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façade that made it, the only block of flats in the street, the kind of building where people scrawl insults in chalk on the lower walls. I saw myself going out, in jeans and jacket, walking on air, and coming back in the clinging silk dress. What had happened? Why had the other world rejected me like this?
    â€˜Yes. I put them in the washbox. I’m making the eggs now.’
    This brought me out of the bathroom. I had a bath towel round me, which emphasized my fatness and my sloping shoulders. I went along the passage to the kitchen, already a victim for Tony, unable to wait for what he had to say.
    â€˜Why… why did you put them in the washbox?’
    â€˜They’re not yours, are they? They looked far too small. I thought you must have got into some tangle with someone.’ He looked at me oddly. ‘What the hell’s going on, Jane? With your hair and everything?’
    â€˜But why were they dirty? They didn’t have … blood on them, or anything?’
    Tony forked the eggs onto plates. He set his marble profile above them and began to eat.
    â€˜No, they weren’t dirty. They had a strange smell. Like burnt matches, rather.’
    I went back to my bedroom smiling. So the other world smelled of sulphur, did it? I would have to consult Meg on this. And I put on my ‘normal’ clothes with a light heart: a cotton skirt that had gone at the waist so that the zip had to be dragged up to the waistband and stuck there, a green T shirt and floppy white sandals. I wouldn’t be needing them much longer, if my other outfit was really lying in the washbox; and they felt already like a dead woman’s clothes, neither in nor out of fashion, slightly embarrassing and poignant. I pulled back my shoulders and walked at a quick march to the kitchen and the scrambled eggs. One of Tony’s virtues, which went with his low expectations of life, was his lack of curiosity: he would almost certainly fail to ask me what I really had been up to the night before. He didn’t like surprise, which he treated as if it were sudden pain, backing away from something unforeseen, however pleasurable, with a hurt, blinking stare. If – which he must have suspected – I had picked up a youth, played with lighted matches, fallen with him in waste ground somewhere beyond the refinement of our street and shopping precinct, Tony didn’t want to know about it. And, sure enough, we had our coffee and eggs in silence while the brimstone-tainted jeans lay, carefully covered with the lid, in the straw box in the corner.
    â€˜There’s a press showing today,’ I said at last. We either talked about the films I went to and wrote about, or the progress of Tony’s script. Tony, with his gloomy standing invitation to bad luck, was involved in a script of Conrad’s Chance , and had already announced that there was a jinx on Conrad in the film business, things never worked out as they should. Secretly I didn’t blame Conrad for cursing people like Tony. Why couldn’t they leave his work alone?
    â€˜It’s a West German film,’ I said to Tony’s half-questioning look. ‘About two men who wander the roads on a lorry.’
    â€˜ Easy Rider , German style,’ Tony said. ‘Why’re they showing it on a Sunday?’
    â€˜The Schroeders always do. Don’t you remember, you came to one.’
    â€˜No lunch then?’
    No lunch.
    I got up, feeling vaguely guilty as always. Sunday lunch was supposed to be a cementing thing for couples: you could see the woman fingering bleeding meat on the Friday, frowning over the joints as if the secret of their future happiness lay in the grain of the flesh. Yorkshire pudding solidified relationships too, producing a drowsiness after the meal, a soft acceptance of everything. I would be sitting watching the screen instead of preparing all this. And Tony would be hard and distant as a result. All for a portion of