Belsize Park

Something strange was happening to Dexter's face.

Coarse, black hairs had begun to appear high up on his cheeks, joining the occasional long grey solitary hairs that crept from his eyebrows. As if that wasn't enough, a fine, pale fur was appearing around the opening of his ears and at the bottom of his earlobes; hair that seemed to sprout overnight like cress, and which served no purpose except to draw attention to the fact that he was approaching middle age. Was now middle-aged.

Something strange was happening to Dexter's neck. He had developed this sag, this fleshy pouch under his chin, his bag of shame, like some flesh-toned roll-neck jumper. He stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror and put one hand on his neck as if trying to mould it all back into place. It was like living in a subsiding house -- every morning he woke and inspected the site for fresh cracks, new slippage in the night. It was as if the flesh were somehow cleaving from the skeleton, the characteristic physique of someone whose gym membership had long since lapsed. He had the beginnings of a paunch and, most grotesquely, something strange was happening to his nipples. There were items of clothing that he could barely bring himself to wear now, fitted shirts and ribbed woollen tops, because you could see them there, like limpets, girlish and repulsive. He also looked absurd in any garment with a hood, and only last week he had caught himself standing in a trance, listening to Gardeners' Question Time. In two weeks' time he would be forty years old.

Then there was the widow's peak, particularly noticeable now after a shower; two parallel byways gradually widening and making their way to the crown of his head, where the two paths would one day meet and it would all be over. He dried his hair with the towel, then scrubbed it this way and that with his fingertips until the path was covered over.

Emma came in, naked from the bedroom, and he began to brush his teeth, another obsession; he felt like he had an old mouth, like it would never be clean again.

He shook his head, and told himself it wasn't that disastrous. If he turned and looked at himself suddenly, and held his head in a certain way, and inhaled, he could still pass for, say, thirty-seven? He retained enough vanity to know that he was still an unusually good-looking man, but no-one was calling him beautiful anymore, and he'd always thought he would age better than this. He had hoped to age like a movie star: wiry, aquiline, grey-templed, sophisticated. Instead he was ageing like a TV presenter. An ex-TV presenter. A twice-married ex-TV presenter who ate far too much cheese.

"I'm getting fat," he mumbled, mouth full of foam.

"I thought you said I wasn't getting fat."

"If you feel you are, then you are."

"And I don't eat too much cheese. My metabolism is slowing down, that's all."

"I am -- look."

"So don't eat so much cheese then," she said.

"No you're not," she said without much conviction.

"So do some exercise. Go to the gym again. Come swimming with me."

"I've told you before, darling, you have beautiful breasts," and she laughed, poked him in the buttock and stepped into the shower. He rinsed, sat on the bathroom chair and watched her. "We should go and see that house this afternoon."

Emma groaned over the sound of the water. "Do we have to?"

She continued to shower with her back to him and he stood and stalked into the bedroom to get dressed. They were scrappy and irritable once again, and he told himself that it was because of the strain of trying to find a place to live. The flat had already been sold and a large part of their possessions placed into storage just to make room for the two of them. Unless they found somewhere soon they would have to rent, and all this brought its tensions and anxieties.

"No time, have I?" While the toothbrush was removed from his mouth she kissed him consolingly. "Look, I'm a mess," he mumbled.

"Well I don't know how else we're going to find --"

"Okay. Okay! We'll go and see the house."

"Just now," she said, with studied calm. "I could feel it coming on."

"When?" he asked.

"Oh well," he said, and Emma continued to make coffee, her back to him.

He stood to wrap his arms around her waist and lightly kissed the nape of her neck, still damp from the shower. She didn't look up from the newspaper. "Doesn't matter. We'll try again, yeah?" he said, standing there with his chin on her shoulder for a while. It was a winsome, uncomfortable stance, and when she turned the page of the paper, he took it as his cue to return to the table.

But he knew that something else was going on and sure enough, as Emma waited for the kettle and read the paper, she suddenly said -- "I've just got my period."

They sat and read, Emma the current affairs, Dexter the sport, both taut with irritation while Emma tutted and shook her head in that maddening way she sometimes had. The Butler Inquiry into the origins of the war dominated the headlines, and he could feel her building up to some kind of topical political comment. He focussed on the latest from Wimbledon, but --

"It's weird, isn't it? How there's this war going on, and virtually no protest? I mean you think there'd be marches or something, wouldn't you?"

"What's it got to do with the students?" he said, mildly enough, he thought.

That tone of voice riled him too. It was the one he remembered from all those years ago: her student voice, superior and self-righteous. Dexter made an uncontentious noise, neither challenging nor accepting, in the hope that this would be enough. Time passed, pages of the newspaper were turned.

