SERIOUS TIMES BEGAN ON a gray, ominous day in London. I wasn’t looking for serious. If I’m honest, I suppose I was looking for a bit of the other. Charlie was nearly two years old and I was emerging from the introverted, chrysalid stage of early motherhood. I fitted back into my favorite skirts. I felt like showing off my wings.

I’d decided to spend a day in the field. The idea was to remind my editorial girls that it was possible to write a feature article all on one’s own. I hoped that by inspiring the staff to indulge in a little reportage, my commissioning budget would be spared. It was simply a question, I had told the office airily, of applying one’s pithy remarks sequentially to paper rather than scrawling them individually on sample boxes.

Really I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my journalism degree and intoxicated with the job. Exposing corruption, brandishing truth. How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when, and why? But now, standing in the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten o’clock interview, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at twenty, one is naturally curious about life, but at thirty, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in the hope that some of their youthful predisillusionment would rub off on me.

I was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and hypoxic—half-garroted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.

I tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike anything Andrew would write in his Times column, in other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping, and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and sprawling and oozing, and I hated it. Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy. Why do you always have to be so bloody negative? I asked Andrew. If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about the people who are doing something about it?

—Oh yeah? Like whom?

—Well, like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after all.

—Oh that’s genius Sarah, that really is. Because people really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine uplifting piece?

—You mean what’s my title? Well how about “The Battle for Britain”?

I know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was finally growing out of my magazine’s demographic. Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.

I was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building. Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you? That had been Andrew’s parting shot. What exactly do you require the Home Office to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the lowlifes with Spitfires? Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t help.

I stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realized I hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to my editorial staff. Senior editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their commissioning budgets. I was there, I realized, entirely to make a point to Andrew.

And when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.

Lawrence looked down at his clipboard.

“That’s odd,” he said. “They’ve marked down this interview as ‘nonhostile.’”

I realized I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed.

“Oh god, I’m sorry. Bad morning.”

“Don’t mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem to have it in for us these days.”

I smiled.

“I am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”

“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”

I laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.

“You think I’m joking,” he said.

His voice was flat and unremarkable. He didn’t sound public school. There was a touch of roughness in his vowels, or a sense of some wildness reined in, as if he was making an effort. It was hard to place his voice. He took me on a tour of the building. We looked in on the Assets Recovery Agency and the Criminal Records Bureau. The mood was businesslike, but relaxed. Discourage a little crime, drink a little coffee—that seemed to be the tone. We walked along unnatural galleries floored with natural materials and bathed in natural light.

“So Lawrence,” I said, “what do you think is going wrong with Britain?”

Lawrence stopped and turned. His face glowed in a soft yellow ray, filtered through colored glass.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d fix it.”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at the Home Office? Fix it?”

“I don’t actually work in any of the departments. They tried me out here and there for a while, but I don’t think my heart was in it. So here I am in the press office.”

“But surely you must have an opinion?”

Lawrence sighed. “Everyone has an opinion, don’t they? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this country. What? Why are you smiling?”

“I wish you’d tell that to my husband.”

“Ah. He has opinions, does he?”

“On a variety of subjects.”

“Well, maybe he should work here. They love a policy debate around these parts, they really do. Your first interview, for example…” Lawrence looked at his clipboard, searching for a name.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “I thought you were my interview.”

Lawrence looked up. “Ah,” he said. “No, I’m just the warm-up guy. I’m sorry, I should have explained.”

“Oh.”

“Well don’t look so disappointed. I’ve fixed up a good day for you, I really have. You’ve got three heads of department lined up, and a real live permanent undersecretary. I’m sure they’ll give you more than you need for your piece.”

“But I was enjoying talking to you.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“You think?”

Lawrence smiled. He had curly black hair, quite glossy but cut disconcertingly short around the back and sides. His suit, too—it was a good one; Kenzo, I think—and it fitted him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it. He held his arms a little away from his body—as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl.

“They don’t really like me talking to the visitors,” said Lawrence. “I don’t think I’ve quite perfected the Home Office voice.”

