you could see into the high first-floor windows of publishers’ offices, the walls of bookshelves and often a huddle of figures at a glaringly lit party. Such a party was going on now, at the front door below a few guests were leaving, and the bright rectangle widened and narrowed as they slipped out into the night, laughing and exclaiming about the weather. A couple emerged, heads lowered, and behind them he saw a small figure, an old woman surely, framed in the doorway as she buttoned her coat, secured her hat, hung her bag on her arm, and then, as she stepped out on to the pavement, pushed up a flimsy umbrella, which the wind snatched instantly and jerked upwards inside-out behind her head. Her words whipped back to him distinctly, “Oh, bugger it!” He saw her grappling with the thing as he drew nearer, his own umbrella swerving and struggling in the face of the wind. She staggered a little, more or less righted it, and moved quickly away, almost stumbling, though a spoke stuck up at a hopeless angle, the pink fabric flared loose, there was a lull and then a sudden slam of wind which wrenched the brolly out of her hands and off into the road, where it skidded and then leapt away in long hops between the parked cars. Of course he should help her, run after it, but she seemed, with a certain reckless good sense, to have given the thing up. She turned for a moment, glint of street-lamp on glasses, then ducked back into the wind, the rain now only a kind of roaring dampness, and as she hurried on Paul felt such a twisting stab of anxious excitement that he hid behind his umbrella for ten seconds, not knowing what to do. He slowed down, almost as though to let her get away; then pulled himself together. Trudging forward against the wind she seemed alarmingly vulnerable, to the weather, to the London night, and also to him. Why had no one come with her, or seen her to a cab? It was with a sort of ache he came up behind her, the painful comedy of having her for a further ten seconds, fifteen seconds, within arm’s reach, her red felt hat pulled down tight and her white hair beneath it tugging in clumps in the storm. There was a pink silk scarf around her neck, and her mac was shabby, the collar darkened. He picked up very faintly its musty, perennial smell, before he swept his umbrella up and then down between her and the gale. “There you are …,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “isn’t it awful,” walking on, with a quick doubtful glance at him but perhaps a touch of reassurance too.
“You shouldn’t be out in this, Mrs. Jacobs,” he said, very capably.
“The rain’s pretty well stopped, I think.”
Paul grinned, perhaps rather stared at her. “Where are you going?” He felt buoyant with his nerves and his own, perhaps unshared, sense of hilarity in the meeting. He slowed his step to hers.
“Were you at the party?” she said, with a slightly sentimental look, as if still savouring it.
Before he could think better of it, he said, “Yes, I was, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to you.”
“Caroline has so many young friends …” She made sense of it for herself. He could see she’d had quite a bit to drink—the grip of the drink at these parties and the nonsense you talked: then you came hurtling out, parched and light-headed and you hoped not alone. Night had fallen while you drank. He was straightforward, though still teasing her for some reason:
“Do you remember me, Mrs. Jacobs?”
She said, as if she’d been waiting a long time patiently for this question, and without looking at him, “I’m not sure.”
“Why should you!” he said. “We haven’t seen each other for a good ten years …”
“Ah, well,” she said, relieved but still non-committal.
“No, it’s Paul—Paul Bryant. I used to be in the bank at Foxleigh. I came to your … your big birthday party, all those years ago.” That perhaps wasn’t tactful.
“Oh, did you,” and then Mrs. Jacobs gave a strange gasp, or grunt—Paul saw it too late, like a hazard in the black gleam of the pavement just ahead. Could they chat on casually around that double tragedy? It was also perhaps an opportunity, for sympathy,