ONE
With its free peanuts and anonymity, the airline lounge is somewhere I can usually feel at home; but on this occasion I was in too much of a panic to enjoy its self-importance. It had been hard work getting there. The queues at Kennedy were backed up to the terminal doors; the migrants heaving trunks onto the check-in scales made New York look like Lagos.
I had done a bad thing and wanted to escape the city. Staying in an Upper West Side apartment belonging to my friend Jonas Hoffman, I had ordered in a call girl. I got the number from a phone booth on Columbus. It seemed to me important to get the sex act into perspective, to laugh at myself in the way you laugh at other people for their choice of mates. A true view of myself and my concerns: that was what I needed.
I suppose I’d say I was a voluptuary, someone who had seen it all, yet when the super called to say there was a young lady on her way up, it struck me that I was nervous. The front door buzzed. I took a pull of iced gin and went to open it. It was eleven in the morning. She wore an overcoat of olive green and carried a serviceable handbag with a clasp; for a moment I thought there was a mistake and that she must be Hoffman’s cleaner. Only the high heels and lipstick suggested something more frolicsome. I offered her a drink.
“No, thanks, mister. Maybe a glass of water.”
In so far as I’d imagined what she might be like, I’d pictured a pinup—or a tart with platinum hair and rouge. But this woman was of indeterminate nationality, possibly Puerto Rican. She was not ugly in any way, yet neither was she beautiful. She looked like someone’s thirty-eight-year-old sister; like the person who might be in charge of the Laundromat or work behind the desk of a Midtown travel agent.
I brought back the water and sat beside her in Hoffman’s huge, book-lined living room. She had taken off her coat and was wearing an incongruous cocktail dress. It was hard not to think of her family: brother, parents … children. I put my hand on her knee and felt the coarse nylon. Was I meant to kiss her? It seemed too intimate; we’d only just met.… But I tried anyway and found a world of fatigue in her response.
It brought a flash-recall of Paula Wood, a sixteen-year-old girl I’d kissed in a village hall a lifetime ago, before I’d discovered the awfulness of desire. Kissing this hooker was like kissing a mannequin: it was like a repetition, or a memory, not like a kiss at all. I went to the kitchen and poured another half tumbler of gin with ice cubes and two slices of lemon.
“Come this way,” I said, gesturing down the corridor to the spare room—my room—at the end. Hoffman kept it for his mother, for when she visited from Chicago, and I felt a moment of unease as we went in. I pushed off my shoes and lay on the bed.
“You’d better take off your clothes.”
“You better pay me first.”
I pulled out some money and handed it over. With what looked like some reluctance, she undressed. When she was naked, she came and stood beside me. She took my hand and ran it up over her abdomen and breasts. The belly was rounded, and there were small fat deposits above the hips; the lumpy navel had been botched by the obstetrician. Her skin was smooth, and there was a look of concentration in her eyes—not kindness or concern, more a sort of junior-employee focus. I felt extremely tired and wanted to close my eyes. At the same time I felt an obligation to this woman; it seemed we were joined in this thing now, for better or for worse.
After the breasts, I touched the plated sternum—and then the clavicle. As I did so, I wondered how my fingers felt to her. When you run your hand across another’s skin, is it merely your intention that distinguishes a lover’s heat from a doctor’s care?
What this girl presumably felt was neither of those things, but a simple friction of skin on skin. I stood up and took off my clothes, placing them on a chair. With Annalisa such movements were made in a literally tearing rush. I used to panic that I would never sate myself on her; I used to fear her leaving before we had begun, because I knew as soon as the door closed I would be desperate for her again. And that was one emotion—the frantic dread—that I knew could not be right or real. That was something on which I badly needed to find a healthier point of view.
There was a mirror in Hoffman’s spare room that gave me the reflection of an aging man copulating with a stranger: here was the zoological comedy I craved as I watched white skin collide with brown, my ugly face flushed, her head down and rear extended. This was the rude comedy of manners I saw in other people’s lives, and I smacked her rump in satisfaction.
I pressed her to stay for tea or beer afterwards, to gloss the exchange with some civility. She told me she lived in Queens and worked part-time in a shoe shop. In a vague way, I had thought being a New York hooker was a job in itself, not one with “prospects” and a trade union but at least a full-time pimp beneath the lamppost. She seemed reluctant to tell me more, for fear, maybe, of breaking the illusion of glamour; I guess she didn’t want me to think of her as someone who would go to the storeroom to fetch a size-seven brogue.