I was surprised to find myself laughing. We walked on down the corridor. Somewhere in between the Criminal Records Bureau and the Forensic Science Service, the mood changed. People ran past us down the corridor. A crowd clustered around a television monitor. I noticed the way Lawrence put a protective hand on the small of my back as he steered me through the sudden press of people. It didn’t feel inappropriate. I realized I was slowing down to feel the pressure of his hand on my back.

BREAKING NEWS, said the TV monitor: HOME SECRETARY RESIGNS. There was footage of the man looking haggard and climbing with his guide dog into the backseat of a torment that for the moment still resembled a ministerial car.

Lawrence inclined his head toward the others, who were staring raptly at the monitor. He spoke close to my ear.

“Look at these bastards,” he whispered. “The man’s being crucified and these people are already excited about what it means for their jobs.”

“What about you? Don’t you care?”

Lawrence grinned.

“Oh, it’s bad news for me,” he whispered. “With my brilliant track record, I was next in line to be the man’s guide dog.”

Lawrence took me to his office. He said he had to check his messages. I was nervous, I don’t know why. There wasn’t anything of Lawrence on the walls—just a generic framed photo of Waterloo Bridge, and a laminated card showing the mustering points in the event of fire. I caught myself checking my reflection in the window glass and then thinking, Oh don’t be so silly. I let my eyes change their focus until they rested on the flat gray wall of the neighboring office building. I waited while Lawrence scrolled through his e-mails.

He looked up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to reschedule your interviews. It’ll be chaos around here for the next few days.”

The phone went and Lawrence listened for a moment. He said, What? Shouldn’t someone more senior be doing that? Really? Oh, great. How long do I have? He put the phone down on the table and then he put his head down on the desk. In the corridor outside the office there were sounds of laughing, shouting, doors slamming shut.

“Bastards,” said Lawrence.

“What is it?”

“That phone call? Off the record?”

“Of course.”

“I have to write a letter to the outgoing home secretary, expressing our department’s deep regret at his leaving.”

“They don’t sound particularly regretful.”

“And to think that but for your journalistic sensitivity to detail, we’d never have noticed.”

Lawrence rubbed his eyes and turned to his computer screen. He laid his fingers on the keyboard, then hesitated.

“God!” he said. “I mean, what do you write?”

“Don’t ask me. Did you know the man?”

Lawrence shook his head. “I’ve been in rooms he was in, that’s all. He was a twat, really, only you couldn’t say that because he was blind. I suppose that’s how he got so far. He used to lean slightly forward, with his hand on his guide dog’s harness. He used to lean, like this, and his hand would sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn’t tremble when he was reading Braille.”

“You don’t sound as if you’ll miss him much either.”

Lawrence shrugged. “I quite admired him. He was weak and he turned that into a strength. A role model for losers like me.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re doing self-deprecation.”

“So?”

“So, it doesn’t work. Studies have shown. Women only pretend they like it in surveys.”

“Maybe I’m only pretending to do self-deprecation. Maybe I’m a winner. Maybe becoming the Home Office’s press bitch was my own personal Everest.”

He said all this without facial inflection. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t know where to look.

“Let’s bring this back to my article,” I said.

“Yes, let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t it?”

I felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.

I remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see them now, with hyperreal clarity, every minute gray acrylic fiber of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the gray pubic fuzz of an aging administrative body. I stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to meet Lawrence’s eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Stop it.”

Lawrence blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.

And, just like that, for the moment, it was gone.

I breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.

“Why did the home secretary have to resign?” I said.

Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a journalist.”

“Not a serious one. Nixie does current affairs the way The Economist does shoes. On a need-to-know basis.”

“The home secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s nanny.”

“You believe that?”

“I don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh, listen to them.”

From outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.

“They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”

“You think they set him up?”

He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What would you put?”

“It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”

Lawrence groaned.

“But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”

I looked around his office.

“I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my interview.”

“So?”

“So, you’re not making it easy for me.”

“In what way?”

“Well, you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”

Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.

