"Can I come round for a cup of tea sometime?"

Elegance had proved beyond him. He'd settled for desperation, in the hope that she'd respond to his neediness.

"Well . . ."

"At a time convenient to you, of course." As if the inconvenience, rather than the infidelity and the mess it had caused, might be responsible for the hesitation.

"Maybe later in the week? Let the dust settle a bit?"

"Oh. Really? Is there still, you know . . . dust?"

"There is round here. I don't know what it's like at your place."

"I suppose if I say it's not dusty, you'll think, I don't know . . . that everything's all okay for me."

"I'd just think you hadn't noticed, to be honest, Duncan. You never used to notice when you were living here."

"Ah. I thought we were talking about metaphorical dust."

"We were. But there's always room for a joke, surely?"

"Ha, ha. Yes, of course. Whenever you want. I'm sure I deserve a bit of teasing."

She was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer hopeless-ness of her relationship with Duncan. It wasn't just hopeless in its current form; it had always been hopeless. It was an unsuitable Internet date with an inadequate, unexciting man that had lasted for years and years and years. And yet something was making her flirt with him, if flirting could ever include bitterness, and exclude fun, joy and the promise of sex. It was the rejection, she decided. And rejection in Gooleness was a special kind of rejection.

"What about Thursday?"

The truth was, she didn't want to wait that long-she wanted him to see the picture as soon as possible. She could see, however, that desperately wanting someone not to recognize a photo of someone else was unattractive, and possibly even indicative of a spiritual crisis.

Terry Jackson, the town councillor, was unhappy at the lack of progress with the 1964 exhibition and had come to the museum to tell Annie as much.

"So, at the moment, the centerpiece of the exhibition would be what? The pickled shark's eye? Because it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to look at that for long."

"We don't really believe in centerpieces."

"Don't we?"

"No, we . . ."

"Let me put it another way, then. Is the shark's eye the best thing we've got?"

"The idea is that we collect so many great things that we don't talk about the best thing we've got."

Every time Annie met Terry Jackson, she was distracted by his hair, which was gray, but thick and lovingly shaped by Brylcreem. How old had he been in 1964? Twenty? Twenty-one? Ever since he'd outlined his dream exhibition, which she had been naive enough, and arrogant enough, to believe she could turn into a reality, she'd had the feeling that he had left something behind in that year, and that she could help him get it back. The shark's eye clearly wasn't going to do it for him.

"But you haven't got any great things."

"We haven't got enough, certainly."

"I can't say I'm not disappointed, Annie. Because I am."

"I'm sorry. It's a very hard thing to pull off. I think that even if we'd decided to widen it out and try for a 'Gooleness in the 1960s' exhibition, we'd have had difficulties."

"I can't believe that," he said. "This place was bonkers in the 1960s. Loads of stuff going on."

"I can believe it."

"No you can't," he said sharply. "You're just pretending you can believe it to humor me. The truth is, you think this place is a dump and you always have done. You'd love to put a shark's eye in an empty room and tell everybody it summed up Gooleness. You'd think it was funny. I knew we should have got a local girl in to run this place. Someone with a feel for it."

"I know I wasn't brought up here, Terry. But I'd like to think I've developed an affinity with the town."

"Codswallop. You can't wait to leave. Well, now your boyfriend's run off, you can, can't you? Nothing keeping you here."

She studied the wall behind his head hard, in an attempt to retract the one tear that seemed to be forming in her right eye. Why the right? Was it one of those things where the right tear duct was connected to the left side of the brain, and it was the left side of the brain that processed emotional trauma? She had no idea, but trying to work it out helped.

"I'm sorry," said Terry. "I had no right to bring up your personal life. It's a great town, Gooleness, but it is a small town, I'll give you that. My nephew's at the college, and they all seem to know up there."

"Don't worry. And, of course, you're right. There's less to tie me to the town than there was. But I would like to try and get this exhibition on before I leave. If I leave."

"Well. That's very nice of you. And I'm sorry I got a bit hot under the collar about the lack of progress. That year . . . I can't explain it. Everything seemed magical to me, and I thought it might to everyone else, and they'd all come flooding out of their houses with, with . . ."

"That's been part of my problem, you see, Terry. I'm not sure what they'd be donating either."

"Well, I never threw anything away. I kept every newspaper, every cinema ticket, every bloody bus ticket, just about. I've got one of those old-fashioned blue-and-red posters advertising the Rolling Stones, plus Bill Wyman's autograph, because he was the only bugger who'd give me one. I've got photos of my mam standing outside Grant's department store the day before they knocked it down, I've got a boxful of bloody shark photos, I've got pictures of me and my mates down at the old Queen's Head, before they turned it into that cheesy nightclub . . ."

"I wonder if you might think of lending us some of that?"

She was as polite and as understated as she could be, in the circumstances. If she killed him, though, she was pretty sure a jury would understand, provided they'd been briefed on the recent history of small museum funding, and the restrictions that placed on any kind of imaginative exhibiting.

"Nobody wants to look at my old rubbish. I certainly don't. I want to look at somebody else's."

"But would you mind if I looked at it?"

"For ideas, you mean? Get a better picture?"

"Well, that too, yes."

"Oh, if you must."

"Thank you. And I wouldn't rule out lending us some of your memorabilia."

"You'd have to be pretty desperate."

"Yes," she said. "Well." And left it at that.

He was right, of course: she had never taken Gooleness seriously, and neither had Duncan. That, after all, was one of the strongest and richest connections between them: their contempt for the town they lived in, and the people they lived with. That was why they'd been matched up in the first place, and that was why they'd stayed together, huddled against the cold winds of ignorance and Philistinism. So what sort of curator did that make her, if she'd never been persuaded that there was a past or a present worth curating? All she and Duncan had ever been able to see was a lack of culture, and you couldn't put a lack of culture in a museum.

