"What's reasonable? About what?"

"Tomorrow?"

"What's happening tomorrow?"

He hoped that she was talking about a social arrangement he'd forgotten. He hoped that normal life was reasserting itself, and they could put this misfortune behind them.

"You're moving out," said Annie.

"Oh. Wow. Ha. No, no, that's not what I'm talking about," said Duncan.

"It may not be. But it's what I'm talking about. Duncan, I have just wasted half my life with you. What was left of my youth, in fact. I'm not going to waste another day."

She picked up her bag, drew out a ten-pound note, threw it on the table and walked out.

seven.

And how do you feel about that?"

"I feel shitty, Malcolm. How do you think I feel?"

"Define . . . that word."

"Like shit."

"You can do better than that, Annie. You're an articulate young woman. And I'll put ten pence in the swear box for you."

"Please don't."

"I'll let you off the first one, but the second was gratuitous. I don't think it's a good idea to break rules. Whatever the circumstances."

Malcolm fumbled around in his pocket, found a coin and put it in the novelty piggy bank he kept on the bookshelf behind his head. The piggy bank was designed to spin the coin around and around before it came to its final resting place, so for the next minute or so there was silence; neither of them wanted to speak until the spinning had stopped. It seemed to take even longer than usual for the reassuring clink indicating that this ten pence had joined the others, all of them representing oaths uttered by Annie in extremis, none of them anything that would shock a ten-year-old.

A few months before, Annie had told Ros that, out of all her dysfunctional relationships, it was the one with Malcolm that caused her the most anxiety. Until the Friday-night curry, Duncan hadn't been particularly troublesome; she only spoke to her mother for fifteen minutes a week, and saw her rarely since she'd gone to live in Devon. But Malcolm . . . Malcolm she saw every Saturday morning, for a whole hour, and every time she'd raised the subject of not seeing him every Saturday morning, or at any other time, he'd become visibly distressed. Whenever Annie thought about leaving town and her job for Manchester or London or Barcelona, the Malcomlessness of these places came up embarrassingly early in the fantasy-after the absence of Duncan, probably, but sooner than the attractions of food or weather or culture.

Malcolm was her therapist. She'd seen a business card on the bulletin board in the health center when she first started to become depressed about childlessness, but almost immediately she'd known that Malcolm wasn't right: he was too nervous, too old, too easily shocked, even by Annie, who never did anything to shock anybody. When she'd tried to tell him that he wasn't right for her, however, he had begged her to reconsider, and had dropped his fee from thirty pounds an hour to fifteen, and then, finally, to five. It turned out that Annie was his first and only client. He'd taken early retirement from the Civil Service to train, it had been his ambition for more than a decade, he would learn quickly, he was the only serious therapist in Gooleness anyway, he'd never find anyone as interesting or as sensitive as her . . . Annie simply hadn't had the heart, or the necessary steel, to walk away, and she'd been enduring the spinning coins for two years now. She'd refused to entertain the notion of the swear box, which was why it was always Malcolm's ten-pence pieces that got spun. Why he was so committed to the swear box at all, she had no real idea.

"Why are you so committed to the swear box?"

"We're here to talk about you."

"But don't you ever watch TV? People say . . . that word all the time."

"I watch television. I just don't watch those programs. People don't seem to feel the need to swear on Antiques Roadshow Antiques Roadshow."

"You see, Malcolm, that's exactly the sort of remark that makes me think we're not right for each other."

"What? Me saying that people don't swear on the programs I watch?"

"But you have such a prissy way of saying it."

"I'm sorry. I'm trying to learn to be less prissy."

He said it quietly, and humbly, and with a perceptibly self-flagellating tone. Annie felt terrible, as she often did when talking to Malcolm about nothing much. This was why she eventually ended up giving in, telling him the sorts of things she was supposed to share with a therapist, stuff about her parents and her hapless love life: it took them away from the depressing, awkward small talk.

"Humiliated," she said, suddenly.

"Sorry?"

"You were asking me to do better in my description of how I'm feeling. I feel humiliated."

"Of course you do."

"Angry with myself, as well as him."

"Because?"

"Because this was always going to happen. He was going to meet someone, or I was going to meet someone, and that would be it. So I should have got out ages ago. It was just inertia. And now I've been sh . . . dumped on."

Malcolm went quiet. Annie knew that this was a technique analysts were supposed to use: if they waited long enough, then the person undergoing analysis would eventually shout out "I slept with my father!" and everyone could go home. She also knew that, with Malcolm, the reverse was true. If Annie waited for long enough, he would fill his own silences by saying something stupid, and they would argue. Sometimes they spent the entire fifty minutes arguing, which at least made the time go quickly. Malcolm's interjections carried with them no disadvantage that Annie could see, as long as she succeeded in sloughing off the irritation of their inanity.