A few minutes later she was spread-eagled on the rug by Hoffman’s fireplace, intent on a repeat. I felt reluctant to start again, but I didn’t want to deny her the chance of earning more. My motive was not so different from the one that made me, at the end of the evening at the village hall, offer to dance with Paula Wood’s mother: courtesy, perhaps, or an ignorance of what women want.
When it was done, I gave the girl another twenty dollars, which she folded into her purse with a nod of thanks.
“What’s that scar on your shoulder?” she said.
“A bullet wound. A pistol.”
“How—”
“You don’t want to know.”
I fetched her coat and held it out to her; there was an awkwardness as she said goodbye. Was I to kiss her, and if so, how? She touched me on the cheek, then put her lips quickly to where her fingertips had been. It was in its way the most erotic moment that had passed between us.
Alone again, I slumped down in the big armchair and looked out over Central Park. A few single women were running there, probably with keys between their knuckles to protect them; there were no mothers with children even at this middling hour of the day. A handful of men with Walkman headphones also loped round the paths: assailants, vigilantes—hard to tell—but they didn’t look like athletes. For all Mayor Koch’s bumper stickers, no one loved New York in 1980. What was there to love in a city where, as you left the local bar, the doorman insisted you wait till he had the taxi hard up against the curb, door open, ready for the getaway. It was only three blocks over, but they had told me never to walk.
After I had showered in Hoffman’s mother’s bathroom, I poured another gin, went back to the living room, and thought about the hooker. They say that when you sleep with someone all their previous partners are in bed with you, but I’ve never felt that. And in any case it would have had to be some bed to accommodate the back catalogue of a professional. What I always did feel was a dim awareness of my own past lovers. The hair on the pillow, the discomfort of the bed, the varying degrees of guilt … So much of what I’d heard and read as a young man excited in me the belief that enduring sexual passion, romantic “love,” was the highest type of interaction—perhaps indeed the highest state of being—to which a human could aspire. How lamentably I had failed. How seldom had I felt the weight of all my joy and all my safety to hang on the say-so of another—though I did remember the first time it had happened.
I was twenty-eight years old and was in the Italian backstreet lodging of the girl I had been courting for some weeks. Even at this remove, I find it hard to name her, to utter those three syllables without pain; so I’ll have to call her L. It being wartime—which is how I’d got the pistol wound—we had also slept together. As I stood there, I had the impression that the chest of drawers, the dull eiderdown on the bed, and the walls of the room had become iridescent. Even the thin blind seemed to be glowing. I glanced about to see if there was an overturned lamp; then I looked at her, leaning towards a mirror as she completed her preparations for the evening, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a white handkerchief. She stopped, turned round, looked at me and smiled. I took a step back. All evening she carried that light in every room we seemed to shimmer through.
* * *
A FEW HOURS after the hooker had left, I had a feeling that my encounter with her had not been unnoticed. It was not just the way the super cleared his throat when I went out or the way the bartender in my usual place raised his eyebrow as he poured the drink; even the panhandler in the doorway seemed to be smirking as he eyed me. And the next day I thought I’d better get out of New York.
It suited me quite well to leave. I had come to the city for a medical conference and had listened to a number of speakers in the halls of Columbia in Upper Manhattan. Such was the surplus weight of sponsorship money from drug companies that the junior delegates had been shifted at the last minute from bed-and-breakfast inns round Murray Hill to rooms in the Plaza Hotel. I found myself on a high floor with a barnlike suite, which was of little use to me. The whole place seemed less like a hotel than a monument to construction work. I wrestled vainly with the air-conditioning controls; at night the plumbing in my unused sitting room sighed and muttered like the brain of an exhausted lunatic.
When the conference ended, I decided to extend my stay by moving into Jonas Hoffman’s apartment. I had met Jonas after the war in medical school in London, where he had arrived on some American magic carpet of GI Bill or Rhodes scholarship. Our friendship had survived the fact that he had become rich by taking anxious women through their past lives in his Park Avenue consulting rooms while I was still in Kensal Green, in a house that was a short walk from the necropolis. The fees from these long hours of listening had enabled Hoffman to take on the apartment from whose spare room I could see the turning colors of the autumn trees while reading the newspaper in bed.
