Solar

In what he considered layman's terms, he explained the recent excitement – not one electron for every photon, but two, and one day perhaps, even three! As she listened, she adopted the expression he always liked, a wry smile puckered into a pout that barely contained the pressure of a delighted laugh. But nothing he was saying was faintly amusing. She deserved better. So he began to tell her about his adventure on the train, and because he was still feeling bloated and overheated, suggested they move back to the sofa.

When he had told the story at the Savoy, he had drawn directly on his memory of the experience. Now there were three elements – the events as he recalled them, the fresher memory of his first account, and the desire to tell an after-di

Withholding information worked. At the right moment Melissa shrieked in amazement. She took his head between her hands and shook it and said, 'You idiot, you nincompoop! Oh, I wish I'd been there!' Still laughing, she fetched her wine, that same two inches, and then they kissed, and laughed together, and embraced. She pulled away and said, 'You thug!' and then, wonderingly, 'That poor fellow!'

Recovering at last, she moved closer beside him and said, 'But do you know, something just like that happened to Ivan – you remember Ivan in the shop?'

He did not care to hear about Ivan. He stood with some difficulty and, making a mock chivalrous gesture with open hand and faint bow, guided her towards the bedroom and there, in silence, undressed her. She liked to begin this way, naked while he was fully clothed. He knew nothing of such things but he was certain that in some other century she would have been considered the ideal of feminine beauty, of perfection in a welcoming softness of form. Narrow at the shoulder, swelling to the hip, heavy breasts, two dimples at the base of her spine above generous buttocks. He kissed these dimples now. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and she turned and lowered herself to sit astride his thighs, arms looped around his neck. She nuzzled and kissed his forehead, he kissed her breasts. But such beauty was not weightless. A fiery pain in his dodgy knee was intensifying, and he thought he had less than a minute before the next move, before a ligament tore from its anchoring in the bone. But she was telling him she loved him, she was whispering how she loved him, and he had to wait.

Finally, with a moan that passed for passion, he took her in his arms and lowered her on her back on the bed, and drew back the duvet for her. The bedroom was cooler than he would have liked. He was out of his own clothes with long-practised speed and lying beside her, caressing her in a ma

'…like loving someone you've never met, but that's not it either. We have met, we've always known each other, right from the begi

She had drawn him towards her, and they were making love. Plaintively, she repeated, 'Say you will, please say you will €¦' until it was indecent not to comply, and he said, 'I will,' and he kissed her and thought that perhaps he was not lying because he did not know the future and it was not entirely inconceivable that, in his own way, he might love this child, if it ever existed, and whatever he said now, time and events would scramble, and lovemaking was an enclosed, enchanted world with its own language and rules, its own truth.

She took her pleasures easily, she was a loud, big-hearted lover of the back-clawing school, which was to his taste, but not tonight. As they bucked and turned, and her silky skin turned slick and her cries grew louder in his left ear, he found he could no longer abandon himself completely, and he was troubled, distracted. He wished she had not reminded him of her pregnancy. After many uncountable minutes, the moment was approaching when sexual etiquette required that he time himself, get in step with the shrieking downhill dash to her final orgasm, and he knew he was not ready and might not make it. And so, in those closing seconds, he entered a familiar empty theatre, sat in the stalls and auditioned some women he knew, bringing them onstage in merging sequence at the impossible speed of thought. They appeared in experimental attitudes, in different tableaux that magically involved himself. He summoned and dismissed the girl from Milan, then an Iranian biophysicist, and then Patrice, an old stand-by. But at last he settled on the right choice, the immigration officer with the withered arm. He let her step out coolly from behind her station, and there they stood, fucking against her desk in front of five hundred bored passengers ready with their passports. To Beard, sex in public among indifferent lookers-on was a fantasy of unaccountable appeal, and it worked. He made it just in time.

When he returned from this affair to Melissa's bed, she was kissing his face and saying, 'You're my darling. Thank you. I love you. Michael, I love you. You dear, dear man.'

He thought it was a police helicopter that disturbed him as it hovered a couple of streets away, but by the time he was fully awake it was receding northwards across the rooftops and it was a neighbour's deep-throated dog making all the noise. His hand was tangled in Melissa's hair, her right leg was crossed over his. He extricated himself, then lay waiting while she murmured in her sleep on a querulous note. When she was settled he slipped out from under the covers. There was never much darkness in a city bedroom and he crossed quickly to the door and went naked along the hallway to the bathroom.