She was provoking him. Fine, if that's what she wanted. "So why aren't you?"

"It's traditional, isn't it? That students are politically engaged. If we were still students, we'd be protesting." She went back to the paper. "I would anyway."

"I mean you'd think there'd be something like the anti-Vietnam movement or something, but nothing. Just that one march, then everyone shrugged and went home. Even the students aren't protesting!"

She looked at him sharply. "What?"

"Protesting. If you feel so strongly."

"What, you think it's a fairly just war?"

"What?" She looked at him, eyes narrowed.

"What do you think?"

He returned to the paper, resolving to keep quiet but unable to do so. "Or maybe it's because people don't mind."

"You can be glad Saddam's gone and still be against the war."

"But what about you?" She closed the newspaper, and he felt a genuine sense of unease. "What do you think?"

"Not me necessarily. People."

"That's exactly my point. Maybe I should be! That was exactly my observation! If there was some kind of cohesive movement…"

"What do I think?"

"That's my point. It's ambiguous, isn't it?"

"The war. I mean if people were really affronted by it there'd be protests, but maybe people are glad that he's gone. I don't know if you noticed, Em, but he wasn't a very nice man…"

He sighed. Too late now, no turning back. "I just think it's pretty rich that a lot of people on the Left were against the war when the people that Saddam was murdering were exactly the people the Left should have been supporting."

"Trade unionists, feminists. Homosexuals." Should he say the Kurds? Was that correct? He decided to chance it. "The Kurds!"

"Like who?"

Emma snuffled righteously. "Oh, you think we're fighting this war to protect trade unionists? You think Bush invaded because he was worried about the plight of Iraqi women? Or gays?"

"… and Iran? And China and Russia and North Korea and Saudi Arabia! You can't protest against everyone."

"That's beside the point!"

"Why not? You used to!"

"All I'm saying is that the anti-war march would have had a bit more moral credibility if the same people had protested against the Iraqi regime in the first place! They protested about apartheid, why not Iraq?"

"Is it? When I first knew you, all you did was boycott things. You couldn't eat a bloody Mars Bar without a lecture on personal responsibility. It's not my fault you've become complacent…"

He returned to his ridiculous sports news with a little self-satisfied smirk, and Emma felt her face beginning to redden. "I have not become… Don't change the subject! The point is, it's ridiculous to claim that this war is about human rights, or WMDs or anything like that. It's about one thing and one thing only…"

"I'm not haranguing you --"

"… nothing to do with human rights. It's entirely to do with oil!"

"Calm down, Dex --"

"I tell you what this is really about. You've had your period and you're angry about it and you're taking it out on me! Well I don't like being harangued while I'm trying to eat my breakfast!"

"Are we? Because I'm arguing --"

"Well isn't that a pretty good reason?" he said, standing and deliberately scraping his chair. "Or don't you use oil, Em?"

He groaned. It was inevitable now: she was going to say "oil". Please, please don't say "oil"…

"We're not arguing, we're discussing --"

As last words go, he felt this was pretty effective, but it was hard to walk away from an argument in this bachelor flat that suddenly felt too small, cluttered and scuffed. Certainly Emma wasn't going to let a fatuous remark like that go unanswered. She followed him into the hall, but he was waiting for her, turning on her with a ferocity that unsettled them both.

"Arguing then --"

"The war wasn't my idea, Em! I didn't order the invasion, and I'm sorry, but I don't feel as strongly about it as you do. Maybe I should, maybe I will, but I don't. I don't know why, maybe I'm too stupid or something --"

"I wasn't! I wasn't talking to… oh, forget it."

"Don't you dare tell me to --"

"I'm not embarrassed, I'm just… bored." He was searching through the laundry basket, pulling out discarded clothes, checking trouser pockets for keys. "I find politics boring -- there, I've said it now. It's out!"

Emma looked startled. "Where did that come from? I didn't say you were --?"

He squeezed past that bloody bike of hers, cluttering up his hallway, and into the bedroom. The blinds were still drawn, the bed unmade, damp towels on the floor, the room smelling of their bodies from the night before. He began searching for his keys in the gloom. Emma watched him from the doorway, with that look of maddening concern, and he kept his eyes averted.

"But you treat me like I am. Or like I'm this right-wing nut because I don't spout platitudes about The War. I swear, if I sit at one more dinner party and hear someone say 'It's all about the oil'! Maybe it is, so what? Either protest about that, or stop using oil or accept it and shut the fuck up!"

"Why are you so embarrassed about discussing politics?" she said calmly, as if he were a child having a tantrum.

"Yes, really."

"Even at University?"

"Really?"

"What does that mean, Em? It's meaningless, it's just something to say --"

"It means we talked about a lot of things!"

