me, frowning. ‘Why do I tell you that?’
‘Do you want to impress me?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t care a bugger what you think.’ He blinked a bit. ‘I suppose that’s not true.’ He paused. ‘I have irritating holes in my life.’
‘Like what?’
‘Too much money. No motivation. And I’m going bald.’
‘Marry,’ I said.
‘That wouldn’t grow hair.’
‘It might stop you minding.’
‘Nothing stops you minding. And it’s damned unfair. I go to doctors who say I can’t do a bugger about it, it’s in the genes, and how did it get there, I’d like to know? Father’s OK and Grandfather had the full thatch, even though he was eighty-eight last birthday, and look at Keith with enough to brush back with his hands all the time like a ruddy girl. I hate that mannerism. And even Ivan has no bare patches, he’s going thin all over but that’s not as bad.’ He looked balefully at my head. ‘You’re about my age, and yours is thick.’
‘Try snake oil,’ I suggested.
‘That’s typical. People like you have no idea what it’s like to find hair all over the place. Washbasin. Pillow. Hairs which ought to stay growing in my scalp, dammit. How did you know I wasn’t married, anyway? And don’t give me the stock answer that I don’t look worried. I am worried, dammit, about my hair.’
‘You could try implants.’
‘Yes. Don’t laugh, I’m going to.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘I bet you are, inside. Everybody thinks it’s hilarious, someone else going bald. But when it’s you, it’s tragic.’
There were irretrievable disasters, I saw, that could only get worse. Dart drank deep as if beer would irrigate the failing follicles and asked if I were married, myself.
‘Do I look it?’
‘You look stable.’
Surprised, I said yes, I was married.
‘Children?’
‘Six sons.’
‘Six!’ He seemed horrified. ‘You’re not old enough.’
‘We married at nineteen, and my wife likes having babies.’
‘Good Lord.’ Other words failed him, and I thought back, as I did pretty often, to the heady student days when Amanda and I had taken to each other with excitement. Friends around us were pairing and living together: it was accepted behaviour.
‘Let’s get married,’ I said impulsively. ‘No one gets married,’ Amanda said. ‘Then let’s be different,’ I said.
So we married, giggling happily, and I paid no attention to my mother, who tried to tell me I was marrying Amanda with my eyes, marrying a half-grown woman I didn’t really know. ‘I married Keith Stratton for his beauty,’ she told me, ‘and it was a dreadful mistake. It’s always a mistake.’
‘But Amanda’s lovely.’
‘She’s lovely to look at and she’s kind and she clearly loves you, but you’re both so young, you’ll change as you grow older and so will she.’
‘Mum, are you coming to the wedding?’
‘Of course.’
I married Amanda for her long legs and her blonde hair and her name, Amanda, which I loved. It took ten years for me to face a long repressed recognition that my mother had been right about changes.
Neither Amanda nor I had known at nineteen that she would almost at once develop a hunger for babies. Neither of us could possibly have envisaged that she would ecstatically enjoy the actual birth process, or that she would plan the next pregnancy as soon as the last was accomplished.
Both Christopher and Toby had been born by the time I’d struggled through my qualifying exams, and feeding and housing the four of us had seemed an impossible task. It was then, in my first week out of college, that I’d gone to drown my sorrows in a depressing old pub and found the landlord weeping bankrupt tears into warm beer amid the crash of his own personal dream. The place had been condemned as unfit to live in, he owed money everywhere, his wife had left him and his licence to sell liquor would run out the next day.
We negotiated a rock-bottom price. I went to the council to get a stay of demolition. I begged and borrowed and mortgaged my soul, and Amanda, the two boys and I moved into our first ruin.
I began to make it habitable while I looked round for a job, and I found a lowly position in a large firm of architects, an existence I disliked but stuck to grimly for the pay packets.
Unlike Dart, I knew well what it was like to sweat at night over which bill to pay next, over how to pay any bill next, over which did I need most, electricity or a telephone (electricity) and do I pay the