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Vic flashed her mother a look of exaggerated disgust and pity, an expression that might have been borrowed from a sitcom, and then she softened into an authentic smirk. “Actually, she said he was
brilliant
in bed. ‘Genius,’ to use her exact word. She got all worked up about him, but he didn’t want to know. What did he want, anyway?”

Given Vic’s obvious contempt for Dan, Jean was embarrassed to tell her about the film—anyway, she planned to get out of going. “Oh, I forgot to give him the revised drawings for Dad’s fridge campaign and he needs them today. I’ll have to run them round later.”

“Maybe I could drop them off if he can’t be…bothered to come get them,” Victoria offered, uncharacteristically helpful. “We’re leaving from King’s Cross.”

“No, don’t worry, darling, I can do it later. I’ll walk and get some fresh air.” She hadn’t told Vic about the biopsy, and though she almost wished she had, she still couldn’t imagine bringing it up.

“It’ll take you till Tuesday to walk to Clerkenwell, Mum. And it looks like more rain,” Vic said, peering out the window up to the street, adding her own
“Shit.”

“Tell you what,” Jean said, inspired, shifting the hissing coffee machine to get at the trapped spillage. “I’ll drop you at King’s Cross and go on to the office. That way you don’t have to lug your bag on the tube. We’ll cab it. I’ve got to get through the rest of my twenty-pound notes at some point this weekend.”

She’d lied, but at least she’d spared Victoria a tube journey.

S
aturday evening
. Jean was quick to Waterloo. When she emerged from the Underground, she saw that the rain had stopped. Or paused. She gave her magazines to a young woman sitting cross-legged by the entrance, begging with a puppy in her lap, and in the pink early evening she approached the theater with time to spare. She wandered around the leaking concrete complex, feeling shame for the decade of her childhood—the ugly sixties—and in no rush to meet the “total predator.” At five to seven she arrived at the National Film Theatre. No Dan.

She stood with her arms crossed and her knees locked together, wishing she’d worn something warmer. She had on her brown suede boots, black tights patterned with holes like chair caning, a thin brown dress, and her mac, still puckered from yesterday’s downpour.

The last film lovers were moving into the cinema when Dan appeared, running, his olive-drab T-shirt faintly pricked with sweat, leather jacket flapping behind him. “I’m so sorry,” he panted, combing his fingers through wind-bent hair, guiding her into the semidarkness with a flat palm on her back. “Appalling traffic.”

Was there any other kind, she thought, furious she’d let herself in for this but maintaining a dignified silence—at least until she saw the near-empty theater. “Good thing we prebooked,” she said. Dan’s chest was heaving as the lights dimmed to black. With her eyes not yet adjusted, she leaned toward him and asked, “Did you
run
all the way from Sussex?” Still too winded to reply, he squeezed her forearm instead.

Apparently he’d been playing rugby all day. “My fortnightly Old Fucks’ game,” he explained when he caught his breath. “And then tea with the godchild.”

“What position do you play? And just how old are you?”

“Wing. Thirty-one. Anything else you’d like to know, Mrs. H.?”

Yeah, she thought, what exactly did Maya Stayanovich mean by “genius”? Instead she smiled her serene boss’s wife smile, silently doubting the discernment of the breathless, eternally embroiled Maya Stayanovich. Finally, the film was about to begin—no reminders to turn off cell phones, no jingles or trailers, just the scratched countdown of numbers. Jean glanced around. Adult education, she thought gloomily, her stomach rumbling.

She leaned and whispered to Dan, “They only sell drinks out there, right?”

“’Fraid so. Can I get you one?”

“Sure, g and t if they’ve got it.” And then, in a scarcely audible whisper as Dan ducked back down the aisle, she tried out “rugger bugger.” It was her own fault, of course. She’d been counting on some popcorn to keep her going. But all hunger and irritation was soon crowded out by incredulity. The film was in black and white. Three hours long, he’d said, and the first four minutes felt like fifteen: a long panning shot of Chinese trees in colorless blossom… Unzipping her boots, she prepared to nap.

Jean had to say it—she wanted to tell everybody—
Shroud of Dew,
this misty
Othello
set in China at the time of the last emperor, was fantastic. When Dan offered to leave at the intermission, she insisted on staying. And she couldn’t stop crying—all the cross-purposes and tragic misapprehensions. The fresh gin and tonic in the squeezy plastic cup helped, but still the tears kept leaking out. Jet lag, she murmured, exhausted, and glad for the dark because she knew she must look terrible.

When she turned toward Dan, his leather jacket on his lap like a pet, she could see his neat, slightly wolfish teeth in the dark. He was watching the screen but smiling; and as they settled into the second half, he produced a handkerchief, one which in the dark he had carefully folded for her. “You can check,” he whispered, loud enough to provoke a hiss from a woman sitting in front of them, “no strawberries.”

