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By Root 597 0

as been goaded into the arrangement. Binny had intimated in her forthright way that she was sick to death of being introduced only to those boozy male acquaintances of his who thought he was a hell of a dog for getting his leg over. She wanted to meet his real friends, preferably a married couple. ‘I’m not going to be hidden in the shadows of the saloon bar any longer,’ she’d said. She was perfectly within her rights of course. It was rotten for her, reeling out of the dentist alone, unable to depend upon him at Christmas, forced to see him at times mostly convenient to Helen. He gave her so little; he denied her the simple pleasures a wife took for granted – that business of cooking his meals, remembering his sister’s birthday, putting intricate little bundles of socks into his drawer. All he had to offer were those pitifully few hours of an evening, if and when Helen chose to go to one of her meetings.

And life, as Binny so often observed, was perilously short. She’d remarked upon it the first time they met, at a wine and cheese party given by clients of his – a firm of estate agents in Chalk Farm. He was early and knew no one save the senior partner, and was smarting because Helen had refused to accompany him; she preferred instead to attend an Inter Action group in Hampstead where she sometimes knelt on the floor and stroked people seated on either side. It was his impression afterwards that, when he entered the estate agents’ office, he’d noticed a pale and diminutive woman standing by the window. She wore a bunch of artificial flowers pinned to the collar of her dress and it was these same limp violets that enabled him later, much later, when she’d manoeuvred him behind a filing cabinet, to identify Binny. During the evening she had unaccountably gained weight and colour from somewhere. Her eyes shone brilliantly. She kept asking him if he was happy. It was then, just as he began to feel undeniably cheerful – he heard his own laughter loud above the murmur of voices – that she spoke of death, likening middle age to the second half of a football match. The game, she said, long since decided, was drawing to a close. Short of breath and flecked with mud, trembling in every limb, the players struggled up and down the pitch, waiting for the final whistle to blow. ‘Although I am still active in mid field,’ she told him, ‘it may be that I won’t play to the end. It’s possible that I shall be sent off.’ ‘Ah no,’ he cried, filled with a tenderness that was surely out of place after so short an acquaintanceship. ‘Not you.’ But Binny hadn’t heard him. She said she herself had enjoyed a life packed full of incident. She wondered if others could say the same. He was aware that as she talked the tips of her fingers brushed his own. She had travelled extensively in Europe, been divorced, known many lovers. Suddenly depressed, he longed to go home and watch television. He tried to catch the attention of the senior partner, and failed. Binny swayed a little on her feet and leant against him; the violets rustled on her breast. He escorted her to a terraced house in Fulton Street and fell over a bicycle in the hall. Shaken by her acceptance of death, he confessed that the passage of time affected him in a retrospective sort of way. He didn’t fear the deterioration that old age might bring – increased blood pressure, varicose veins, palpitations of the heart. It was waking in the night, as he did frequently, from dreams clear in every detail, of gardens glimpsed from windows, roads travelled, rooms dwelt in as a boy, that caused him agitation. He regretted that he no longer experienced the present or looked forward to the future. Unusually articulate and rubbing his shin bone, bruised from contact with the mudguard in the hall, he would have confided more but felt he was becoming boring. She made him a cup of coffee and enlisted his help with her tax problems, crying out in the middle of his discourse upon capital growth and percentages that she needed to embrace him. Remembering her formidable list of lovers, he was concerned she might