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but occasionally, when rereading Simon Flowers’s address, she sees herself there as others must see her: Farkas, Marina; Flat Two, Westminster Court, Pembridge Road, London W2, with her telephone number: 01 229 8753 – an open invitation.
    What does madness feel like? Can you develop it quite discreetly on the bus home from Oxford Street, carrying mothballs? Can it be normal to cry in department store toilets, at advertising hoardings or thoughts of distant famine? Somebody must know.
    Laura needs a trusted friend in whom to confide. But half of them have crossed to the dark side: Basingstoke, Bedford, Doncaster. St Albans. The London survivors are too sane, too married; they have bedrooms, and whole houses; they have produced charismatic scruffy children who adore them, or live sterile but sexually satisfying lives of style and beauty. She cannot ask them whether, when they stand on an Underground platform, they think of jumping. It isn’t depression, obviously. She isn’t catatonic in an armchair, she doesn’t have time. Besides, she is not entitled to misery. Her life, compared not only with that of starving Ethiopians but also her very own in-laws, is easy; it is simply that, without Marina, a layer of resistance has started to peel away.
    Did it happen in the run-up to Marina’s going, or on the day she left? In either case, it is Laura’s own fault; she should have stopped her. It was a test of motherhood, which she failed.
    Or perhaps, she thinks, after yet another stern self-talking-to, perhaps this is how women her age are supposed to feel. There is no way of knowing for certain. The lives of women like her, without men, away from their children, do not feature in magazines. When, on the Tube, or tidying the waiting room at work, she happens upon an advertisement for microwave ovens, sun-dried tomatoes, granite worktops, stippling, hyacinths, her soul lifts. Whisper it: this does not happen at exhibitions of German Expressionism. And it is possible, she wants to explain to the world, to be a reasonably intelligent woman – shamefully ignorant and under-educated, yes, but once attached to a modestly adequate brain – yet to long for the four-seasons duvets she will never have.
    So if she is not stupid, how is it that Mitzi Sudgeon has everything, the labour-saving devices and career and Alistair Sudgeon, and she, Laura, has not? Is it for want of personal grooming? If she had concentrated properly during drawing lessons, might she now have him? Most women your age, she tells herself many times a day, do not live in a basement with two virgins and two widows and innumerable house plants. They are not told off at mealtimes for being too quiet; they have friends. Lovers, even. Is it any surprise that, after thirteen years, you are a little low?
    Many times a day Marina checks that the phones are on the hook, in case Simon Flowers decides to ring her; although, when he does, it would be better if she were out. Being in would mean she is either a saddo or desperate for him, practically a slut. This is the boys’ favourite subject, who is a dirty slut and who is frigid and, since discovering that this is how girls are divided, she has devoted many hours to deciding which she is. What with that, and her chemistry struggles, and trying to learn about jazz for when she and Simon Flowers do finally meet, the holidays are racing past. She feels like an old person, watching the days run out, and all her plans for the holidays – ear-piercing, daily sit-ups, reading Ulysses , possibly learning a bit of medicine in case of future emergencies – have failed.
    This is partly a question of time. She has less of it now; her old habits of preferring certain streets to others, touching doors and her lucky ribbed tights and shampoo and pens, have expanded until they take up hours. Everything has some bearing on the future. It isn’t just the street name, or the houses, or past associations which makes Bridstow Place