I smiled. “Nice,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I felt the ache of adrenaline again.

“You really don’t fit in here, do you?”

“Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”

“So write something.”

“But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”

I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”

Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”

I realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”

“Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”

“Well I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”

“Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”

“Yes, I do.”

Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”

“Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”

Lawrence drew in his elbows—drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.

You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen_

That was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The bearings squealed in his chair.

“So tell me something,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Is it your husband who makes you unhappy?”

“What? You don’t know anything about my husband.”

“It was one of the first things you said to me. About your husband and his opinions. Why would you mention him to me at all?”

“The subject came up.”

“The subject of your husband? You brought it up.”

I stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence smiled, bitterly but without malice.

“I think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.

I moved quickly out from behind his desk—my turn to blush now—and I went over to the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary life in the street. Lawrence came to stand beside me.

“So,” he said. “Now it’s me who’s sorry. I suppose you’ll tell me I should leave the close observation to you journalists.”

I smiled, despite myself. “What was that line you were in the middle of writing?” I said.

“You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen…I don’t know, I’m going to say, still to be seen what great fruits your work will bear, or still to be seen what the successes of your hard work will be. Something open-ended like that.”

“Or you could just leave it how it is,” I said.

“It isn’t finished,” said Lawrence.

“But it’s rather good,” I said. “It’s got us this far, hasn’t it?”

The cursor blinked and my lips parted and we kissed and kissed and kissed. I clung to him and whispered in his ear. Afterward I retrieved my knickers from the gray carpet tiles, and pulled them on under my skirt. I smoothed down my blouse, and Lawrence sat back at his desk.

I looked through the window at a different world from the one I had left out there.

“I’ve never done that before,” I said.

“No, you haven’t,” said Lawrence. “I’d have remembered.”

He stared at the screen for a full minute with the unfinished line on it and then, with my lipstick still on his lips, smashed down a full stop. You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen. Twenty minutes later, the letter was transcribed to Braille and put in the post. Lawrence’s colleagues hadn’t cared enough to proofread it.

Andrew called. My mobile went in Lawrence’s office and I will never forget the first thing Andrew said: This is fuckin fantastic, Sarah. This story is going to be full-on for weeks. They’ve commissioned me to write an extended feature on the home secretary’s downfall. This is pay dirt, Sarah. They’ve given me a team of researchers. But I’m going to be in the office all hours on this one. You’ll be all right looking after Charlie, won’t you?

I switched off the phone, very gently. It was simpler than announcing to Andrew the change in our way of life. It was easier than explaining to him: our marriage has just been mortally wounded, quite by accident, by a gang of bullies picking on a blind man.

I put down the phone and I looked at Lawrence. “I’d really like to see you again,” I said.

Ours was an office-hours affair. A long-lunches-in-short-skirts affair. A sneaked-afternoons-in-nice-hotels affair. Even the occasional evening. Andrew was pulling all-nighters in the newspaper’s offices, and so long as I could find a babysitter, Lawrence and I could do what we liked. Occasionally in a lunch hour that had extended almost to teatime, with white wine in my hand and Lawrence naked beside me, I thought about all the journalists who were not receiving guided tours, all the meet-the-media breakfasts that were not getting planned, and all the press releases that were waiting on Lawrence’s computer with the cursor blinking at the end of the last unfinished sentence. This new target represents another significant advance in the government’s ongoing program of_

Handing out in-flight meals in a plane crash. That’s what our affair was meant to be. Lawrence and I escaped from our own tragedies and into each other, and for six months Britain slowed incrementally during normal office hours. I wish I could say that’s all it was. Nothing serious. Nothing sentimental. Just a merciful interruption. A brief, blinking cursor before our old stories resumed.

