home, and – there’s no snow anywhere. None. It’s all just like normal, grey pavements and tarmac and roofs, like none of it happened.
Then what? Tom says.
What happened about the Fenimores? Paula says.
How was that a happy Christmas? Tom says.
I had no idea what happened to the Fenimores, I realized, sitting there by myself in the warmed-up seat in my car in a near-empty car park miles from home. I could remember her sad face. I could remember his open, naïve brow, his forward slant when he walked down the school corridor or up the makings of a path at the foot of the ben. They were only there for that year, maybe. They moved away. The judo club stopped. A home economics teacher took over the cookery club. People stopped talking about them like they were the local joke pretty soon. Where were those people, the hopeful man and his sad helpful love; where were the Fenimores tonight, nearly thirty years later? Were they warm in a house, well into their middle-age? Were they still the Fenimores?
From here in my car I could see the frosty roofs on the village terrace below, down at the bottom of the slope. I looked the other way and saw, through the side window of the pub, the man and the barmaid.
The man had his back to the bar. He was holding a near-empty glass, staring ahead into space. The barmaid was leaning on her elbow. She was staring in the opposite direction. They stayed like that, unmoving, like figures in a painting, the whole time I watched.
The barmaid was called Paula. I had no idea what the man’s name was. Good, because I didn’t want to know. I was just a stranger who ordered supper and didn’t eat it. I was long gone, as far as they knew, on the road out of here in the dark.
I put my hand on the ignition key, whisky or no whisky.
But if I went back inside, I could eat. And if I went back inside, if I was simply there, those two people would speak to each other again, they’d be able to, even if I was just sitting reading my paper or eating my supper ignoring them.
I looked down at the roofs of the houses sheened with the fierce frost, like a row of faraway houses in the kind of story we tell ourselves about winter and its chancy gifts.
I opened the car door and got out. I locked it, though I probably didn’t need to, and I went back into the pub.
the third person
All short stories long.
This one is about two people who have just gone to bed together for the first time. It’s autumn. They met in the summer. Since they met they’ve been working up to this with a sense of unavoidability; less a courtship, more as if they’ve found themselves in a very small room, like a box room, a room small enough to feel overcrowded with two people in it, and this room also has a grand piano in it. It doesn’t matter where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing - meeting each other by chance in the street, walking down the road, going to a cinema, sitting at a table in a pub – it’s as if they’re in a tiny room and in there with them, massive, ever-present as an old-fashioned chaperone, awkward and glossy and unmentionable as a coffin, the grand piano. To move at all in this room means having to squeeze into the narrow space between the wall and the side of the piano. The inside of it, under the lid, is a structure of wires and hammers a bit like the underframe of a bed or a harp that’s been laid on its side.
They’ve done it, they’ve shrugged themselves out of their shy clothes at last, they’ve slipped in under the covers of a small double bed, they’re holding each other in nothing but skin. One of them even has a quite-bad cold and the other doesn’t care. Ah, love. Outside, the trees are quiet. The light is coming down. It’s five in the evening. But enough about them. It’s spring. It’s morning. In the trees the birds are singing like crazy. A woman living in a street of terraced houses, a street on which so many cars are parked that it makes driving the fortnightly refuse-collector truck down it quite difficult, has just hit one of the dustmen who routinely empty