So he’d read
Othello,
Jean thought, and carefully: how many people would even remember the strawberries embroidered on Desdemona’s handkerchief? As she handed it back, she wondered why he’d folded it for her anyway; not because it was snot-encrusted on the other side. No, he’d done it as you might partially unwrap a chocolate bar for a small child, lending a hand. The white cotton square gave off a good strong aroma, just like him: clean laundry cut with unclean leather jacket.

“Mark would love that movie,” Jean said, pink eyed, blinking with discovery in the sharp night air. “Too bad he’d never see it. Not in a million.”

Another discovery: the pleasure, after the movie, of talking about it. Mark hated talking about movies. He thought they were like books, an entirely private experience. And Jean thought the loneliest walks of her life were not along some wind-lashed beach in Ireland but the two blocks home from the Odeon in Parkway. Jean told Dan about Mark’s perverse post-movie rules—emphatically, as if fervor would justify the mild disloyalty. She wanted to know if he agreed—that with all the ads and all the reviewing of all the ads, as Mark had told her a hundred times, reviewing the movie was too much like work.

Consensus withheld: Dan not only loved the postmortem, he seemed to like all the same movies she did, even if she had instinctively edited out the worst. But then, Dan seemed so amenable, he couldn’t hold
Bridget Jones
against her. Never mind that he’d parked a mile away and the rain had started again; he understood that what she needed right now, this weekend, was the sunny and uncomplicated. She wasn’t about to muddy that gift with any speculation over whether he was in fact hoping to seduce her or just going through the motions. Who cared, anyway? She was just going to the movies.

“Fuck!” As she stepped down from the curb to get into his car, she’d landed her left foot up to the ankle in a puddle. It was soaked, and this time the boots were truly ruined. Trying to ignore her squidgy toes, now inside the little car—a black VW Beetle which, as Mrs. Mark Hubbard, she knew was not just some old banger but a “design classic”—she was still talking when he started over the bridge, wiping out an earlier suggestion of finding dinner on the South Bank.

“I’m taking you home,” he said.

Jean, finally quiet, hanging on to misty twenties China, was looking out the window at the glittering lava of the Thames below. She wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed or alarmed—did he mean dropping her off at her place or taking her back to his?

“Are you now,” she said neutrally, waiting to see what he meant, waiting to see how she felt. Don’t be an idiot, she told
herself. Maya Stayanovich probably threw herself at him. Must happen all the time. In her own case, he was politely chaperoning the boss’s wife; it was his
job.
For an unhappy moment she wondered if Mark had asked him to look after her, because of Scully, and his being away.

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got a gorgeous dinner all ready in the boot. A perfect picnic provided by the mother of my godchild and dear friend, Sarah Mustoe. God bless Sally.”

Mustang Sally. An old girlfriend, Jean supposed, not saying anything yet. At least he stayed friends with them. She thought for a second of the chubby redhead waving inanely at the pub.

“You do seem well looked after.”

“Ay, that I am. Now, we can go to your place, which is a bit nearer, or we can go to mine, which I marginally prefer only because I have the perfect bottle of wine to drink with the perfect picnic. A 1988 Puligny-Montrachet. And a microwave, which I’ll bet money doesn’t deface the Hubbard household decor.”

“Well, you’re right on the wine front—I don’t think I have
any
after my night in with Vic.” In honor of Meg Ryan’s performance, Jean didn’t mind sounding like a lush, but she wasn’t at all sure about his tone—was “decor” ever not a term of insult?—or for that matter about going to his place. When she spoke to Mark she hadn’t mentioned her date with Dan; she thought she’d still get out of it. The remote possibility that he’d arranged her date made that an awkward omission. But once again she was being paranoid. Why shouldn’t she go to a movie no one apart from Dan would dream of seeing—or, indeed, grab a bite afterward? Anyway, if Mark
had
arranged it, he’d have found a way to boast of his thoughtfulness.

Dan was a very skillful and reassuring driver, she noticed, enjoying her accelerated view of the slick London night. Suddenly it was entirely clear. She was hungry and she wanted her dinner. If Dan came over she might never get him out. Going to his place meant she could leave.

“It’s late,” she said. “Do you really think it’s a good idea? I mean, it’s been great, but maybe I’ll just go home.”

Dan shot past the turn for Camden Town. “Don’t worry. I’ll run you back,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road. “It’s a very good idea.”

