One

The book, her book, was bound in black, with the words North of Nowhere indented in worn gold on the spine. Dirty and dusty, the boards loose under the cloth, it resembled a kind of withered bat. I looked at it with vague distaste. Then, almost as if it had suddenly come to life, it slithered out of my grasp, jabbed my foot, bounced and splayed open. I picked it up. I didn't know then how dangerous fairy tales can be.

I was trying to separate my possessions from those of my wife, Georgina. A biography in books, this is why some people scan your shelves, in the manner of a Roman seer gazing at entrails. There were duplicate editions of T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare, of Beckett, Pinter, and Joyce. My own copies of Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Waugh jumbled up with her Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës...the male versus the female canon. The plays I had been in, with my parts underlined in lurid orange. Her university texts, with notes scribbled in pencil or biro. Then single volumes, signifying union: paperbacks stained with the oils of lost summers, whose cracked spines still released cascades of fine sand or faded blades of pale grass; hardbacks generously inscribed to mark birthdays or Christmas, passed from one to the other at bedtime as a preliminary to love; bound proofs of new books, battered ghosts of old ones. All of these, left to me to divide and put into boxes. She had taken the children's books, as she had taken the children. We had been separated now for over a year, and were getting divorced.

I had been astonished by how much suffering this had caused, and was now weary. My body had taken on a life of its own, in which it wept while I remained an embarrassed parent, unable to control its excesses. She had gone and I had stayed. It wasn't just because I'd been determined not to relinquish this house. I had been unable to do anything. Once a fortnight, I would emerge to buy groceries. Otherwise I slumped in an armchair, without hope or energy. Some days, I couldn't remember how to talk. On really bad days, I couldn't even walk either. Eventually, after a bout of snarling by lawyers, we had agreed to sell and split the proceeds. The new owners were people who would paper over the walls and drain the Japanese pond I had made in the garden (I had heard them agreeing on this in loud voices, when they walked round with the estate agent). Several other prospective buyers had dropped out even as they walked to the front door. I had heard stories of divorcees who had bought a dog just so it could crap over all the carpets and drive the price down, but my neglect wasn't calculated. I had given up washing anything, including myself. The small, synchronized actions to get to the bathroom were too much for me. I knew the new owners would think I was crazy anyway. People always think this of the person who lived in their house before them. It's a way of pretending you never existed.

In every room, packers were entombing our furniture, wadding it in transparent, silvery bubbles that, they assured me, would protect the most fragile of objects. If I stood still for long enough, there was even a chance they might do the same to me. I shivered. The front and back doors were open, the heating switched off. What had been my life, our life, was finally ebbing from this place. Already, the house was acquiring a hollow sound, motes swirling in weak sunlight as if the very atoms of my existence were being sent into Brownian motion. There was nothing but boxes and dust, and these, too, would go--a ghostly picture here, a chair there, wiped out, painted over, forgotten.

I turned over the book I held. The pages were spotted like elderly hands. I began to read, mechanically.

"At least tell me the way," she said, "and I will seek you--that I may surely be allowed to do?"

"There is no hope, not unless you wear out an iron staff and a pair of iron shoes in searching," said he. "The troll witch lives in a castle which lies East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and there too is her daughter the princess with a nose three ells long, and she is the one I now must marry."

Then the girl fell into a deep, deep sleep; and when she awoke there was no prince or castle, only a little patch of green on which she lay and the great dark wood all around. By her side was the same bundle of rags that she had brought with her from her own home.

Why should these words have affected me so deeply? Perhaps it was seeing my own home vanish, like that of the girl in the story. Perhaps it was knowing that I was heading North of Nowhere, too. Or perhaps it was the drawing beside it, occupying almost the whole page, and executed in black ink. There was an ornate frame just inside the margin of white, made of intertwined thorns, and then the illustration itself.

What I saw was a girl, waking up in a tiny clearing almost completely overgrown by black brambles and branches. There was no visible way out, just a shaft of sunlight coming down on her like a spotlight in a theatre. Her face was a white wedge of misery. The darkness pressed in upon her, wave on wave of chaotic, seething undergrowth: yet was repulsed. You could tell, I don't know how or why, that this wasn't going to be the end of the story, that she was going to get up and put on those iron shoes and find the happiness she had lost. She looked the way I felt, or wanted to feel.

High on an empty bookcase, a telephone rang. It would not be cut off until noon. I closed the book with an effort and thrust it into the pocket of my jacket.

