more than welcome to share the facilities of the Holiday Inn—room service and swimming pool and sauna. Sophie was after all thirteen, and it’s a rare contemporary child—especially born to parents in the communicative arts, that being the only umbrella heading under which both Lou and myself could suitably cluster: though he saw, probably rightly, greater sensibility and sensitivity in a Bloch quartet than he did in a Sunday Times editorial—who can expect both parents to live permanently and companionably together.
I left the hotel, feeling rather like the Lady of Shalott, breaking the spell, leaving her room, her castle, going only to the river’s edge, there to drown herself, and made my way to the Navimore School for Girls. One by one they sauntered out, or clustered together for safety in great rushes: all in theoretical navy and white, but with such imaginative variation in those two colours and where and how placed, and in what fabric, as to make their apparel singularly unalike. The girls were, however, very much alike: wide-eyed, glossy-haired, with a hunch of shoulder and ease of hip that made them all the sisters they longed to be. And there, yes, that was Sophie. She had a little mole above her pretty upper lip, so I knew it was she. I approached. ‘Sophie—’ I said.
And she cut me dead. My own child looked through me with her wide, hazel, dark-fringed eyes and cut me dead. Was it Sophie? She swung round and I recognized the broken metal heel guard on her right shoe. Yes, it was Sophie. She would not part with her shoes for long enough for me to have them properly repaired. ‘Sophie,’ I begged, but she walked on, with a flick of a navy pleated skirt on which I recognized a cigarette burn. Lou smoked three cigarettes a day: it was his one bad habit—and on one occasion Sophie’s skirt and a stub had somehow come into contact.
What had Lou told Sophie? What had he said to her? How had he betrayed me? Poor child, she must be suffering. What had I done? I saw Sophie swing lithely on to a bus before it stopped moving. How many times had I told her not to do it?—to wait.
But she was right: if you didn’t get on the bus while it moved, you didn’t get on it at all. The driver seemed to be playing some kind of survival game with the girls of the Navimore School: he slowed down out of courtesy to the bus stop sign, but took it no further than that. He drove, they leapt, all survived.
I stood, shaken, watching after the departing bus. A dog, some kind of uneasy black and white mixture between collie and labrador, trotted happily towards me. It looked at me in the kind of easy, assessing way dogs on their peculiar errands do look at strangers—and then looked again, and stopped dead: his hackles rose: he backed, he made a kind of howling noise, turned tail, and fled.
Abashed, I made my way back to the Holiday Inn. I passed a church on the way and really believe I would have gone in to sprinkle myself with holy water—but it was locked, as churches are, these days, against vandals. It was left to the glass, chrome and carpets of the Holiday Inn, the sense of un-exotic, common-sensical luxury, to sustain me. The third floor was a no-smoking floor or I think I might have started smoking again after six years’ abstinence. The ambience presently calmed me. The sense of order, of human needs being comprehensible, in fact meetable, was reassuring. Plentiful towels, hair dryer, little bottles of everyday necessities—shampoos, conditioners, shoe horns—whoever uses shoe horns?—our one suitcase each, the few clothes neatly hung: our personal computers, reference books—the tools of our trade. What else could a man and a woman need, I repeated to myself, except each other?
Poor little Sophie would by now be suffering pangs of guilt for her behaviour towards me. I wondered whether to call and say I understood, I forgave her; we’d meet next week some time. I decided I would. I called home. Lou answered. On hearing my voice he put down the phone. I was devastated. Forget Sophie, who was given to drama and tantrum anyway, what about Ben, my little boy? Apple of my eye? Perhaps Lou had told him the monstrous lie that I didn’t love him any more? Of course I loved him. It was just