An Irresponsible Age. Lavinia Greenlaw

who looked up at it wished that everything else, including the stars and even themselves, would disappear.

      Jacob was enjoying the silence between them, but Juliet was caught up. ‘Do people buy that? God, I bet they do. We love patterns, even anti-patterns, as long as they’re graceful.’

      ‘What’s an anti-pattern?’

      ‘Fuck knows, I just made it up. And what is your egg? No, don’t answer that. I bet I could carry on asking you questions all night and you would always have an answer, and every answer would take us further away.’

      ‘From what?’

      ‘The point. And if you say “Does there have to be one?”, I just might puke.’

      Jacob looked a little shocked. ‘So no more questions?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Tania told me you’ve almost finished your thesis.’

      ‘She talked to you about me?’

      ‘No more questions – although I would like to know more if you want to tell me.’

      He took her arm again and they walked on to the end of the park while Juliet explained her theory of the empty metaphor and the frame. By the time they had reached Hyde Park Corner, she was exhilarated because no one had ever been so interested or had understood it so well.

      He had surprised her and now she surprised herself by saying, ‘You’re quite patient, really.’

      ‘Yes, I am.’

      They were walking unnaturally slowly and for a long moment, nothing was said.

      ‘I’m going away,’ Juliet announced in the tone of someone remarking that they had lost a glove. ‘In six months time, to America.’ Jacob did not react. She went on: ‘A visiting professor at the Institute, Merle Dix …’ Did he recognise the name? She wasn’t sure. ‘She’s going back to Littlefield and has offered me a research post.’ Still nothing. ‘At the end of August, for a year.’

      A bus pulled up as they reached the stop. Juliet stepped forward, then turned back to face Jacob and found herself turning in his arms. To stop herself meeting his kiss, she said the first thing that came to mind: ‘My father was a medical student in London in the Fifties and he used to talk of a walk that took in every bridge.’

      He lifted his hands, spread his fingers and pressed them to either side of her face. ‘Have you done it?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘How long have you lived here?’

      ‘Ten years, nearly.’

      ‘Let’s do it then.’

      He tipped her head to one side. She felt his teeth electrically sharp on her earlobe, and then her head was tilted forward and his whole open mouth was on the back of her neck.

      She stepped back, meaning to say ‘You’re married’, but what she said was ‘I’m going away’.

      A bell rang, an engine revved and the conductor gave a torn-off shout. Then Juliet was leaning her head against a window watching her jittery reflection, and Jacob had gone.

      

      On the steps of a City banqueting hall, Fred held Jane’s hand. Her head lolled on his shoulder as she hiccupped and gurgled. He tried not to look down at her breasts which were shying away from the bodice of her strapless dress. He drew her fun-fur coat more tightly together at her neck. She flinched and Fred trembled.

      ‘Grem,’ Jane mumbled. Then more urgently, ‘Grem? Grem!’

      ‘Graham’s gone to find a cab. Caroline’s helping him.’

      ‘Going home are now? Um, we?’ She was shivering, so Fred took off his rented dinner jacket and put it round her shoulders, giving her dress a restorative tug as he did so.

      From the hall above them came a continuous baying, as if everyone in the room had worn out their voice and could now only make noise. Five hundred young financiers were trying to live up to the stories they had heard. Their bosses sat at the top table – men in their thirties and forties, veterans of the economy’s most volatile years. They were bored with the games and pranks but clever enough to encourage the belief that if money was a tool, it was also a toy.

      A group were competing over the most amusing thing to do with the chocolate mousse. A man wiped it across the bottom of a passing waiter, raising a cry of ‘Shit-arsed dago!’ but the one who provoked the greatest cheer pulled a fifty-pound note from his wallet and used it as a spoon. This caught on as if no one had done it before, and those who had only tens or twenties used several at once. A window opened and a hand threw a spike-heeled sandal into the night. Fred retrieved it and noticed the price label on the sole, £449. He passed it to Jane, ‘Look at this.’

      ‘Gord!’ she blurted, ‘Y fnd m shoe!’

      He looked down. ‘You’re wearing your shoes.’

      ‘Wanted these shoe. Thuz a waitin list.’

      To Fred, the one in her hand looked identical to the pair on her feet.

      ‘This is somebody else’s, and anyway there’s only one.’

      Jane clutched the shoe to her. ‘Sbetter thn nn.’

      ‘Someone will be looking for it.’

      Jane held the shoe more tightly.

      Feet were pounding the floor and a chant had gone up: ‘Off! Off! Off!’ but at that moment someone at the top table gave a sign and the lights flicked on, and all the young men in the room straightened themselves out as best they could and began trying to help the nearest woman out of her seat. They trailed out with elaborate courtesy, shaking hands, helping each other into coats, holding open doors and volunteering (like Graham and Caroline) to find cabs. Some would go home and wonder at themselves but being young and excitable and rich, as well as so very tired, none would let this bewilderment harden into anguish. They would sleep and if they couldn’t, they had no qualms about pursuing sleep through whatever means they chose.

      

      ‘Cold a long long while,’ Juliet was singing to herself on the almost empty bus as Mary George got out of the saxophone-player’s mini-van and climbed five flights of stairs in Block A, North Square of the Hugh Carmodie Trust Estate in Walham Green. Mary had moved there five years ago and was used to its treeless concrete squares. She knew by name the twelve-year-olds who rose out of dark corners to sell bags of powder. She knew the wandering encrusted toddlers, the coddled pitbull terriers, the girls who smoked and shrieked beneath her window, and the boys who careered past in stolen cars refining their handbrake turns. She was on first-name terms with the women who kept their flats spotless and swore at their children, who were brought up in the old-fashioned way. They were free to play outside all day, given duties from an early age and retained respect for their parents. Many of them had aunts, uncles and grandparents living nearby.

      Mary let herself into the dark hall, stubbed her toe on a piece of motorbike engine and then bumped into a clothes-horse draped with washing and positioned just inside the living-room door. In the bedroom, she took off her clothes and put on a t-shirt that Tobias had left on top of the laundry bin. She lay down and reached out, her hand meeting first his cropped hair, then the coarse stubble on his cheek and then, beside him, the heat and force of their two-year-old daughter, Bella George Clough.

      Mary propped herself up and put her lips against Bella’s head to kiss her, catching the odd smell of biscuit and vinegar that collected in the child’s clammy hair. Bella began to wake, her mouth opening and closing with a sticky smack. Her free arm waved and her legs kicked out as if the world had all at once let go of her. Her fists clenched and her first sleepy agitations hardened into a wail, and Mary wondered as she often did if Bella sometimes forgot having been born and was furious to find herself here.

      Tobias began to sit up. Mary lifted Bella onto her chest and pushed him back down. He smiled, mumbling Hello,