But it was gorgeous. I gave myself completely to Lawrence in a way that I never had with Andrew. It happened easily, without any effort on my part. I cried when we made love. It just happened; it wasn’t an act. I held him till my arms ached and I felt agonies of tenderness. I never let him know. I never let him know, either, that I scrolled through his BlackBerry, read his e-mails, read his mind while he slept. When I started the affair, I think it could have been with anyone. It was the affair that was inevitable, not the specific man. But slowly, I started to adore Lawrence. To have an affair, I began to realize, was a relatively minor transgression. But to really escape from Andrew, to really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love. And again, I didn’t have to make an effort to fall in love with Lawrence. All I had to do was to permit myself to topple. This is quite safe, I told myself: the psyche is made to absorb the shock of such falls.

I still cried when we made love, but now I also cried when we couldn’t.

It became a source of worry, hiding the affair. The actual assignations were simply concealed from Andrew, of course, and I made a point of never mentioning Andrew or his work when I was with Lawrence, in case he himself got too curious. I put up a high fence around the affair. In my mind I declared it to be another country and I policed its border ruthlessly.

Harder to disguise was the incontrovertible change in me. I felt wonderful. I had never felt less sensible, less serious, less Surrey. My skin started to glow. It was so blatant that I tried to conceal it with foundation, but it was no use: I simply radiated joie de vivre. I started partying again, as I hadn’t since my early twenties. Lawrence got me in to all the Home Office events. The new home secretary loved to meet the media, to tell them over canapés how tough he was going to be. There were endless soirees, and always an after-party. I met a new crowd. Actors, painters, businesspeople. I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt since before I met Andrew—the thrill of realizing I was attractive, of knowing myself irresistible, of being half drunk on champagne and looking around at the bright, smiling faces and giggling when I realized that suddenly anything could happen.

So I should hardly have been surprised when it did. Inevitably, at one of those parties, I finally bumped into my husband, crumpled and red-eyed from the office. Andrew hated parties—I suppose he was only there on some fact-finding mission. Lawrence even introduced us. A packed room. Music—flagship British music—some band that had made it big on the internet. Lawrence, beaming, flushed with champagne, his hand resting riskily on the small of my back.

“Oh, hi! Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah is the editor of Nixie. Andrew’s a columnist for The Times, terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you two are going to get on.”

“So was the priest,” said Andrew.

“I’m sorry?”

“He was sure we were going to get on. When he married us.”

Andrew, lighthearted, almost smiling. Lawrence—poor Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back. Andrew, noticing. Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.

“I didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”

“Yes. Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine…you know.”

My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles to the crown of my head. My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful, redrawing its county boundaries to annex my new life. I looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew still there, standing very still, very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.

That night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about saving our marriage. Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said sounded like his Times column, and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my magazine.

“At what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”

“I just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”

“Happiness isn’t something one can pick up off the shelf, it’s something one has to work at.”

“You bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”

“Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”

It was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.

Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.

I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to Book of the Week on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.

I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”

“What, now? To my house?”

“You said Andrew was away.”

I shivered. “Oh, goodness. I mean…you don’t even know where I live.”

“Well, where do you live?”

“I’m in Kingston.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

“No, Lawrence…no.”

“But why? No one will know, Sarah.”

“I know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”

He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.

“No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

“But why not?”

“Because my house is me, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

The next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was canceled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

“Make a wish!” I said.

Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

“Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of life on short legs.

Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

Silence.

“Andrew?”

“Charlie does, does he?”

“Yes.”

“And what about you? Do you want me back?”

“I want what Charlie wants.”

Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory.

“You really know how to make a man feel special.”

“Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

“You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

“I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

“Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

“Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.

“Just sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put just in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”

“Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realization hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.

“Please, Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery. A fresh start.”

A pause. He cleared his throat. “Yes. All right.”

“We need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and even Charlie—we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a holiday.”

Andrew groaned.

“Oh, Jesus. A holiday?”

“Yes. Andrew. Please.”

“Jesus. All right. Where?”

The next day, I called him back.

“I’ve got a freebie, Andrew—Ibeno Beach in Nigeria, open-ended tickets. We can leave on Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“You can file your column before we leave, and you’ll be back in time for the next one.”

“But Africa?”

“There’s a beach, Andrew. It’s raining here and it’s dry season there. Come on, let’s get some sun.”