"It's funny, you know, with your generation." It was all Annie could do to stop herself from licking her lips in anticipation of the fuddy-duddy provocation that was almost bound to follow an introduction like that.

"What is, Malcolm?"

"Well, lots of people I know have an unhappy or frustrating marriage. Or a boring one."

"And?"

"You see, they're quite content, really."

"They're happy in their misery."

"They put up with it, yes."

Never before had Malcolm so neatly summarized the absurd paradox of his ambition, Annie felt. He was an Englishman of a certain age and class, from a certain part of the country, and Englishmen like him believed that there was almost nothing too grim to be endured. To complain was to show weakness, so things got worse and worse, and people became more and more stoical. And yet counseling was nothing without complaint. That was the basis of it, really, airing dissatisfactions and hurts in the hope that something could be done about them. Annie started to laugh.

"What have I said now?" said Malcolm wearily.

Annie could hear her mother's voice in there somewhere. It was the tone she used when Annie had taken her to task for saying that the IRA killed people, or that children needed their fathers-actually, Annie could see now, relatively unobjectionable banalities that in the exotic political climate of the early eighties, had come to sound like incendiary fascist slogans.

"Do you really think you're in the right job?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, the reason I come to you at all is because I don't want to be quite content with my unhappy, boring, frustrating marriage. I want more. And you think I'm a bit of a crybaby. You'll probably end up thinking that anyone who sits in this chair is a bit of a crybaby, really."

Malcolm stared hard at the carpet, which was presumably where this conundrum had ended up somehow.

"Well," he said. "I'm not sure that's it."

"So what is it? If it's not that?"

"You said you don't want to be quite content."

"Yes. With. A. Rubbish. Life." She said it as if he were deaf, which of course he might well have been. She became momentarily distracted while she tried to decide whether deafness might have played a part in the unsatisfactory nature of their sessions. When Malcolm didn't seem to hear what she was saying, was it because he wasn't able to?

"The context is important."

"But people who are quite content don't have a rubbish life," he said.

Annie opened her mouth, ready to fire off the dismissive one-liner that always came to her whenever Malcolm offered any kind of observation, but to her surprise, there was nothing there. Her mouth was empty. Could he be right? Did the contentment count more than the life? It was the first time she'd thought about anything Malcolm had ever said to her.

She had never told Duncan that she went to talk about her problems on Saturday mornings. He was under the impression that she went to the gym, or shopping. He wouldn't have been unhappy about it, if he'd found out. He'd have worn it as a badge of honor, even though he hadn't been directly involved in the therapeutic battlefield: for him it would have been yet another example of the kind of thing that separated them from, raised them above, the rest of Gooleness. So that was one reason she kept it a secret. The other was that she didn't really have any problems, apart from Duncan. That he wouldn't have wanted to know, not at first-and then he would have wanted to know everything, and it would have been impossible. So she took her swimming things out with her, or came back with a secondhand book from the thrift shop, or a pair of cheap shoes, or a bagful of groceries, and Malcolm stayed a secret. When she left Malcolm's house up near the elementary school and started to walk back into town, she realized that she didn't need to buy anything to prove to Duncan that she hadn't been telling a complete stranger how much he disappointed her. It felt strange, walking home empty-handed. Strange, a little risky, and, yes, of course, a little sad. It was lies like those that reminded her that she had someone to go home to. But when she got back to her newly empty house, Duncan was sitting in it, waiting for her.

"I've made us some coffee," he said. "In a pot."

The pot was significant, otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned it. Duncan thought that real coffee was a bit of a fuss, what with all the waiting and the plunging, and claimed to be happy with instant. This morning's gesture was presumably intended as some kind of penance for his infidelity.

"Gee, thanks."

"Don't be like that."

"Why would I care what coffee you drink?"

"If I hadn't slept with someone else you'd be pleased."

"If you hadn't slept with someone else you'd be drinking instant."

Duncan conceded the point by saying nothing and taking a sip from his mug.

"You're right, though. It's much nicer."

Annie wondered how many similar concessions Duncan would have to make before they'd have a relationship that might conceivably last them for the rest of their lives. A thousand? And after that, he could begin to work on the things that really bothered her.

"Why are you here?"

"Well. I mean, I still live here, don't I?"

"You tell me."

"I don't think you can just tell someone whether you're living with them or not. It's more a consensual thing," said Duncan.

"Do you want to live here?"

"I don't know. I've got myself into a bit of a mess, haven't I?"

"You have, yes. I should warn, you, Duncan: I'm not going to fight for you. The whole point of you is that you're not the sort of person anyone fights over. You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all."

"Right. Well. That's telling me straight. Thank you."

Annie shrugged, an it-was-nothing gesture that capped what she felt had been a flawless couple of minutes.

"Would you say there's any way back for me? If that's what I wanted?"

"Not when you phrase it like that, no."