* * *
MY FLIGHT TO London had been called, so I gathered my briefcase and left the anonymity of the lounge—not without a pang, I confess; I wasn’t eager to confront what lay outside its vacuum. I wondered how many hundred times I had gone through the doorway of an airliner, touching its hinge and rivets as I ducked my head and summoned a smile for the cabin staff with their primly folded hands. In my seat by the window, I swallowed a sleeping pill and opened a book. The aircraft backed off the stand and idled along on its plump tires; then it changed into a different beast as it surged madly down the runway, pushing me against the back of the seat.
My fellow passengers were soon opening their puzzle books or gazing up at the bulkhead to watch the film. My seat was at an awkward angle, so the light striking the screen made the characters appear in colored negative, like oil in water. The passenger in front seemed gripped enough by it as he sat forwards and munched through his bag of nuts.
After a couple of gins, I felt the sleeping pill dissolve in my bloodstream; I pulled down the blind, arranged a thin blanket over me, and told the stewardess not to wake me with the tray at dinnertime.
The night flight had coughed me up by six thirty at Heathrow, and the day ahead looked endless as the taxi drove me through the gray backstreets of Chiswick. When I let myself into the house, I was tempted to go straight to bed but knew from experience that it would make matters worse. Mrs. Gomez, the cleaner, had piled up three weeks’ post on the hall table. I went through it quickly, looking to see if there was anything in Annalisa’s handwriting, but there was only one envelope that wasn’t typed or printed. I tore it open and saw a note on plain paper:
Dear Mr Hendricks, we have just moved into the top floor flat and we are having a party on Saturday night. Please do look in if you feel like it. From 8. V. informal. Sheeze and Misty.
I had the ground and lower ground floors of the house, which was larger than the average for the area. The first floor had been occupied for more than twenty years by a Polish widow, but the top floor was in constant flux. Something about their names made me think the new people were Australian. I guessed it would be noisy and they wanted to forestall my objections; presumably they had also invited poor old Mrs. Kaczmarek.
In the study was my recently acquired telephone answering machine. I had tested a number in the shop and had chosen this one because it took normal-size cassettes and its three clearly marked buttons made it easy to operate. I could tell from the time it took to rewind that it was almost full. A peculiarity of the machine—perhaps a mistake in the way I had set it up—was that it always replayed my greeting before it played the incoming messages: “This is Robert Hendricks’s answering machine…”
My voice always displeased me. It sounded sandpapery yet insincere; it had something of the simper in it. I sat down with a pad and a pen as the tape rewound and braced myself for my own familiar and irritating tones: I had the narcissist’s dread of myself as others heard me.
But what came out of the machine was a woman’s voice: “We know what you did, you filthy bastard. We know what you did to that poor woman. No wonder you ran out of New York.”
It was no one I recognized. She had an American accent and seemed to be in her fifties or older. I went out into the hallway and waited for it to stop; I didn’t want to erase it for fear of wiping others at the same time. I didn’t hear the squeal that meant a new message was beginning, but eventually there were deeper, male tones in the study. I went back. It was my voice: the usual greeting that concluded with the assurance that I’d ring as soon as … Then the callers began.
“Hi, Robert, it’s Jonas. I’m sorry I missed you in New York. The thing in Denver was a king-size pain in the ass. I’d have had more fun pouring liquor down you at Lorenzo’s. Call me some time.”
There came the regular high-pitched sound, then another message: “Dr. Hendricks, it’s Mrs. Hope here, Gary’s mother. I know you say to ring the secretary, but he’s been bad again…”
I sat down at the desk and picked up the pad. There were fourteen more messages, all quite normal. When I had noted down any details that needed my attention, I scrubbed the entire tape. Then I pressed Play to make sure my greeting was intact. Sure enough, it whirred and spoke: “This is Robert Hendricks’s answering machine…”
I couldn’t understand how the abusive female caller had bypassed my greeting.