“Nigeria, though? Why not Ibiza, or the Canaries?”

“Don’t be boring, Andrew. Anyway it’s just a beach holiday. Come on, how bad can it be?”

Serious times. Once they have rolled in, they hang over you like low cumulus. That’s how it was with me and Andrew, after we came back from Africa. Shock, then recrimination, then the two awful years of Andrew’s deepening depression, and the continuing affair with Lawrence that I never could quite seem to stop.

I think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you’ve been carrying the weather around with you. That’s what I was explaining to Little Bee on the afternoon she came with me to pick up Batman from nursery. I sat with her, drinking tea at the kitchen table.

“You know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about staying. About us helping each other. I think you’re right. I think we both need to move on.”

Little Bee nodded. Under the table, Batman was playing with a Batman action figure. It seemed the smaller Batman was engaged in a desperate battle with an unfinished bowl of cornflakes. I started explaining to Little Bee how I was going to help her.

“What I’m going to do first is track down your caseworker—oh Charlie, food is not a toy—track down your caseworker and find out where your documents are held. Then we can—please Charlie, don’t get those flakes everywhere, don’t make me tell you again—then we can challenge your legal status, find out whether we can make an appeal, and so on. I looked this up on the web and apparently—Charlie! Please! If I have to pick up that spoon one more time I will take away your Batman figure—apparently if we can get you temporary resident status, I can arrange for you to take a British Citizenship Exam, which is just simple stuff, really—Charlie! For god’s sake! Right, that’s it. Get out. Now! Out of the kitchen and come back when you’ve decided to be good—just simple stuff about the kings and queens and the English civil war and so on, and I’ll help you with the revision, and then—oh Charlie, oh goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry, Batman. I’m so sorry. Come here.”

Batman flinched away from my arms. His lip wobbled and his face went red and he howled, abandoning himself utterly to grief in that way only infants and superheroes have—that way that knows misery is bottomless and insatiable—that honest way. Little Bee rubbed Batman’s head, and he buried his masked face in her leg. I watched his little bat cape shaking as he sobbed.

“Oh god, Bee,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a mess at the moment.”

Little Bee smiled. “It’s okay, Sarah, it’s okay.”

The kitchen tap dripped. For something to do I got up and tightened it, but the drips kept coming. I couldn’t understand why that upset me so much.

“Oh Bee,” I said. “We’ve got to get a grip, both of us. We can’t let ourselves be the people things happen to.”

Later, there was a knock at the front door. I pulled myself together and went in through the house. I opened the door to Lawrence, suited, travel bag slung over his shoulder. I saw his relief, his involuntary smile when he saw me.

“I didn’t know if I’d got the right address,” he said.

“I’m not sure you have.”

His smile disappeared. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I’ve only just put my husband in the ground. We can’t do this. What about your wife?”

Lawrence shrugged.

“I told Linda I was going on a management course,” he said. “Birmingham. Three days. Leadership.”

“You think she believed you?”

“I just thought you might need some support.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some.”

He looked over my shoulder at Little Bee, standing in the hallway. “That’s her, is it?”

“She’s staying for as long as she wants.”

Lawrence lowered his voice. “Is she legal?”

“I don’t think I give a shit. Do you?”

“I work for the Home Office, Sarah. I could lose my job if I knew you were harboring an illegal and I didn’t do anything about it. Technically, if I have the slightest doubt, I could be sacked if I even stepped through this door.”

“So…um…don’t.”

Lawrence blushed, took a step back, and ran his hand through his hair.

“This isn’t comfortable for me either, Sarah. I don’t like the way I feel about you. It’d be nice if I loved my wife and it’d be super if I didn’t work for the forces of darkness. I wish I could be idealistic like you. But that’s not me, Sarah. I can’t afford to act as if I’m someone. I’m nothing. Even my cover story is nothing. Three days in Birmingham—Birmingham, fuck! On a course to learn something everyone accepts I’m hopeless at. It’s so plausible it’s tragic, don’t you think? That’s what I was thinking, even while I was making it up. I’m not ashamed of my adultery, Sarah. I’m ashamed of my fucking cover story.”