One thing was clear: the rest of Duncan's Friday night hadn't gone well. Annie was tempted to press him for details, but even in her anger she could recognize that the impulse was not a healthy one. It was easy to imagine, though, that this other woman would have been extremely disconcerted by Duncan's appearance on her doorstep, if that's where he'd gone. He'd never been equipped with a great deal of diplomacy, intuition or charm, even when they'd first started seeing each other, and the little he did possess would have been eroded by fifteen years of underuse. Clearly, this poor woman was lonely-it was almost impossible to arrive in Gooleness from somewhere else without leaving a trail of unhappiness and failure behind-but anyone desperate enough to usher Duncan straight into her life at eleven o'clock on a Friday night would be unemployable, possibly even under medical supervision. Annie's guess was that he'd spent a sleepless night on a couch.

"So what should I do?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. He was looking to Annie for some firm advice.

"You need to find somewhere to stay, preferably this morning. And after that, we'll just have to see."

"But what about my . . ."

"You should have thought about that before."

"I'll just go upstairs and . . ."

"You do what you have to do. I'll go out for a couple of hours."

Later, she wondered how he would have finished the question. What about his what? If she'd been marched down to a bookmaker's at gunpoint and asked to place a bet on what it was Duncan felt he couldn't live without for a couple of days, she'd have put her money on Tucker Crowe bootlegs.

While Duncan was packing, she went to work. She told herself-literally, with words muttered under her breath-that she had loads of e-mail to catch up on, but even Malcolm might have deduced, given all the relevant information, that she wanted to see if she'd heard from Tucker. This was her workplace affair, with a man on another continent that she'd never met, and wasn't ever likely to meet.

The museum didn't open until two on Saturdays, so there was nobody else around; she killed the first few minutes of the promised two-hour absence by wandering around what was officially and grandly known as "the permanent collection." It had been ages since she'd really looked at what they asked people to pay to see, and she wasn't as embarrassed as she thought she might be. Most museums in seaside towns had bathing machines, the peculiar Victorian beach huts on wheels that allowed ladies to go into the sea without exposing themselves to onlookers, but not everybody had a nineteenth-century Punch-and-Judy stall, complete with grotesque puppets. Gooleness, typically, was the last town in the UK to employ dippers and bathers; dippers dunked ladies into the sea, and bathers immersed the gentlemen, and it was a calling that had mostly vanished by the 1850s. Gooleness, however, had been so far behind the times that the museum had late nineteenth-century photographic evidence of both teams. And to her surprise, she could now see that their photograph collection was really pretty good. She stopped before her favorite, a picture of a sand castle competition that must have been held at the turn of the last century. There were very few children visible-one little girl in the foreground, wearing a knee-length dress and a sun hat that might have been made out of newspaper-and the competition seemed to have drawn a crowd of thousands. (Would Ros tell her that this, too, was the best day in some poor coal miner's life, the day he had a front-row view of the Gooleness sand castle competition in 1908?) But Annie's eye was always drawn to a woman over on the right, kneeling on the ground, working on a church steeple, in what looked like a full-length overcoat and a peasant sun hat that made her seem as sad and as destitute as an old peasant in the Vietnam War. You're dead now, Annie always thought when she saw her. Do you wish you hadn't wasted your time doing that? Do you wish you'd thought, Fuck the lot of them, and taken your coat off so you could have felt the sun on your back? We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sand castles? She would waste the next two hours, because she had to, and then she would never waste another second of however much time she had left to her. Unless somehow she ended up living with Duncan again, or doing this job for the rest of her working life, or watching EastEnders EastEnders on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn't on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn't King Lear King Lear, or painting her toenails, or taking more than a minute to choose something from a restaurant menu, or . . . It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

Duncan wouldn't have believed it was possible to feel more miserable than he'd felt in the Indian restaurant, telling Annie that he'd been unfaithful and then watching her walk out. But actually, packing his suitcase was, if anything, slightly more uncomfortable. True, the infidelity conversation had involved the most excruciating eye contact he'd ever had to put himself through; it would be a while before he forgot the hurt and the anger he'd had to look at in Annie's eyes, and, if he hadn't known her better, he might have come to the conclusion that there'd been hatred there, too, and possibly some contempt. But now, putting his clothes into a suitcase, he felt physically sick. This was his life, right here, and however many things he put into a bag, he couldn't take it with him. Even if he could take everything he owned, he'd still be leaving it behind.

He'd spent the previous night with Gina, in Gina's bed. She hadn't, as far as he could tell, been surprised to see him; on the contrary, she talked as if she'd been expecting him somehow. Duncan had tried to explain that he would prefer to look on her as a friend with a sofa for the time being, but Gina didn't seem to understand the distinction, possibly because he hadn't explained that he was homeless, nor the circumstances surrounding his homelessness.