* * *
I WOKE UP in the middle of the night in a rage of jet lag. I enjoy these surges; it’s as though you’ve absorbed some of the kinetic energy of Manhattan. I went into the kitchen and made a pot of tea. One thing I like about Americans is that they take themselves seriously. You don’t need deep roots or self-deprecation in New York; you have a brass plate on the door, a diploma, a position—you’re ahead of the huddled masses who’ve just ridden in from Kennedy. And they’re right to think this way. Your life is a small thing, but why should you not value it? No one else will.
With a mug of tea, I went to the desk and started opening the accumulated letters addressed to Robert Hendricks, MD, MRCP, FRCPsych. That looked like a career. There was nothing provisional or fake about those qualifications; they had been gained by graft and time—by a certain dedication in a field where few had the heart to persevere. I wondered whether it was a peculiarly English trait to feel like an impostor all one’s life, to fear that at any moment one might be rumbled—or whether this was a common human failing. And, really, as a practicing psychiatrist, I should have known.
I fetched my briefcase and put the hotel bill and a couple of business cards ready for filing. As I opened a drawer onto the pile of papers I could never face, I saw a letter that had baffled me when I received it a few weeks earlier. It was from France, postmarked “Toulon,” and was written in ink by an elderly hand.
Dear Dr. Hendricks,
Please forgive me for writing to you out of the blue, but I have something that I think may be of interest to you.
During the First World War I was in the British army, serving as an infantryman on the Western Front. (I also served as medical officer in the Second, by the by.) I have spent my working life as a neurologist, specialising in old people’s ailments—memory and forgetting, and so forth. As I near the end of my own life—I am very old now, and have been unwell for some time—I have been trying to set my papers in order. In the course of this task I came across references in some old diaries to a man with the same somewhat unusual surname as yourself. He was in my Company from 1915 to 1918.
I had not looked at this diary for decades, but something about his name rang a secondary bell, as it were; and then I remembered. There was a book I had much admired when it came out some fifteen years ago by one Robert Hendricks—The Chosen Few. I went to my shelves and pulled it down. You can perhaps picture my excitement when I examined the small author photograph on the back flap and found that it brought back to mind quite clearly the face of a young soldier I had known so many years ago.
My excitement intensified when I sat down to reread the book—which I did in a single sitting, through the night. In chapter five I came across a reference made by the author— you yourself, I believe, Dr. Hendricks—to the fact that his father had been a tailor—as was true of the man I had known in the war.
There was more in this vein, ending with an invitation to visit him. His name was Alexander Pereira, and he was apparently offering me a job.
* * *
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I went for a walk on Wormwood Scrubs. On the way, I collected Max, my long-legged terrier cross, from the cleaner’s flat in Cricklewood, where he’d been during my absence. Although he was spoiled by Mr. Gomez—who I suspected fed him on paella and biscuits—he was always touchingly pleased to see me; I had rescued him when he was a puppy from a pound in Northamptonshire, and he seemed to nurse a keen sense of gratitude.
We walked round the perimeter of the Scrubs, returning on the long south side by the prison officers’ houses, then the jail itself. I gave half a thought to the wretched men inside, banged up in the warped dimension of institutional time. But only half a thought. Mainly I was wondering whether Annalisa might be free in the afternoon. The odd thing about “relationships” is that it’s often only in retrospect that you seem to have developed one. At the time it may feel more like a series of meetings: a sequence without causality. It was only the possibility of not seeing Annalisa that made me stop and think how much space the idea of her was occupying in my life. For some reason I couldn’t acknowledge the depth of this feeling or call it by a better name.
It was agreed that I would never ring her in case her “boyfriend” picked up the phone, but she was free to call me and frequently did. I shoved Max into the back of the car and went to a telephone box just outside the Scrubs car park. I could pick up recorded messages remotely by dialing my own number and pointing a gadget into the mouthpiece of the receiver as the greeting played. I heard my voice and fired the remote. There were no messages.
Annalisa and I had met some five years earlier, at the osteopath’s in Queen’s Park where she worked as a receptionist. I had had problems with my back since a growth spurt in my teens had left the lower spine unstable; the big muscles felt they needed to go into protective spasm at the least provocation (bending down to turn on the television had once been enough to trigger it). I had tried exercises, painkillers, and yoga, but the only sure relief was a violent manipulation from a New Zealander called Kenneth Dowling.