I smiled.

“I sort of remember why I like you. No one could ever accuse you of being full of yourself, could they?”

Lawrence puffed up his cheeks and blew air through his mouth, sadly. “Not in the full light of the evidence,” he said.

I hesitated. He reached up and held my hand. I closed my eyes and felt the resolve draining out of me into the cold smoothness of his skin. I took a step back into the house. I almost staggered, really.

“Are you letting me in then?”

“Don’t get used to it,” I said.

Lawrence grinned, but then he hesitated on the threshold. He looked at Little Bee. She came up and stood just behind my shoulder.

“Do not worry about me,” she said. “Officially you cannot even see me. You are in Birmingham and I am in Nigeria.”

Lawrence gave a quick little smile. “I wonder which of us will get found out first,” he said.

We went in through the hall and into the living room. Batman was T-boning his red fire engine into the side of a defenseless family saloon. (In Charlie’s world, I think, the emergency services are staffed by rogue elements.) He looked up when we came in.

“Batman, this is Lawrence. Lawrence is Mummy’s friend.”

Batman stood and walked up to Lawrence. He stared at him. His bat senses must have told him something. “Is you mine new daddy?” he said.

“No, no, no,” I said.

Charlie looked confused. Lawrence knelt so that his face was at Charlie’s level. “No, Batman, I’m just your mummy’s friend.”

Batman tilted his head to one side. The ears on his bat hood flopped over. “Is you a goody or a baddy?” he said slowly.

Lawrence grinned and stood up.

“Honestly, Batman? I think I’m one of those innocent bystanders you see in the background in the comics. I’m just a man from a crowd scene.”

“But is you a goody or a baddy?”

“He’s a goody of course,” I said. “Come on, Charlie. Do you really think I’d let someone into our house who wasn’t?”

Batman folded his arms and set his lips in a grim line. No one spoke. From outside came the evening sounds of mothers calling normal children in from gardens for tea.

Later, after I’d got Charlie to bed, I made supper while Lawrence and Little Bee sat at the kitchen table. Digging at the back of the cupboard for a refill of pepper, I found a half-full packet of the Amaretto biscuits that Andrew used to love. I smelled them, secretly, holding the packet up to my nose, with my back to Lawrence and Little Bee. That sickly, sharp smell of apricot and almond—it made me think of the way Andrew used to wander around the house on his insomniac nights. He would return to bed in the small hours with that smell on his breath. Toward the end, the only thing keeping my husband going was six Amaretto biscuits and one tablet of Cipralex a day.

I held Andrew’s biscuits in my hand. I thought about throwing them away, and I found that I couldn’t. How duplicitous grief is, I thought. Here I am, too sentimental to throw away something that gave Andrew slight comfort, even as I cook supper for Lawrence. I felt horribly traitorous, suddenly. This is exactly why one shouldn’t let one’s lover into one’s home, I thought.

When the supper was ready—a mushroom omelet, slightly burned while I was thinking of Andrew—I sat down to eat with Lawrence and Little Bee. It was dreadful—they wouldn’t talk to each other, and I realized that they hadn’t spoken the whole time I’d been making supper. We ate in silence, with just the sound of the cutlery. Finally Little Bee sighed, and rubbed her eyes, and went upstairs to the bed I’d made up for her in the guest room.

I crashed the plates into the dishwasher and dumped the frying pan into the sink.

“What?” said Lawrence. “What did I do?”

“You might have made an effort,” I said.

“Yes, well. I thought I’d be alone with you tonight. It’s not an easy situation to adjust to.”

“She’s my guest, Lawrence. The least you can do is be polite.”

“I just don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into, Sarah. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to have that girl staying here. Every time you see her, you’re going to be reminded of what happened.”

“I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie. I’m going to help Little Bee, and make everything right, and then I can get on with my life.”

“Yes, but what if you can’t make it right? You know the most likely outcome for that girl, don’t you? They’ll deport her.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that.”

