‘Gosh. That is quite bad.’
He said, ‘I know.’
‘Did you actually say the jolly thing to their faces?’
He said okay shut up, and felt on the floor for his phone. He started streaming Radio Four. It was the Shipping News. ‘You will be asleep by the time he gets to the Scilly Isles, I promise. Please can you turn off the light.’
I did, and lay looking at the unfamiliar ceiling, listening to the man say, Fisher, Dogger, Cromaty. Fine, becoming poor.
He said, Fair Isle, Faeoro, the Hebrides. Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.
I turned my pillow over and asked Patrick if he thought the forecast for the Hebrides was really a metaphor for my interior state but he was already asleep. I closed my eyes and listened until God Save the Queen and the end of transmission.
The next morning, in the kitchen while he looked for the kettle, I said, ‘What did you do about the man in the end?’
‘I stayed for another six hours until the daughter changed her mind, then I managed his death. Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?’
*
There was a gate at the bottom of the Executive Development which gave access to the towpath. We walked along it in the afternoon. On the other side of the canal, Port Meadow was a flat, silver expanse stretching towards a low black line of trees and behind them the outline of spires. Horses were grazing half-hidden in the mist. I did not know who they belonged to.
At its end, the towpath joined a street into town and we kept going. Patrick showed some sort of card to the man inside the gatehouse of Magdalen College and took me in. He promised me close-up deer but they were standing together, in a distant corner of the park, and the only thing roaming freely on the grass were young, vital people, students who called out to each other, broke into little sprints for no reason, existed as though nothing bad had ever or would ever happen to them.
*
I found a book club and went to it. It was at someone’s house. The women all had doctorates and did not know what to say when I told them I didn’t, as if I had just confessed to having no living relatives or an illness with a residual stigma.
I found a different book club, in a library. The women all had doctorates. I said mine was on the Lancashire Cotton Panic of 1861 because I had listened to an In Our Time about it while I walked there. A woman I talked to afterwards said she would love to hear more about it next week, but I had already told her all the things I could remember. I left knowing I could not go back because I would have to listen to the episode again, and one of the three male experts on the panel had been a compulsive throat clearer, and only ever interrupted its sole female.
*
Sometimes, during the day, I sat in the front window of the Executive Home and stared at the facing Executive Home, trying to imagine myself inside it, living a mirror image version of my exact life.
The actual woman who lived there at the time had boy-girl twins and a husband who was, according to the magnetic signs that he pressed onto his car doors in the morning and peeled off at night, The Chiropractor Who Comes To You.
One day she knocked on the door and apologised for not coming over sooner. We were wearing the same top and when she noticed and laughed, I saw she had adult braces. While she was talking, I imagined what it would be like to be her friend. If we would visit each other without texting, if we would drink wine in each other’s kitchens or outside in our gardens, if I would tell her about my life and she would be forthcoming about a childhood in which braces were not possible.
She said she hadn’t noticed any children and asked what I did. I told her I was a writer. She said she actually had a blog, and blushed telling me the name of it. It was mostly funny observations about life, and recipes, and she said I obviously didn’t need to read it.
The main thing: what did I think of the house? I said oh my gosh, like we were friends who have been talking for an hour and have finally got to the good part. ‘I feel like I’ve been in a dissociative fugue since we drove in the gates.’ I told her I had only lived in London and Paris and wasn’t sure I’d known places like this really existed. ‘Are we supposed to believe it’s Regency Bath, despite the satellite dishes?’ I was talking too fast by then because Patrick was the only person I had spoken to for a period of days but I thought I was being interesting and funny from the way she was smiling and furiously nodding. ‘I’ve come home about ten times and not been able to get the door open and then I realise I’m standing in front of the wrong house.’ I made a joke about the enervating nature of taupe carpet and said finally, on the positive side, if she happened to own fifteen thousand appliances with unusual plugs and ever wanted to use them all at once, she was welcome to run an extension cord over the pretend-cobbled street. Her smile was suddenly gone. She did a little cough and said it was probably good we were just renting and went back to her own house.