Annalisa was in her forties, a good-looking woman of apparent respectability, dressed in a smart skirt and sweater. It was not until my third visit that I noticed something in her eyes—a dreamy light at odds with the desk diary and the receptionist’s manner. While we waited for Dowling to free up the previous patient, I talked to her about work and whether she had a long commute. She had a pleasant manner and seemed keen to talk, as though not many people bothered to engage with her. At the end of another visit, I lingered after writing out the cheque. I discovered that she wasn’t needed by Dowling on Tuesdays and Fridays; I mentioned that I could do with an assistant in my private practice, someone to deal with paperwork, and asked if she would be interested.
I did my private consulting from a flat in North Kensington above a convenience store run by Ugandan émigrés. It was not a glamorous location, though it fairly reflected the status of my speciality within British medicine. It was at least a quiet street, and the consulting room itself was airy. There was a kitchenette and shower room as well as a small back office, once a bedroom presumably, where I kept a filing cabinet—and in which I now installed Annalisa at a desk. I disregarded what seemed a gratuitous brushing against me as she went to file some papers; I ignored the way she made no attempt to pull down her skirt when it rose up her thigh as she sat at the desk. People talk about “tension” as though it were palpable, but you can never be certain what’s actually shared and what’s in your imagination.
It must have been on her third day at work that things became obvious. I was standing behind her when she deliberately took a half step back. There was contact. She turned round and touched the front of my trousers at the point where our clothes had met. I imagine it was less than a minute before we were engaged in the act. There was a fractional swelling at her belly; the backs of her thighs had lost the firmness of youth—though I found these signs of frailty both touching and arousing when she leant over the desk.
Annalisa had been married once and now had a long-term connection with a man in his fifties called Geoffrey; she was attached to him and unwilling to jeopardize their domestic life. This Geoffrey was a property lawyer, who, from Annalisa’s description, sounded—I thought—homosexual. I never said so; there was no point in unsettling the arrangements.
That Saturday evening, I took a long bath and drank some gin with vermouth and ice. Then I thought I would go to the party upstairs. I could tell it had begun because the music was trickling down the stairs, though it was nothing yet to frighten Mrs. Kaczmarek. In fact, I’d noticed that the noise from the top-floor flat had changed recently. Ten years earlier the house had shaken with apocalyptic thunderings; now the songs seemed machinelike and unthreatening. I didn’t care for any of it, but this latest sound was easier to deal with, like the background tape at a business convention.
The door was opened by a smiling girl with black-rimmed eyes and hair that looked dyed blond. “Hiya. I’m Misty. Come in.”
She fetched me some wine from one of a variety of bottles I could see lined up on the kitchen counter.
“There you go. Château Oblivion.” She had the cheery Australian inflection I’d foreseen, as did “Sheeze,” the flatmate who came bounding up next. Misty was shorter and prettier, with neat little features and flawless skin where Sheeze’s face was blotched; in other respects they were like twins, with blue eyes and the undimmed hopefulness of youth. They looked as though they expected to be happy.
Their friends were also young, accomplished, and confident, or so it seemed to me. The music was getting louder, but I could still hear all right as I introduced myself to a circle of strangers and began that cycle of self-revelation and licensed curiosity. I didn’t like to tell people what I did because it seemed to unsettle them; I said I worked in general practice, and that was well received. Then I tried to steer the conversation towards less personal topics: a curious item I’d heard on the radio or a film that had just come out.
I had never been quite certain what was expected from me at parties. Growing up in the English countryside, I had been to village dances and people’s houses for birthdays or at Christmas. Some of these evenings, like the one at which I kissed Paula Wood, could be quite louche, even then, back in the thirties. Often there was an occasion or event: a tennis tournament at the recreation ground or a village fete at the big house. In the summer, people would slope off into the darkness, and there seemed always to be rhododendrons for cover. I remember the glowing cigarettes, laughter, the rustling leaves underfoot, and the feel of a cool bare thigh.
“Robert, come and meet a friend. This is Mandy. She’s a nurse.”
Perhaps it was the medical connection that made my hostess think I would get on with her friend. This nurse was a woman who made it easy for me because she talked without stopping. I presumed there was a complicated argument that needed to be built up. But after my attempts at helping her to focus had been rebuffed, I saw that she had no point to make; she was merely scared of silence.