“Sarah, we have an entire department consecrated to ensuring that it will come to that. Officially Nigeria’s pretty safe, and she’s got no family here, by her own admission. There’s bugger all reason for them to let her stay.”

“I can’t not try.”

“You’ll get dragged down by the bureaucracy, and then they’ll send her home anyway. You’ll get hurt. It will damage you. And that’s the last thing you need at the moment. You need positive influences in your life. You’ve got a son that you have to bring up on your own now. You need people that are going to give you energy, not drain it away.”

“And that’s you, is it?”

Lawrence looked back at me, and shifted his weight forward.

“I want to be important to you, Sarah. I’ve wanted it from the moment you walked into my life with your reporter’s notepad that you never wrote down a single word on and your Dictaphone that you didn’t even switch on. And I haven’t let you down, Sarah, have I? Despite everything. Despite my wife and despite your husband and despite bloody well everyone. We have fun together, Sarah. Isn’t that what you want?”

I sighed. “I really don’t think this is about having fun anymore.”

“And do you see me running away? This is about us doing what’s best for you. I’m not going to stop just because it’s gone all serious. But you have to choose. I can’t help you if all your focus is on that girl.”

I felt the blood draining out of my face. I spoke as quietly and calmly as I could.

“Tell me you’re not asking me to choose between you and her.”

“I am absolutely not asking you to do that. But what I am saying is that you’re going to have to choose between your life and her life. At some point you have to start thinking about a future for you and Charlie. Charity is lovely, Sarah, but there has to be some logical point where it stops.”

I banged my damaged hand down on the table, fingers splayed out. “I cut off my finger for that girl. Will you tell me when is the logical point to stop something that started like that? Do you really want me to make a choice like that? I cut off my own bloody finger. Do you think I wouldn’t cut you off too?”

Silence. Lawrence stood up. His chair scraped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No. Maybe you shouldn’t.”

I sat at the kitchen table and listened to Lawrence taking his coat from the peg in the hall and picking up his travel bag. When I heard the front door opening, I stood up. Lawrence was halfway down the path by the time I got to the door.

“Lawrence?”

He turned.

“Where are you going to go? You can’t go home.”

“Oh. I didn’t really think about it.”

“You’re meant to be in Birmingham.”

He shrugged. “I’ll get a hotel. It’ll be good for me. I’ll read a book on leadership. Might actually learn something.”

“Oh Lawrence, come here.”

I held out my arms to him. I pressed my face into his neck and hugged him while he stood motionless. I breathed in the smell of him, and remembered all those hotel afternoons, high as kites on each other.

“You really are a loser,” I said.

“I just feel so bloody silly. I had it all worked out. I got the time off work, I made up the story for Linda. I even bought toys for the kids, in case I forgot on the way home. I had it all worked out. I thought it was going to be a nice surprise for you and…well. It was a surprise, at least, wasn’t it?”

I stroked his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I snapped at you. Thank you for coming to see me. Please don’t go to a hotel room and sit there all on your own, I can’t bear it. Please stay.”

“What? Now?”

“Yes. Please.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Sarah. Maybe I need to take a step back and think about what we mean to each other. What you said just now, about cutting me off…”

“Stop it, you cunning bastard. Stop it before I change my mind.”

Lawrence almost smiled. I linked my fingers around the back of his neck.

“What I didn’t say was that if I had to cut you off, it would hurt more than cutting off my finger.”

