I went out and walked towards the Tube station. It had an old lift that rose and fell with ponderous slowness between the platform and the street. The station was scheduled for closure the following year so that a new lift could be installed: a sign at the entrance stated that this closure would last for nine months. Every morning and evening smartly dressed people poured in and out of the station mouth, commuting to work or to school. They carried briefcases and satchels and coffee cups, talking rapidly on their mobile phones while speeding along the pavements, so that the impression was of a series of precisely timed manoeuvres into which their daily routine had been distilled. The station was so integral to this routine that I wondered what they felt when they passed the sign warning of its future absence.
The Tube station stood at a junction where five roads converged like the spokes of a wheel. The traffic sat at the lights, each lane waiting for its turn. Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river of buses and bicycles and cars, it felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit. There was a café there, and I went inside to wait for my friend Amanda, who lived nearby and had asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. Despite the apparent convenience of this arrangement, I had to wait nearly an hour before she arrived. In that time I studied the café’s interior. With its bookshelves and aubergine-painted walls and antique furniture, it gave an impression of age and character while being, in fact, both generic and new. Amanda texted twice while I sat there: once to say that she was running late and then, a little while later, to tell me there’d been a bit of a disaster at the house and she was running later still. My younger son phoned and I spoke to him. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning: I asked him why he wasn’t in lessons. It’s break, he said. There was a pause and then he said, how are you? After we finished speaking I sat and tried to read a newspaper. My eyes moved over the words without absorbing them. There was a picture of a large elephant beside a small elephant in a hot dusty landscape. There was a picture of a crowd protesting, their mouths open, in some city in the rain. A text sounded on my phone. It was from the Chair at the festival. He said he was afraid he wasn’t free to meet on Thursday, as I had suggested. Some other time perhaps, he said.
Amanda arrived. She had been about to leave, she said, when the indoor sprinkler system the building-regulations people had forced her to install as a fire precaution was somehow activated and it had started raining water all through the house. By the time she’d managed to disarm it everything was soaked: her clothes, her bed, all the paperwork in her office. Luckily she didn’t own very much in terms of furniture, no oil paintings or priceless antiques. The house was pretty bare: there weren’t even any carpets or curtains. Still, she hadn’t expected to be mopping floors this morning. She’d cleared up the worst of it and then left the windows open so that it could dry out by itself.
‘Which violates the terms of my insurance,’ she said. ‘But at this point I’m past caring.’
She had narrated the story of the sprinkler so cheerfully it was hard to believe it had actually occurred. In fact, she seemed almost animated by it. She wore work clothes – a tight black dress and a black jacket – and her eyes were bright with make-up. She was carrying a big sack-like leather bag, distended with the bulk of what was in it, on her shoulder and when she hung it over the back of the chair the weight caused the chair to tip backwards and crash to the floor. With a swift, darting movement she set it back on its legs and sat neatly down, grinning, with the bag at her feet. Outside, the sun had come out: the light from the window fell directly on her face and caught the nap of her black clothing, illuminating a labyrinth of dusty creases.
‘I had to get these out of the laundry basket,’ she said. ‘They were the only things that were dry.’
Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied, as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled, like a crumpled photograph of a child. Her short, fleshy body seemed to exist in a state of constant animation through which an oceanic weariness could occasionally be glimpsed. Today the grey tint of fatigue lay just beneath her made-up skin: she glanced at me frequently, her face crinkled against the sun, as if looking for her own reflection.
‘I know I look awful,’ she said, ducking her head. She picked up the menu and her eyes ran quickly down the page. ‘I was awake most of last night. I can’t even blame it on the kids,’ she added, ‘since I don’t have any.’
She’d been up until three in the morning, she went on, arguing with Gavin: recently she’d started yoga to try to help with her insomnia, but it would have taken more than a sun salute to get her off after that. Gavin was Amanda’s boyfriend, a large, sombre-faced man I’d met only once. He ran the building company Amanda had hired to renovate her house.
‘It’s pathetic,’ she said. ‘At my age I should be doing something more useful with my time. Everyone I know seems to be running marathons for charity. They spend all their time training and doing special diets, while I’m eating takeaways and living the emotional life of a teenager. Not that I could run,’ she added, ‘even if I wanted to. I can barely climb the stairs.’
She had been to the doctor and been told she’d developed asthma from breathing dust. It’s from living in a building site for two years, she said. He’d given her an inhaler but she had lost the cover for the mouthpiece, so now the inhaler was impregnated with dust too.
The waiter came to take our order and Amanda asked for herbal tea.
‘Actually,’ she said, when he turned to leave, ‘make that a hot chocolate.’
He gave a small smile, writing on his pad.
‘Yes, please,’ she grinned, when he suggested whipped cream and marshmallows on top.
She’d promised herself, she went on, that she was really going to do something about her health – she needed to lose weight, for a start – but instead she seemed to be surviving more and more on adrenalin, living in the moment, which made it impossible to stick to any kind of regime. She would wake up full of resolutions, but events had a way of overwhelming her so that she would end the day further away from her goals than she had begun it. Nothing seemed to last, no matter how hard she tried.
I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.
‘You don’t really think that,’ Amanda said, with a glimmer of interest in her red-rimmed eyes.
Maybe people run marathons, I said, to exercise their fantasies of running away.
Amanda laughed. The argument with Gavin, she said presently, had happened because he had failed to turn up for the trip to Paris she had arranged for her birthday. They had been all packed and ready to go and Gavin had suddenly announced that he’d forgotten his passport. He’d gone to get it and hadn’t come back. Amanda had sat beside her suitcase as the house grew dark around her. She’d tried repeatedly to reach him on the phone but he hadn’t answered. She couldn’t cancel the tickets and the hotel because it was too late. A week had gone by without her hearing from him. But last night he had appeared on the doorstep with a roll of banknotes and given them to her.
I asked whether she had accepted the money.