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audience were surprised at the tenderness expressed in it. But after a short silence, they whooped and clapped appreciatively enough. Some called for more. And the funny thing is that when I talked to them about it afterwards, it turned out that they all thought – every single one of them – that the ‘you’ I addressed in the poem, my longed-for love, the one I felt I had insulted with my desire, with my crass murmurings, it was England! Yes, I can write anything, any self-flagellating piece in which I offer to crush up the splinters of my heart and put them on the ground and walk over them to prove my love, and these people will assume I’m talking about the revolution.
You’ve teased me in the past, saying I think it’s all about me. And it is one of my failings, I admit. Everything, even the way I relate to you, is about me. (Although I don’t know who else I should channel my feelings through. If ‘you and me’ can’t be about how I feel about you, then I’m stumped. I don’t want to love you through another man – but that’s too damn close to our current situation to joke about.) Anyway, what’s so refreshing about these fucking audiences is they listen to my stuff, my carefully-wrought, delicately-crafted, heart-splintering stuff, and they think it’s all about them. Ha ha ha. Be careful what you wish for, eh, my darling? Oh, I know. I said something along those lines to you that night. But I didn’t mean it to come out quite how it did. You see, I had been wishing for it for so long. For so long. The world has changed, because of you.

p.s. Some members of the audience seemed to think the word in the poem was ‘soiled’. You didn’t think I said soiled, did you? No wonder you were cross.
J. xx

Chapter Five ~ Atlantis

    The first thing Lucas realised when he saw Angela that evening was that he couldn’t have sex with her if he was likely to think about Joanna Jones because that would be disrespectful and almost as bad as cheating on her. The second thing he realised was that he didn’t want to have sex with Angela anyway because he now suspected she only did it to pass the time, and he was angry about that, and this anger had perhaps motivated his almost suicidally imprudent visit to the Jones household.
    The third thing he realised was that he had changed since this morning and Angela hadn’t. She was just the same lovely woman she had always been. But he was behaving as if she was the one who had changed.
    He went to the cupboard and looked at the jars arranged on the shelves. He was looking for jam. He wanted to know if Angela was in any way similar to Joanna Jones. He wanted to know if she was the sort of woman who would sit with a stranger in a car, and if she might then go to a hotel room with him for sex, if she thought her life or her husband’s life somehow depended on it. And if so, he wanted to blame her for it, rather than himself. Ultimately, of course, society was to blame: confining women to their homes, taking away their right to work, to protest. In recent months, he had sometimes congratulated himself for not beating Angela or abusing her, as other men did with their wives. He realised – what number was he up to? Was that number four or five? He also realised that it was not enough. It was not right. They had to get out of London. They had not a moment to lose. It didn’t help that Jones would be home by now, would have spoken to his wife, might already be on to him. Why add that danger in to the mix, as if the stakes were not already high enough? Perhaps he had behaved incautiously so they would have no choice but to leave London?
    He wanted Angela to have children. He wanted to live in Cornwall with her and the children. If not Cornwall, then Wales. If he thought there was any chance of getting there, he’d build a boat and sail them to Australia. It was so remote and such a dreamed-of paradise, Australia. You might as well talk about the Lost City of Atlantis. It