Soon the music had reached a point where conversation was no longer possible, except in the narrow kitchen. Thinking it rude to leave before ten o’clock, I checked my watch and resigned myself to fifteen minutes jammed up against the washing machine. I talked to a young man in a red check shirt who said he was a tree surgeon, and to his brother, who was a travel agent.
It seemed to me that they were both drunk. They were friendly towards me in a puzzled way, as though surprised that I would choose to come to a party. I felt a rush of envy at what I presumed of their domestic life: a commotion of willing girls with young breasts and white teeth.
“So I just put the client on hold while I dial up the airline and photocopy the schedule,” said the travel agent, helping himself to red wine. “It’s not exactly brain surgery.”
“It’s not even tree surgery,” I said.
Neither brother registered my attempt at wit, and when I turned to refill my own plastic glass I found myself face to face again with the nurse.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. “Do you take private patients?”
I looked at her closely—the dilated pupils, the glassy irises. “No, I don’t.”
She pressed her hand against my chest. I feared she might be going to vomit, but it seemed she was merely steadying herself.
“I know someone who needs help. He has this terrible depression and—”
“I told you. I’m a GP. I don’t do that stuff.”
“Oh. Because Misty said—”
“Forget what Misty said. I only met her a couple of hours ago.”
I elbowed and squeezed my way out of the kitchen, paused to thank Sheeze for the party, and made my way out onto the landing. Back in my own flat, I turned on the television and poured myself a deep whisky before sinking into the reclining armchair. The babel of the last hour fell from my shoulders; I lit a cigarette and put my head back. There was time to watch a film on tape, and halfway through it I would take a sleeping pill. When it was over I would block out the last of the music with wax earplugs, pull up the bedcovers, and set sail for the morning.
It was only twenty minutes later that there came a cautious knocking at my door.
“Can I come in?”
“How did you know I live here?”
It was the nurse, Mandy. “Misty told me.”
“Are you all right? Do you want a glass of water?”
She sat on the sofa in the living room and began to cry. “Sorry, Robert. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s just that because you’re older … and you’re a doctor. I’m in a mess.”
I sat down next to her. “How much have you had to drink?”
“I don’t know. I had some wine before I came to the party.”
“Do you want me to get you a taxi? Where do you live?”
“Balham. Can I stay here for a bit? I feel … the world’s spinning.”
“I’ll make you some tea.”
The important thing, I thought as I clattered kettle and cup, was to get this girl out of my flat as soon as possible. When I returned with the tea, I saw that she had taken off her shoes and put her feet up on the sofa. A strand of hair was stuck to the side of her face, and there were damp-looking patches showing through the soles of her nylon tights.
“I’ll ring for a taxi while you drink this.”
“I’ll get one on the street.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m sure I can. It’s not even eleven yet.”
If it came down to it, I thought, I would just take her back upstairs to her friends: she was their responsibility. Mandy pushed herself into a sitting position and bent down to pick up the cup, causing her skirt to ride up her heavy thighs.
I walked over to the window.
“Do you live alone?”
“No, I live with two other girls. But they’re not there. What about you?”
“Yes. Alone,” I said.
“You’re not married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Look, Mandy, why don’t we just get you into a taxi and safely back to Clapham?”
“Balham. What’s the hurry? It’s Sunday tomorrow. And I just … I need some company.”
“What’s your problem?”
There was a story about a man, some indignation, an attempt on my sympathy … but there was no connective logic and I tired of looking for it.
“… so I’m thinking, What about me? You know, isn’t it time I had a say in all this? And … What’s that?”
“Someone at the door. Someone else.”
I went to the hall and buzzed open the front door. It was Annalisa, and her face was so full of conflicting emotions that it made me shudder.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said, pushing past me into the hall and then the sitting room, not even pausing for a kiss.
She stopped and stared. I made an awkward introduction.
The events of the next minute seemed to play out like a cartoon, like the images on the screen of the plane from New York. There was shouting and there were accusations. Annalisa clearly thought I was about to sleep with the nurse and that I’d brought her down to my flat for that reason.
The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it’s a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.
Eventually, both women left. I sat down heavily on the sofa. I am so alone, I thought. All the connections I’ve made with people over more than sixty years of living can’t conceal the fact that I am utterly alone.
Copyright © 2016 by Sebastian Faulks