Yes, she could leave, and most of her wanted to leave. Nothing was keeping her in Gooleness, just as Terry had said, apart from some nagging and probably deluded conviction that she was nicer than the sort of person who wouldn't want to stay.

Duncan knew that she got home at six, so he turned up at about three minutes past. Annie had made sure she was back by a quarter to, though, so that she'd have time to do things that turned out not to need doing. It didn't take her as long to hang up her coat as she'd anticipated, and the photo on the fridge didn't actually need moving three inches to the left, then three inches to the right, and then back to where it had been all the time.

And he didn't look at it anyway. He didn't really look at anything.

"I suppose you knew straightaway that I was making a terrible mistake," he said, when she asked him if he wanted a cookie. He was hunched over his tea and staring at the handle on his "bLIAR" mug. (She'd thought about giving him one of the others, in case drinking out of this one made him weepy, but he hadn't noticed it.) "The truth is, I'd have been making a terrible mistake even if I'd been single for all those years. Even if I'd been desperate for, for . . ."

Annie stared at her own mug. She had no intention of asking him questions about Gina.

"You see, the thing is, I think she might be mad."

"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."

"I know that's supposed to be a joke. But to tell you the truth, that's one of the reasons I've come to that conclusion. She acts as though it's some kind of miracle that we've found each other. That she got a job at the college, and there I was, waiting for her. Well, I know I'm nothing much."

Annie felt the same little pang she'd noticed on the phone the other night, but she was beginning to wonder whether it wasn't just a straightforwardly human pity. She was relieved he'd gone, and he was worried that another woman's interest in him was evidence of her insanity. How could she not feel protective?

"It's all very difficult, isn't it," he said. "This whole business of, of whatever you want to call it."

"I'm not sure what it is. What would you call it?"

"Knowing somebody."

"Ah."

"Well, I knew you. Know you. That seems to me important. More important than I'd realized. The other night, when I called you . . . I mean, I know it was about Tucker, and I said silly things about how Tucker was sort of our child even though not having a child was a delicate topic. But the impulse . . . You see, I don't really want to tell her anything. Any news I have doesn't belong to her."

"Give it time."

"I'm just not cut out for this sort of change, Annie. I want to live here. With you. And tell you things."

"You can always tell me things."

Annie's heart sank. She couldn't think of a single thing Duncan was ever likely to tell her that she'd actually want to know.

"That's not what I mean."

"Duncan, we've been more friends than lovers for quite a long time. Maybe we should think about making that relationship official."

His face lit up, and for a moment Annie thought she was safely on to the other bank. "Marriage, you mean? Because I'd be happy to . . ."

"No, no. You're not listening. The opposite of marriage. A non-matrimonial, nonsexual, once-a-week-in-the-pub friendship."

"Oh."

Annie was beginning to resent the unfairness of all this. The one good thing about being rejected by Duncan was that she didn't have to end the relationship herself. Now, suddenly, it would appear that she had to both get dumped and and do the dumping. How had that happened? do the dumping. How had that happened?

"The truth is," she said, acutely conscious that the phrase was being used to introduce an absurd lie, "I've sort of kind of started seeing somebody. I mean, it's very, very very early days, and we haven't . . ." early days, and we haven't . . ."

If the somebody in question was who she thought it was-and there were no other candidates that came to mind-then "actually met" were the two words missing from the end of that sentence. But Tucker wouldn't mind, she felt. He knew how fiction worked, and what it was for.

"You're seeing somebody? I'm . . . Well, I'm aghast."

If ever Duncan wanted to know the reason why people sometimes found him insufferable, she could point him toward that description of his inner turmoil. Who used the word "aghast" without irony?

"I was pretty aghast myself when you told me about Gina."

"Yes, but . . ."

He was clearly hoping he wouldn't have to expand on the differences between his situation and her own-which were, of course, more profound than he knew. (What if they weren't? What if Gina were as imaginary as Tucker? This was a more plausible explanation, surely, than the one she had been expected to swallow: that a woman would take one look at Duncan and usher him straight into her bed. Actually, it wasn't Duncan's appearance that was the problem. It was harder to believe that a woman would spend an evening talking to Duncan and still want to sleep with him.) "But what?"

"Well. Gina was a, was a given given. She was known information known information . This is something entirely new." . This is something entirely new."

"Gina's quite new. To me, anyway. And anyway, what is she? Some kind of nuclear strike that's supposed to disable the opposition? I'm not allowed a life because you got one first?"

Duncan looked pained.

"There's a lot in there I'd like to take issue with."

"Feel free."

"In order, (a) I don't like to think you're the opposition. That is not how I think of you, and (b) that whole thing of 'getting a life.' I'd like to think you had one already, even before we split up. And, as I have been trying to explain to you, I'm not sure I do have a life. Not in the sense you mean. Anyway. We're getting away from the point. The point being, you've met somebody."

"Yes."

"Do I know him?"

For a moment, Annie was tempted to upbraid him for his presumptuous use of the masculine pronoun, but she couldn't have fun both ways: she couldn't expect much mileage out of the photo on the fridge if she also wanted to convince him that she'd become a lesbian.

Did Duncan know him? Well, yes and no. Mostly no, she decided.

"No."

"That's something, I suppose. Had you . . ."

"I'm not sure I really want to talk about my situation, Duncan. It's private."

"I understand. But it would help me if you could answer one more question."

"Help you how?"

"Had you met him before we . . . before I . . . before recent events?"