Jean had no intention of helping him lay the table or warm the picnic and she wasn’t sure she could wait for it. Cold and famished, she looked in the industrial fridge where she found vitamins, film, juice, pickled onions, a jar of almond-stuffed green olives, a half-eaten can of sardines. She attacked the only possibility—the olives—and nearly finished them off before he reached over her shoulder against her laughing but genuine protests and stuck a couple fingers in the jar, nabbing the last one for himself.

A whole fish pie and two bottles of Montrachet later, Jean was wandering barefoot through Dan’s thoroughly modern third-floor flat. Loft, she supposed, for its open plan and exposed brickwork, but redeemed in her opinion by the row of doublearched windows admitting slanted Ms of moonlight.

He’d taken off her boots and with a big white towel patdried through her tights the puddle-soaked foot. Then she took her tights off because he was right, she’d “never get warm in those wet things,” and his manner remained capable—the matchside paramedic addressing a sports injury.

With her feet finally dry and her eyes closed—she was supposed to guess the ingredients—she ate warm, vanilla-scented plums poached in honey and wine, spoon-fed to her by Dan across a long black lacquered table, and what she had to say
then, rising to take the plates to the sink, was “I must go.” This she said a second time, quietly to the wall, bent away from him to look at a framed, almost invisible pencil drawing of a nude hung opposite the arched windows. When she straightened and turned to say so again Dan was standing very near. He didn’t step toward her, just lifted his hands to find her waist. His tongue when he kissed her entered with the forcible promise that he was going to fuck her and soon, and Jean more than anything was relieved that it was settled.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t, she thought. Seemed a long time they’d been standing there kissing, her hands holding his shoulders like the sides of a big ladder she was considering climbing. She’d forgotten about kisses like this. The more she got the more she wanted, as if there was something she needed at the back of his mouth and he was not letting her pass. Why couldn’t she just
do
it—why did she also have to picture it (their lips like four fingers making taffy, two mouths after the same piece of gum) and add to that a running caption. The last time I kissed like this, Jean thought unhelpfully, Dan was eight. And what about the dressing under her right breast? Why had she told Dan about the biopsy? Subconsciously, to prepare him?

They stopped and looked at each other with no message exchanged, no corny smolder, and for this Jean was grateful. She closed her eyes like pulling down the blinds and Dan picked her up, her legs instantly lifting to wrap around him, and carried her not to his bed but to the long lacquered table.

He placed her carefully like a large terra-cotta urn and skill-fully set about his work, as concentrated as a specialist restorer focused on her intricate finish, as if she wasn’t even there. A tug here and the top of her dress fell to her waist. He tilted her head back to get under her chin, and his thumbs on her jaw and her throat and her chest moved swiftly, smoothing the skin as if it was quick-drying clay. He pushed the straps of her bra easily off her shoulders and then, for Jean, the first awkward moment. Perhaps it was the still-undiscovered Band-Aid that made her tense or an instinctive flinch for the biopsy spot itself—and none of this helped by the reminder, as he reached a couple exploratory fingers inside the bra, of his greedy grab for the last olive.

But reassuringly, he held her head again and kissed her about her ears. She didn’t know about having her ears kissed—how it pulled like a drawstring threaded right through you, teasing, tightening, bringing you in. With each nuzzling kiss the line extended over other parts of her body, gathering into a new constellation of improbable shapeliness—Archer, Boar, Mermaid—another point from among her scatter of solitary stars. His wide hands now completely covered her breasts and with that wolfish smile, he yanked her bra down, forgetting the fiddly hooks—such attractive, hungry, butterfingered frustration.

Dan held her hair back with both hands, he kissed and nibbled her throat and licked her torso, first like a cat—working his way cleanly over a small area, tasting her skin—and then like a dog, with broad-stroked abandon, bunching her breasts together to meet his flattened tongue. She forgot the bandage, if it was even there anymore, her hunger sidelining local soreness, his own vivid appetite returning her breasts to their atavistic nonmedical, nonmaternal purpose. If she had first thought of herself as a pot or a clay nude, she wasn’t as passive as that; more like an artist’s model, a hard-won stillness as her body shivered through tiny arcs of pleasure and gratitude.

What, she wondered, was her best feature in the past? Her long neck, or her slender ankles? The slim waist maybe, or her breasts, smallish but pretty and unthreatening. However improbable, for some it would always be these freckles that deepened in color with heat or emotion, a Milky Way of discrete
blushes. Now, she couldn’t help thinking, her best feature was gratitude. Irresistible to certain men. There were tit men, leg men, ass men, and gratitude men… Dan was certainly working hard to earn hers. It took her ages to stop noticing, assessing, and relax, but it seemed he could wait. She didn’t know how long it had been—but at last her critical machinery was unplugged. And then, just as she was finally above the foothills, in step for the slow climb then long slide, he picked her up again, leaving her dress behind, a dark island on the glossy table.