.’

‘But he’s teaching at Imperial.’

‘Can’t be.’

Jago blinked hard. In a second he had cut off Spink and phoned Imperial. They had no Johansson. He phoned the cuttings library; they promised to e-mail an obituary from an obscure science journal. He cast his mind back (a manoeuvre that did not come easily to him). How much had Viv known about Stefan when they introduced him to Belinda? Nothing. Viv’s sister met him in the canteen, that’s all. He was an impostor! A cheating, clever impostor! Like, like—

‘Get me the names of some impostors quick!’ he ordered his secretary.

Jago was nearly hyperventilating. What a great story! What a madly dangerous scheme to take the identity of a famous dead scientist and, moreover, pretend to be Swedish. Jago’s mind raced, as he scanned the obituary that had just arrived on his screen. Key words leapt out at him. ‘Cloning … brilliant … Swede … pseudogenes … Sweden … reckless … only in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson … Human Genome Project … very, very mysterious … Malmö.’

Jago couldn’t read it properly, because he never did read anything properly. But he got the idea. The man they knew as Stefan – who was he? ‘Unless, unless—’ he muttered. He scrolled to the end, scrolled to the top again. More key words leapt out. ‘Gene sharing … Malmö … foolhardy experiment … replica … Frankenstein … condemned by scientific fraternity

… Church … offence against God … mutation … Abba … Malmö.’

But then he looked at the picture, and everything changed. It was Stefan. Stefan was dead, yet alive. A great shiver of excitement went up his spine. He heard again Stefan saying, ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’

The conclusion was staring him in the face.

‘Oh my God. The man we know as Stefan Johansson … is a clone.’

Running from the Gemini café, Maggie choked on tears of humiliation. Good grief, if this was what happened when you just popped out for a bacon sandwich she’d become a vegetarian immediately. For someone with Maggie’s particular invisibility complexes, here was a triple calamity: (a) the man she’d condescended to sleep with had entirely failed to recognize her the next lunch-time; (b) he was a bastard and was the partner of her therapist, to whom she now couldn’t talk about it; and (c) after all that Michael Schumacher nonsense, it turns out he’s really interested in classical dance! ‘They’re all the same,’ she sobbed openly, as she ran home. ‘All the bloody same.’

‘Margaret?’ Leon was now calling after her and, from the sound of it, running. His feet were slapping the pavement, and he was gaining on her. Why was he calling her Margaret? ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ she muttered as she ran.

‘Margaret, could you stop, please?’

She turned into her own street. Nearly home. Her heart was pounding as she picked up speed to escape him, and saw – emerging sheepishly from her flat, with hair slightly dirtier than it had been last night – Leon. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then started ambling in the opposite direction.

‘Aieee!’ she cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

Looking back, she saw Leon running towards her; looking forward, she saw him walking away. What an irony, she thought, as she staggered against the wall, clutching her chest. To spend all your professional life practising double-takes. And then, when a double-take would really come in handy, just fainting away on the spot.