OLD ACQUAINTANCE

'How do you fancy a dirty weekend?' said my mother.

'When?' I asked guardedly.

'Christmas,' she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

'Where?' I probed, the scent of rat strong in my nostrils.

'Bournemouth,' she confessed, 'but it's a very nice hotel, excellent food, impeccable service, gets a good write-up in all the best magazines...'

'Teeth been giving you trouble lately, mother?' I asked, full of concern and suspicion.

'Well, of course I don't normally read that kind of magazine, Josie, but in the brochure they do quote a bit - '

'Why, mother?' I fixed the mouthpiece with a beady-eyed stare.

'Well, you know - '

'Why, mother?' The thumbscrew was biting. From the crackles on the line, I judged she had the flex three times round her hand already. Out of respect for her circulation I didn't push the matter any further.

'It's your father's back,' she dropped like a pebble into the pool of silence that was welling up between us.

'From the beginning,' I said.

'Your father and I stayed at this hotel thirty-three years ago - '

'And you wanted to go back to see if they'd changed the bed - or the menu - '

'And it meant a great deal to your father - '

'The menu? The bed? ---I wasn't--was I?'

'You can count, can't you dear? You don't need me to tell you how old you are, do you?'

There are times when I can see where I get it from.

'I hope you're not confusing me with an elephant, dear, they're the ones with a gestation period of three years, which explains why they need such good memories - '

'So it was Paul?'

'Possibly. Anyway, your father likes to think so - romantic old fool.'

'Mother, I'm shocked to hear you talk about my father like that.'

'Yes, well, perhaps romantic is a bit strong, but then stupid certainly isn't adequate - however, our stay at this particular hotel was in many ways one of our most successful times - the back trouble set in shortly afterwards - '

'Which is no doubt why my father never picked me up and cuddled me like a normal daddy.'

'Now, dear, you know your father's not very good at showing emotion in public - '

'Only in hotel rooms.'

'Shush! You don't know the half of it. If I ever do any of this again, I shall demand artificial insemination for a clear separation of fun from function. Be warned by me, Josie.'

I'd always wondered why I'd been christened Josephine. It had never seemed like a family name before. You live and learn. Actually, most people don't.

'So father was insisting on reliving the past, but isn't up to it physically? And you've got a room booked? With all the trimmings? The champagne in the shower? The early morning whisky? The freesias in the toilet?'

'Please, Josie, don't be vulgar.'

'Sorry, Mum. Loo. But that's the size of it?'

There was a pause that made me think I'd forgotten to pay the last phone bill.

'The bridal suite,' she said, with a kind of embarrassed improbability in her voice.

'So of course you thought of me?'

'Christmas is a family occasion - '

'So is a funeral - '

'Christmas is a family occasion - '

'Do you want me to start one?'

'Josie, I don't know if this is what they call alternative humour, but in actual fact you're being particularly tiresome, especially when I'm really trying to do you and Jake a favour. Your father and I are going to Spain - '

'So why can't we have your house? My home? Why are you fobbing us off with a broom-cupboard in an antediluvian flophouse in Eastbourne?'

'Bournemouth. And it's a four-star antediluvian flophouse, where the broom-cupboard has a view of the sea and the gruel rates a rosette in Michelin. Besides, you know your father can't stand the smell of Jake's cigars - '

'He's given up. It's his jeans.'

'It's probably his bloody after-shave, if the truth were known. Or his politics. Anyway, it lingers.'

Strangely enough, this was the excuse my flat-mate Serena offered for not liking him. Collusion? I wondered - Serena and my mother communicating via the Prestel modem that always flickered share-prices at me, when all I wanted was a crispy noodle without the wait? I couldn't stand Serena's computerised dockland yuppy (who'd given her the modem), but I didn't tell her to go to the Isle of Dogs. Her attitude to Jake, though, was seriously damaging the ozone layer. And too much air-freshener taints the turkey.

'Okay,' I said, 'when does it start, and what's it really like?'

'The Saturday before Christmas - don't worry, you'll get your Christmas dinner, too, and your stuffing - '

There was a pause, as if she knew what she'd said, but didn't want to let on that she did.

' - they'll kick you out after the holiday, when the trains start running again.'

I wondered whether to tell her about the red M.G., but she'd only have asked which wheel was actually paid for.

'And what's it like?'

