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was adolescent to want to be in love, but he wanted to be. He wanted to live on his own too, and go and look at things and explore and discover and understand. All these things were equally impracticable for a married man with children and a father-in-law and a job in the Anglian-Victoria Bank. And to fall in love would be immoral, especially if he did anything about it. Besides, there was no one to fall in love with.
    He imagined going round to the Heyshams’ one Saturday morning and finding Wendy alone, and suddenly, although, like the people in the Somerset Maugham story, they had known and not much liked each other for years, they fell violently in love. They were stricken with love as Lancelot and Guinevere were for each other, or Tristram and Isolde. He had even considered Joyce for this role. How if she were to come into his office after they had closed, and he were to take her in his arms and . . . He knew he couldn’t. Mostly he just imagined a girl, slender with long black hair, who made an appointment to see him about an overdraft. They exchanged one glance and immediately they both knew they were irrevocably bound to each other.
    It would never happen to him. It didn’t seem to happen to anyone much any more. Those magazines Pam read were full of articles telling women how to have orgasms and men how to make them have them, but never was there one telling people how to find and be in love.
    Sometimes he felt that the possession of the three thousand pounds would enable him, among other things, to be in love. He took it out and handled it again on Thursday, resolving that that would be the last time. He would be firm about his obsession and about that other one too. After this week there would be no more reading of Yeats and Forster and Conrad, those seducers of a man’s mind, but memoirs and biography as suitable to a practical working bank manager.
    Alan Groombridge wondered about and thought and fantasized about a lot of odd and unexpected things. But, apart from playing with banknotes which didn’t belong to him, he only did one thing that was unconventional.
    The Anglian-Victoria had no objection to its Childon staff leaving the branch at lunchtime, providing all the money was in the safe and the doors locked. But, in fact, they were never both absent at the same time. Joyce stayed in on Mondays and Thursdays when her Stephen wasn’t working in Childon and there was no one with whom to go to the Childon Arms. On those days she took sandwiches to the bank with her. Alan took sandwiches with him every day because he couldn’t afford to eat out. But on Monday and Thursday lunchtimes he did leave the bank, though only Joyce knew of this and even she didn’t know where he went. He drove off, and in winter ate his sandwiches in the car in a lay-by, in the spring and summer in a field. He did this to secure for himself two hours a week of peace and total solitude.
    That Friday, 1 March, Joyce went as usual to the Childon Arms with Stephen for a ploughman’s lunch and a half of lager, and Alan stuck to his resolve of not taking the three thousand pounds out of the safe. Friday was their busiest day and that helped to keep temptation at bay.
    The weekend began with shopping in Stantwich. He went into the library where he got out the memoirs of a playwright (ease it off gradually) and a history book. Pam didn’t bother to look at these. Years ago she had told him he was a real bookworm, and it couldn’t be good for his eyes which he needed to keep in good condition in a job like his. They had sausages and tinned peaches for lunch, just the two of them and Wilfred Summitt. Christopher never came in for lunch on Saturdays. He got up at ten, polished his car, perquisite of the estate agents, and took the seventeen-year-old trainee hairdresser he called his fiancée to London where he spent a lot of money on gin and tonics, prawn cocktails and steak, circle seats in