"Especially there! I just pretended I didn't because it was the thing to do. I used to sit there at two in the morning listening to Joni Mitchell while some clown banged on about apartheid, or nuclear disarmament or the objectification of women and I used to think, fuck, this is boring, can't we talk about, I don't know, family or music or sex or something, people or something --"

"But politics is people!"

"Did we? All I remember about those golden days is a lot of people showing-off, men mostly, banging on about feminism so that they could get into some girl's knickers. Stating the bleeding obvious; isn't that Mr Mandela nice and isn't nuclear war nasty and isn't it rotten that some people don't have enough to eat --"

"-- it's exactly the same now, except the bleeding obvious has changed. Now it's global warming and hasn't Blair sold out!"

"And that's not what people said!"

"I do agree! I do! I just think it would be refreshing to hear someone we know, one single person, say Bush can't be all that stupid and thank God someone's standing up to this fascist dictator and by the way I love my big car. Because they'd be wrong, but at least there'd be something to talk about! At least they wouldn't be patting themselves on the back, at least it would make a change from WMDs and schools and fucking house prices."

"Hey, you talk about house prices too!"

"You don't agree?"

"Do I bore you then?" she said quietly.

"I know! And I fucking bore myself too!" His shout echoed as he flung yesterday's clothes against the wall, and then they both stood there in the gloomy bedroom, the blinds still down, the stale bed unmade.

"No, you don't. Let's change the subject, can we?"

"So, what do you want to talk about?" she said.

"But do I?"

"Don't be ridiculous! That's not what I said." Suddenly exhausted, he sat on the bed.

He sat hunched on the edge of the mattress, pressed his hands to his face and exhaled through his fingers. "We've only been trying for eighteen months, Em."

"I'm sorry for taking it out on you," she said.

"Two years isn't that long. Why not wait another six months?"

"When it doesn't work, like it's my fault."

She crossed the room and joined him, and they sat for a moment holding hands, shoulders hunched.

"I'm sorry. I apologise. I'm just… disappointed. I really want it, that's all."

"That's what it feels like."

"Two years then. I don't know, I just hate that… look you give me."

"So do I!"

"Do you?"

"Two years."

"I don't!"

He looked hurt. "Of course I do!"

"There's nothing wrong with us."

"Come here," she said, falling backwards onto the bed, and he followed, their legs dangling over the edge. A shaft of murky light leaked between the blinds.

She lifted his hand and pressed the back of it against her lips. "You know. I think we should get checked out. Go to a fertility clinic or something. Both of us."

"Well I do now. I love you. You know that."

"What look?"

"Because you didn't to begin with."

"I'm sorry for… I don't know."

"I know, and that's what we're going to confirm."

"I'll be thirty-nine next April, Dex."

He exhaled slowly, visions of test tubes floating before his eyes. Depressing cubicles, nurses snapping on rubber gloves. Magazines. "Alright then. We'll have some tests." He turned to look at her. "But what'll we do about the waiting list?"

"I'm forty in two weeks!"

With some sort of fragile peace in place, he got ready for work. The absurd row would make him late, but at least the Belleville Café was running fairly smoothly now. He had employed a sharp, reliable manager, Maddy, with whom he enjoyed good business relations and some mild flirtation, and he no longer had to open up in the mornings.

She sighed. "I suppose we might have to, I don't know. Go private."

"I just don't feel like I've got another six months in me, that's all."

"No, me neither," she said. "Me neither.

After a while, he spoke. "My God. Now that's something I never thought you'd say."

"You're crazy."

"Exactly."

Emma accompanied him downstairs and they walked out into the day, gloomy and nondescript.

"Kilburn. I'll send you the address. It looks nice. In the photos."

"That's okay. We'll stay in tonight, you and me. I'll cook you dinner, or we'll go out somewhere. To the cinema or something." He pressed his face to the top of the head. "I love you and we'll sort this out, alright?"

"So where is this house then?"

Emma stood silent on the doorstep. The proper thing to do would be to tell him that she loved him too, but she still wanted to mope a little more. She resolved to sulk until lunch time, then make it up to him tonight. Perhaps if the weather cleared up, they could go and sit on Primrose Hill like they used to. The important thing is that he will be there and it will be okay.

"You should go," she mumbled into his shoulder. "You'll be late for Maddy."

"They all look nice in the photos," she mumbled, hearing her own voice, sulky and dreary. Dexter chose not to speak, and a moment passed before she felt able to loop her arms around his waist and hold onto him. "We're not being very good today, are we? Or I'm not. Sorry."

"Don't start."

She grinned and looked up at him. "I'll cheer up by tonight."

"Fun."

"We'll do something fun."

"Of course we do," she said, and kissed him goodbye.

Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity, not just of their romance, but of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone-calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents' house, swimming in the river on New Year's Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. There was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other's permanent presence for granted.

"We still have fun, don't we?"

And they did have fun, though it was of a different kind now. All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.

She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centred? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

But to just look at someone, to just sit and look and talk and then realise that it's morning? Who had the time or inclination or energy these days to stay up talking all night? What would you talk about? Property prices? She used to long for those midnight phone-calls; these days if a phone rang late at night it was because there had been an accident, and did they really need more photographs when they knew each other's faces so well, when they had shoeboxes full of that stuff, an archive of nearly twenty years? Who writes long letters in this day and age, and what is there to care so much about?

No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn't as curious or passionate as she once had been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T. S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them?

Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of those nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years' time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer nor poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not over happy.

Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: "We grew up together."

So they went to work as usual. Emma sat at her computer by the window overlooking the tree-lined street, writing the fifth and final "Julie Criscoll" novel, in which her fictional heroine, ironically enough, became pregnant and had to decide between motherhood and university. It wasn't going very well; the tone was too sombre and introspective, the jokes wouldn't flow. She was keen to get it finished, and yet uncertain what to do next, or what she was capable of doing; a book for grown-ups perhaps, something serious and properly researched about the Spanish Civil War, or the near-future, something vaguely Margaret Atwoody, something her younger self might respect and admire. That was the idea anyway. In the meantime, she tidied the flat, made tea, paid some bills, did a coloured wash, put CDs back in their cases, made more tea then finally turned on her computer and stared it into submission.

"So I'm here, doing my VAT, and I keep thinking about you and I just wanted to say don't worry. I've arranged for us to view this house at five o'clock. I'll text you the address, so, who knows. We'll see. Period property, good-sized rooms. It's got a breakfast bar apparently. I know you've always dreamt of one. That's all. Except to say I love you and don't worry. Whatever it is you're worrying about, don't. That's everything. See you there at five. Love you. Bye."

At the café, Dexter flirted a little with Maddy, then sat in the tiny stock room that smelt oppressively of cheese and attempted to complete the quarterly VAT return. But the gloom and guilt of this morning's outburst still clung to him, and when he could no longer concentrate he reached for his phone. It used to be Emma who made the conciliatory calls and smoothed things over, but in the eight months since their marriage they seemed to have changed places, and he now found himself incapable of doing anything while he knew she was unhappy. He dialled, imagining her at her desk, looking at her mobile phone, seeing his name appear and turning it off. He preferred it that way -- much easier to be sentimental when no-one was going to answer back.

As routine demanded, Emma worked until two, ate lunch, then went swimming. In July she sometimes liked to go to the ladies pool on Hampstead Heath, but the day had become precariously dark and overcast, and instead she braved the teenage kids at the indoor pool. For twenty minutes she weaved unhappily between them as they dive-bombed and ducked and flirted with each other, manic with the freedom of the end of term. Afterwards she sat in the changing rooms, listened to Dexter's message and smiled. She memorised the address of the property and called back.

"Hi there. It's me. Just to say, I'm setting out now and I can't wait to see the breakfast bar. I might be five minutes late. Also thank you for your message and I wanted to say… I'm sorry for being so snappy today, and for that stupid argument. Nothing to do with you. Just a bit nuts at the moment. The important thing is I love you very much. So. There you go. Lucky you! I think that's everything. Bye my love. Bye."

Outside the sports centre the clouds had darkened and finally burst, letting loose fat grey drops of warm rain. She cursed the weather and the wet seat of her bicycle and set off across North London towards Kilburn, improvising a route through a maze of residential streets towards Lexington Road.

The rain became heavier, oily drops of brown city water, and Emma rode standing on the pedals with her head lowered so that she was only vaguely aware of a blur of movement in the side road to her left. The sensation is less of flying through the air, more of being picked up and hurled, and when she comes to rest on the roadside verge with her face against the wet pavement, her first instinct is to look for her bicycle, which has somehow disappeared from beneath her. She tries to move her head, but is unable to do so. She wants to take off her helmet, because people are looking at her now, faces craning over her and she looks ridiculous in a bicycle helmet, but the people crouching over her seem fearful and are asking her over and over again are you alright are you alright. One of them is crying and she realises for the first time that she is not alright. She blinks against the rain falling on her face. She is definitely going to be late now. Dexter will be waiting.

She thinks very distinctly of two things.

The first is a photograph of herself at nine years old in a red swimsuit on a beach, she can't remember where, Filey or Scarborough perhaps. She is with her mother and father who are swinging her towards the camera, their sunburnt faces buckled with laughter. Then she thinks of Dexter, sheltering from the rain on the steps of the new house, looking at his watch, impatient; he'll wonder where I am, she thinks. He'll worry.

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.