Midnight All Day Read Free

didn’t turn up.’
    ‘There’s no lucky person, but it’s not so bad.’
    I take my drink and walk about, though I do not know where I am going. Waitresses tear in and out of the hot dining room, so smart, inhibited and nervous, lacking the London arrogance and beauty. Middle-aged women with painted faces and bright dresses, and satisfied men in suits and ties, who do not question their right to be here – this being their world – are beginning to leave the dining room, holding glasses. For a moment they stand on this piece of earth, as it moves on imperceptibly, and they gurgle and chuckle with happiness.
    Optimistically I follow a couple into one of the sitting rooms, where they will have more drinks and coffee. I collapse into a high-backed sofa.
    After a time I recognise the voice I am listening to. Florence and her husband have come in and are sitting behind me. They start to play Scrabble. I am close enough to smell her.
    ‘I liked the fish,’ she is saying. ‘The vegetables were just right. Not overcooked and not raw.’
    I have been thinking of how proud I was that I had hooked a married woman.
    ‘Florence,’ he says. ‘It’s your turn. Are you sure you’re concentrating?’
    When I started with Florence I wanted to be discreet as well as wanting to show off. I hoped to run into people I knew; Iwas convinced my friends were gossiping about me. I had never had an adventure like this. If it failed, I would walk away unscathed.
    ‘We don’t eat enough fish,’ she says.
    Certainly, I did not think about what her husband might be like, or why she married him. To me she made him irrelevant. It was only us.
    He says, ‘You don’t like to kiss me when I’ve eaten meat.’
    ‘No, I don’t,’ she says.
    ‘Kiss me now,’ he says.
    ‘Let’s save it.’
    ‘Let’s not.’
    ‘Archie –’
    Her voice sounds forced and dull, as if she is about to weep. How long do I intend to sit here? My mind whirls; I have forgotten who I am. I imagine catastrophes and punishments everywhere. I suppose it was to cure myself of such painful furies that I become depressed so often. When I am depressed I shut everything down, living in a tiny part of myself, in my sexuality or ambition to be an actor. Otherwise, I kill myself off. I have talked to Florence about these things – about ‘melancholy’ as she puts it – and she understands it: the first person I have known who does.
    I realise that if I peep around the arm of the sofa I can see Florence from the side, perched on a stool. I move a little; now she is in full view, wearing a tight white top, cream bags and white sandals.
    Oddly, I am behaving as if this man has stolen my woman. In fact it is I who have purloined his, and if he finds out, he could easily become annoyed and perhaps violent. But I gaze and gaze at her, at the way she puts her right hand across her face and rests the back of her hand on her cheek with her fingers beneath her eye; a gesture she must have made as a child, and will probably make as an old woman.
    If Archie is a ruling presence in our lives, he is an invisible one; and if she behaves a little, let’s say, obscurely, at times, it is because she lives behind a wall I can only listen at. She is free during the day but likes to account for where she is. He would have been more than satisfied with, ‘I spent the afternoon at the Tate,’ and could endure with less about its Giacomettis. When we separate at the end of each meeting she often becomes agitated and upset.
    I assumed that I did not care enough about her to worry about her husband. It never occurred to me that she and I would live together, for instance; we would continue casually until we fell out. Nevertheless, watching her now, I am not ready for that. I want her to want me, and me alone. I must play the lead and not be a mere walk-on.
    The barmaid comes and picks up my glass. ‘Can I get you something else?’
    ‘No thanks,’ I say in a low voice.
    I notice that