'It's the sort of place where one has a wedding reception: large, draughty, confusing in its layout, full of corners for canoodling with bridesmaids, plenty of places to get lost in and have little family rows- '

'You sound as though you speak from experience - I thought you and Daddy - '

'Never you mind what we did. You may be a little bastard, but you are legitimate. No - it's just that there was this huge do there when we stayed, and it all went hideously wrong. I never got the full story, but there were all these maiden aunts weeping in corners and fainting in the loos, and assorted tweedy uncles having a couple of whisky flankers whilst they ordered the rounds, because they were so upset. Really. If the cardigans the women were wearing hadn't looked quite so terrible, I'd have asked them what was wrong. There was a pretty sharp wine-waiter there, Len, and he told me that the groom was supposed to be flying back from somewhere out East, but he'd been delayed, so they were having the reception anyway, because it had all been booked, and halfway through the egg mayonnaise the news broke that he was missing, presumed dead. Took away their appetites, and no mistake. But at least your father and I didn't have to pay for dinner that night, thanks to crafty Len - '

'A sort of reverse Hamlet - the marriage feast turns into the funeral banquet - '

'Josie, love, spare me the literature - I know you're frustrated by being a medical secretary and not a great writer, but I've got to go and rub your father's back - '

'You rub my back, and I'll - '

'It's called the Egremont. Look it up in the phone book. Byee.'

'Happy Christmas,' I said to the dead line. Serena's modem crackled, and told me it was a good time to invest in traditional companies. So I rang Jake.

'Hi, Josie,' he answered. His voice was better than his personality - more comforting and reassuring. Almost as good as his smell. When I was very young, I used to sniff my father's gardening clothes - often the nearest I got to the old b. I think they were his father's discarded suits - never a one to throw things away - and they smelt of offices, and stationery, and pipe-tobacco, and the lavender polish my grandmother used, and creosote and earth and onions. And sweat. But that was then. I'm not sure my father has a smell of his own at all nowadays. Except for the back-rub.

But Jake smells of being forty and still a hairy, with little round glasses. He could have been an extra in Woodstock, except that he'd already immigrated to England to escape the draft. He had to explain all this to me, because I'd no idea what it meant. But then I was five at the time. And I'm not as bad as my mother where historical consciousness is concerned. Whenever they show an old newsreel, the best critical comment she can manage is 'I used to do my hair like that.' One of these days I'll discover she had the same coiffure as Adolf.

As I say, Jake has to tell me a lot. But I don't necessarily believe everything he says.

'Sure. Sounds great. Really great.'

See what I mean?

'Jake, love, Christmas is coming, the wallet's getting thin - your wife - '

'My ex-wife.'

'Your ex-wife is going to come down heavily on you for presents for the kids. My landlord has just bought himself a second BMW. Who knows what the New Year holds? This way, we can at least be alone together for a few days without any worries. And without any aerosols.'

When I heard him laugh, I knew I'd got him.

'An olfactory cripple, that Serena.'

'Doesn't know a good man when she smells him.'

'Bournemouth does have a train-station, doesn't it?'

'What happened to the M.G. ?'

'A casualty of the producer's indecision. I'll tell you all about it.'

And he did. All the way from Waterloo. I listened most of the time.

'The growth area in journalism is forgotten wars - well, conflicts -that's the jargon word for them. They're great on two counts: one, they really show up the flabby white underbelly of superannuated imperialism, which is what the Lefties in the BBC want; and two, they remind people of the need for a standing army to go and muddy the waters wherever the natives are getting a bit uppity and starting to think they can think for themselves. And you can imagine who that pleases. So - '

I do like Jake; but he is one of the few people who actually speaks sentences where you can hear the semicolon.

' - there's a market in the things. Korea, they've done. Australian involvement in 'nam, they've done. Cyprus is still too messy - the fan is going round, and there's plenty more shit in the bucket. What did they call it in Cyprus? The Troubles? No, that was Ireland - you wouldn't remember, you're too young - '

'I wasn't even a crick in my daddy's back,' I said, but Jake was flowing.

' - the Mau-mau in Kenya, well, we don't want to offend Kenya - I think that was called a Crisis, but maybe I'm confusing it with Suez. Really imaginative use of language: you invade another country, with a couple of allied nations, and then you call it your crisis! Crisis Almighty!'

I'd been looking out of the window for quite a while by now, watching the way that other railway lines peeled off ours and looped over and round and back under and away, like cat's cradle. Without noticing it, I'd slipped into the state of disorientation that precedes travel-sickness, where you feel that you're stationary, and the rest of the world is swirling past you, a great porridge of ploughed fields and winter-stripped trees being stirred into a whirlpool before it goes down the plughole at the centre of the universe. My stomach and I were about to follow it, when I saw something to hang on to.

It was a railway line that wasn't. It had been, but now it was a curving trench that passed beneath us and went away to the West, cupped protectively around the still green undergrowth. It was a channel for my thoughts: where did it go? how still it would be! how unnoticed! how secretly it would pass under roads, across fields, past the backs of houses! no one would ever know it was there, with no trains to make noise on it any more - ' - Now in Malaya the problem was the Communist Chinese guerillas - Chinese, what's Chinese? - well, that's a problem for a start - were they natives, had they been imported, were they just the Chinese who'd always been around in Malaya and were scared of the Malays turning xenophobic on them, like the Chinese in 'nam after we left - '

'We?' (You see, I wasn't asleep, and I hadn't gone all the way along the abandoned railway line.)

