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then shot forward on to a roundabout, causing a Rolls to brake so suddenly it just avoided bumping a Mini.
    The men at work respected him. They might snicker behind his back, but they couldn’t fault his work. Most were younger, but even the older ones deferred to him for his skill and precision. He was afraid of Pam because he loved her, and hated himself for having a string of thoughts that led to admitting it. He had made her miserable, and disliked her suffering because it reminded him too much of his own. Yet he was also the mirror of her torments. Both of them had been blinded by their continual heliographic flash from too early on. So he couldn’t blame her, or feel guilty about it.
    Right from the beginning they had made mirrors for each other. They had, as it were, bought them from furniture shops, auctions, jumble sales and junk markets. They had purchased them by mail order, from the tally man, and from the Classical Golden Mirror of the Month Club as advertised on TV and in the newspapers. They set them up all over the house: gilt-edged mirrors, wall mirrors, swivel mirrors, shaving mirrors, and even a two-way mirror. They furnished the bedroom, spare-room, box-room, living-room, kitchen and, worst of all for him, his car, which was the only space he could be alone in because she hated it more than any other place since he smoked continuously while at the wolf-fur-covered steering wheel.
    He had never been able to tolerate her yammering when they sat side by side in bed before turning out the light. When it happened downstairs he was at least able to stand up now and again if he felt like killing her. Looking across the table and wondering whether or not she would stop yammering, on sensing this perfectly natural desire in him, he would walk to the fireplace hoping not to offend her even more, at which her yammering would get louder and absolutely to the point. Thinking his head would burst he would get up from his easy chair and shamble into the kitchen to put the kettle on that played ‘Annie Laurie’ when it boiled, not to throw water over her, or to get the spout steaming so that she could hurl it across at him, but simply to make the age-old gesture of brewing a cup of strong tea in a crisis. At the same time he would be careful to leave the door open so that she wouldn’t think he was maliciously trying to get out of earshot, which would justify her in complaining for another half hour at least.
    But once they were in bed and the yammering commenced, or resumed, after a short break during which his cup of tea had really worked its effect of hot flushes or spots before the eyes, or throughout the short time of getting ready for bed, there was no escape, and he had to sit there and listen. The more she went on, the hotter it became in bed, her legs and thighs so warm that his own limbs felt scorched, so that as well as craving to get away from the sound of her voice he was also disturbed by the heat coming from her body and wanted to avoid that as well.
    As for why she was yammering, there was no answer to it. She had been at the game almost twenty years, and though he heard (it was impossible not to) he no longer listened, knowing from experience after the first few occasions that it was best not to, since if he did his head would burst with the fiery violence of a paperbag overfilled with her cinder breath. Listening was beside the bloody point entirely, because she just yammered for yammering’s sake, though it was also true that she was only a yammerer because he could not bear to listen. If he had been a born listener she wouldn’t have been a yammerer, and they would have got on so well that everyone might have called it having a cosy conversation.
    What he could not understand was how a man like him, whose favourite pastime never had been listening (neither did he like to talk much, except perhaps when he was away from home), had married a woman who did nothing but yammer.