He stared at me for a long time and then he said, Oh Sarah. We went upstairs and it wasn’t until we’d started that I realized we were having sex on the bed I used to share with Andrew. I was concentrating on Lawrence, burying my face in the soft hair on his chest, peeling the clothes off him, and then something happened—my bra strap snagged, Lawrence’s belt buckle jammed for a second—I don’t recall but it stopped the flow, anyway, and I realized that Lawrence was lying on Andrew’s side of the bed, that his skin was pressing down where Andrew’s had pressed, that the concave of Lawrence’s back, smooth and hot with sweat, was arching proud of the depression that Andrew had made in the mattress. I hesitated—I froze up. Lawrence sensed it, I suppose, and he kept the momentum going. He rolled over onto me. I just felt so grateful to him, I think, for getting us through that moment without thinking. I let myself dissolve into the slickness of his skin, the delicacy of his movement, the lightness of him. Lawrence was tall but he was slight. There was none of the bruising compression of my pelvis, the crushing of the breath from my lungs, the overpowering gravity of sex with Andrew that left me groaning as much in resignation as in pleasure. That was what I loved about sex with Lawrence—the glorious, giddying lightness of it. But there was something wrong, tonight. Maybe it was the presence of Andrew, so strong in the room. His books and papers were everywhere still—jamming the bookshelves, scattered in the corners of the floor—and when I thought of Andrew, I thought of Little Bee. Lawrence was making love to me and part of me was thinking, Uh, while another part was thinking, In the morning I must phone the Border and Immigration Agency and start to track down her papers, and then I’ll need to find her a solicitor, and start an appeal procedure, and…and…

I found I couldn’t give myself up to Lawrence—not in that un-hesitating, abandoned way I once had. Suddenly Lawrence seemed too light. His fingers barely brushed my skin, as if they were not engaging with my body but merely tracing lines in some fine and invisible dust that Africa had cloaked me in. And when his weight came onto me it was like being made love to by a summer cloud, or a winter butterfly—by some creature in any case that lacked the authority to bend gravity around itself and become the moment’s center.

“What’s wrong, Sarah?”

I realized I was lying absolutely rigid.

“Oh god, I’m sorry.”

Lawrence stopped, and rolled onto his back. I took hold of his penis, but already I could feel the softness returning to it.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t.”

I let go and took hold of his hand instead, but he pulled it free.

“I don’t understand you, Sarah, I really don’t.”

“I’m sorry Lawrence. It’s Andrew. It’s just too soon.”

“He never stopped us while he was alive.”

I thought about that. In the darkness outside, a low jet was climbing out of Heathrow and a pair of owls were calling to each other desperately above the roar, their shrieks shrilling against the whining of the turbines.

“You’re right. It isn’t Andrew.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. I love you, Lawrence, I really do. It’s just that I’ve got so much to do.”

“For Little Bee?”

“Yes. I can’t relax. I can’t stop running it over and over in my head.”

Lawrence sighed. “So what about us?” he said. “Do you think you’re going to find time for us again, one of these days?”

“Oh, of course I will. You and me, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we? We’ll still be here in six weeks, six months, six years. We’ve got time to work this out. We’ve got time to work out how to be together, now that Andrew’s gone. But Little Bee doesn’t have that time. You said it yourself. If I can’t fix things for her, they’ll find her and they’ll deport her. And she’ll be gone, and that will be that. And what sort of a future would we have then? I wouldn’t be able to look at you without thinking I should have done more to save her. Is that the future you want us to have?”

“Oh god. Why can’t you be like other people and just not give a shit?”

“Leggy blonde, likes music and movies, seeks solvent man for friendship and maybe more?”

“All right. I’m glad you’re not one of them. But I don’t want to lose you to a refugee girl who’s really got no hope of staying here anyway.”

“Oh, Lawrence. You’re not going to lose me. But you might have to share me with her for a while.”

Lawrence laughed.

“What?” I said.

“Well it’s just typical, isn’t it? These immigrants, they come over here, they take our women…”

Lawrence was smiling but there was a guardedness is his eyes, an opaqueness that made me wonder how funny he found his own joke. It was strange, to feel uncertain like this with him. Truly, he had never seemed at all complicated before. Then again, I realized, I had never invested anything complicated in him until now. Perhaps it was me. I made myself relax, and I smiled back. I kissed him on the forehead.

“Thank you. Thank you for not making this harder than it is.”

Lawrence stared at me, and his face was thin and sad in the orange glow of the streetlamps filtering in through the yellow silk blinds. The flutter in my stomach surprised me, and I realized that the hairs on my arms were up.

“Sarah,” he said, “I honestly don’t think you know how hard this is.”