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said. ‘I need somebody to fucking fuck me!’
    She sounded quite annoyed about it.
    ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said.
    ‘I gave away my man and now I’m lonely,’ she said in my ear, in a little-girl voice. ‘Audrey gets very, very lonely on her own.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.
    I felt a firm, male grip on my arm.
    ‘Now, now, Audrey,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t get randy with Michael. Was she getting randy with you, Michael?’
    ‘Where’s Brendon?’ said Audrey vaguely.
    ‘Darling, I haven’t a bloody clue,’ said Paul. ‘What are you worrying about Brendon for?’
    ‘Someone should really put him to bed. All these children!’ She made an irritated gesture with her hand that clearly incorporated me. ‘They should all be put to bed.’
    ‘Is it good for you up here?’ said Paul. ‘Do you like it? Not everybody does.’
    ‘I like it very much,’ I said.
    ‘That’s because you’ve got manners,’ said Paul. ‘Tell Audrey to keep her hands off you – you’re a good boy. She gets a little heated sometimes, that’s all. It might be the menopause coming early. Her mother was the same.’
    ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said.
    ‘The people with manners like Egypt,’ said Paul. ‘It’s the ones that think too much that don’t. They find something false in it, you see, and they start to get ironic. I don’t like people being ironic – to me it means they’ve forgotten how to be natural. What are your people like, your family? Are they good-looking too, or are you the black sheep? Would they like it here, do you think?’
    ‘I’m sure they would,’ I said.
    I realised as I said it that this was not true – they would hate it, but I wasn’t sure why. I wondered if this meant that they were ironic, and if the presence I sometimes felt in myself of something caustic was an inherited characteristic, like eye colour. I felt an urgent desire to slip free of that tendency. Someone had set up some fireworks in the field below thelawn and we went down to watch them. They banged like pistol shots in the darkness. Everyone whooped and clapped as they streaked up howling and burst into fountains of light. After a while the grey light of dawn slowly filled the valley. It was almost opaque: from where I stood on the hill it looked as though we were surrounded by sea. I stood on my own and watched it. I watched it and waited, as though I were a stowaway on a big, creaking ship making its way through the indifferent waters, watching the diminishing mainland, waiting for it to vanish and for my place on this laughing, unknown enterprise to be secured.

TWO
    Recently a series of events caused me unexpectedly to meet the Hanburys again.
    I mentioned once to my wife Rebecca the fact that Adam Hanbury still lived in Doniford, no more than sixty miles away. At one time we had been inseparable: now we could see each other any day we chose, yet we had not met for five or six years.
    ‘He’ll come around,’ said Rebecca, sagaciously.
    I guessed she was referring to the ‘big wheel’, a theory of events she had lately taken to propounding. Its basis was that existence is not linear but circular and repetitive. The idea was that you didn’t have to go out and get anything – you just sat and waited for it to come to you, and if it was meant to, it would.
    ‘He might just keep going the way he’s going,’ I said. ‘We all might.’
    ‘It’ll turn,’ said Rebecca.
    She revolved something invisible on the axis of her hand to illustrate her point. I was surprised to see how slow and grinding the revolution was, as she conceived it. Her hand only moved an inch or two. She spoke quite blithely, though. It was not a chore to her, this turning. It was a spectacle from which evidently she derived a certain joy. I wondered whether the fact of our estrangement altered what I knew of the three years during which Adam and I were friends. It made me feel uneasy suddenly to think of it, as though everything