"Oh, hi, hi, it's me. I was just wondering how you are." This was Diana, one of several single women who had decided that my emotional, psychological, and gastronomic well-being was of particular concern to her. Diana was the most persistent.

"Fine."

"I just wanted to know if there's anything I can do. I could get a couple of hours off work, to help you pack, you know? It must be so difficult for you."

"It's done. Thank you."

I forced myself to sound a little less churlish, and immediately a tin of syrupy concern oozed towards me.

"Are you sleeping OK? Eating? You know, any time you want something cooked, let me know. You need to look after yourself, Dick."

As I lied that I was not drowning but microwaving my Meals for One, the line began an insistent chirping. This was my excuse for ringing off, in case it was my agent.

"Hallo? It's Sarah? I suddenly realized you're about to have a new number. I'm having a drinks party next week. Would you like to come?"

They were all so hesitant, these Cinderellas of the mating game, it was difficult to see them as predatory. Something had gone wrong in their lives--they had worked too hard, or played too fast, or been too soft or stayed too long--and now they were desperate, strung out, seeking salvation at the eleventh hour before the biological clock struck midnight. It was not myself they wanted so much as any half-decent heterosexual husband. They had hearts overflowing with love, yet they woke up every morning and saw the gradual withering, the shriveling, the advance of age that only marriage and childbearing could make tolerable. I felt sorry for them, but fed up. I wasn't the solution to anybody's problem, any more than they were to mine.

Upstairs, the packers grunted. The tape they carried in large reels thrummed and shrieked; they would cut the right length with keys--keys, presumably, to their own homes. The dismantling of my own would not take much longer, I knew. Boxes were stacked like battlements on either side of me; I envisaged Georgina and myself crouched down behind our respective barricades like two feuding medieval barons, sniping at each other.

As if in response, the telephone rang again. My wife's voice. I imagined it being bounced down from space, as heartless and cheerful as a goddess speaking from her oracle. "How's it all going?"

I gritted my teeth, and tried to keep my voice even and light. Years of training, and in a situation like this I still start to hyperventilate. "Like a nervous breakdown in slow motion."

She laughed. All my life I had tried to be funny, and nobody laughed. Now I told the truth and everything I said was amusing.

"Bad luck."

"All these women keep ringing up. Single ones."

"Why don't you try going out with one of them?" said Georgie.

"There's always a reason why they're still single."

"Nonsense. They're lovely girls. Clever, pretty, successful, nice, good cooks--what more d'you want?"

"They aren't you."

I knew at once that I'd overstepped the invisible line that had to exist between us.

"Oh, Benedick, you are sweet. You never said anything as nice to me when we were married."

"We're still married."

A large part of my wife's attraction is that she treats my sex as though we're children to be managed. She used to enjoy this. Then she had Cosmo and Flora.

"You should be out there, enjoying your freedom."

I knew this was true. In fact my first reaction when she left me was a kind of elation. If you've been with the same person for most of your adult life, you can't help feeling curious. All those girls you haven't slept with, the parties you haven't gone to, the offers you've turned down.

A year ago, my new situation had seemed like a sort of holiday. Furious, but elated, I raced about going to films and plays and parties as if released from bondage. I had kept my wedding ring on, largely because it had become too tight to remove, but I was free. I would stand in front of the mirror, with the theme tunes to the James Bond movies playing very loud, drawing an imaginary gun from a holster. I could go to the gym, travel the world, buy designer clothes, have affairs--

It took about three months for this tawdry fantasy to come crashing down. Most of the people I knew were just as I was--exhausted, poor, harassed, and prematurely aged by parenthood. The unmarried looked better but behaved worse. Everyone who was still single came trailing a history of romantic disappointment. In my twenties parties had been casual, raucous, bring-a-bottle events. Now, as forty approached, there was champagne, cocaine, and utter desperation. I was actually frightened by the intensity with which I was pursued. One woman I had hardly even spoken to came up to me and said, "don't want a relationship. Let's just fuck."

I stopped going out, but not before my name and number had been entered in too many address books. Now Georgina had joined in the game of pairing me off. "What about Amelia de Monde?"

"You must be joking. The last thing I want is another divorcee. Or another hack, for that matter."

My wife ignored this. Just before she left me, she had been writing a column about her life, in which I had featured largely as a neurotic layabout who spent all our money on absurdities and left her to cope with the ensuing disaster. It was hugely popular--thousands of women apparently wrote to say their own lives were just the same. No, I did not want Amelia de Monde.