'All right, they -' (It was actually very cruel of me to do that, since Jake had big guilt feelings about having been sensible. My view is that if you were too young to vote for them, then you can't be bound by what they decide. But then I haven't got class-mates with half their heads shot away.)

'- Anyway, they'd fought against the Japanese, so that's probably how they got the guns. Now the trouble with resistance fighters is that you can never be sure who they're gonna resist - it might even be you - There was the - uh - Unpleasantness in Greece, f'r instance - - but, as I say -'

But even as he was saying, I was thinking about the Railroad Not Taken: all those possibilities - and the elaborateness with which these other dead lines departed from ours, so that you had no chance of guessing their ultimate destination. And I was thinking: suppose I'd been standing next to someone else in the queue for that Prom in August; suppose they hadn't been playing the Mendelssohn Midsummer-Night's Dream music; suppose old Beard and Bullshit hadn't said that he found the Wedding March really convincing and moving in that context (he said a lot of other things,too [well, he always does], but that was what got to me) - suppose - suppose we hadn't - suppose I was walking along that disused railway line, sheltered from all observation (even self-observation), pushing my way through the bushes, hacking my way through them, because there wasn't really a path, and they swung back and tore my face and caught my hair and clothes, and the effort was slowly sapping my strength, and I was lost and the path, that was the only one I could take, and wasn't really a path, was leading me straight to my enemies, who could walk through this stuff without a path, and it wasn't a channel to my heart's desire, it was a trap - 'I mean, the jungle, I mean, God, the jungle - and these kids just out of school - I mean, you had National Service, these weren't specially trained fighters - '

I could see them. They'd probably been to the greenhouses at Kew, just to get some idea of what it was going to be like. Perhaps the officers had stayed a bit longer in the steam room at the Turkish baths. No doubt they thought of the jungle as resembling Auntie Ethel's front room when the whole family was round there on a winter afternoon for tea, and they were all talking too much to notice that the kettle on the hob was boiling furiously: it was steamy, and close, and full of high-pitched chattering, and you were surrounded by vaguely menacing, oversized houseplants. Only these didn't need their leaves sponged once a week.

' - If they got lost - I mean, they could go round and round and round and still be in the same place - I mean, do you know what that's like, round and round and round - and still lost - ?'

I knew. But I didn't tell him. I just nodded, and kept on looking for dead railway lines. I'd spotted one that had been turned into a road, quite suddenly, and I found it disconcerting.

'Round and round and round - I mean, when I was fifteen I got lost in some woods - that doesn't sound too bad - but the woods we have, it's two miles to the road if you take the right way, and sixty miles if you take the wrong one - you get lost, and there you are - '

'Or there you aren't,' I said to infuriate him. But there we were. Bournemouth. In that high, echoing station, like the nave of a very secular cathedral, open at both ends so there was nowhere for God to hide. We staggered out of the echo with our overfilled cases (perhaps we wanted to look respectable to the hotel staff), and a bright yellow taxi, with its doors open like a Venus fly-trap, gobbled us up smartly and spat us out again at the Egremont.

It was one of those glorious December days that make you feel the English climate is as obsessed with the notion of fairness as the English people: a committee of the months had decided that June, July and August had been having too good a time of it for too long, so they'd taken all the summer weather away from them and spread it out in dribs and drabs over the rest of the year.

Outside the Egremont (a blockish '30's building) a silver Rolls Royce was basking in the sun. The chauffeur, in his grey uniform and long brown boots, was sprawled with a kind of sexual negligence across the front seat, his long legs dangling on to the running board. With his peaked cap tilted forward over his eyes, he looked like a character out of D.H. Lawrence. He was studying a detailed map of the area, presumably to make sure he could find the honeymoon hotel.

We exchanged the brightness of the day for the subdued lighting of the hotel lobby. Despite the babble of voices and clatter of glasses from the rooms on either side, the receptionist spotted our entrance at once.

'Mr and Mrs - - ?' his voice piped up. I felt an unexpected pleasure in beating the bumbling Jake to it. After all, it was my surname that the room was booked in - my parents had left everything as it was. It seemed like a triumph for feminism that he had to be called by my name.

'If you'd care to leave your luggage, I'll see that it's taken up. I'm afraid the room is being used in connection with the reception at the moment. Perhaps you'd like to have a complimentary drink at the bar.'

He gestured. We smiled, and went where he directed us. As we turned, Jake muttered to me, 'What's he doing, giving her a quick one before she gets into the going away outfit?' He smiled roguishly, as though it was funny. Men are like that. Even the nicer ones. (I prefer to use the comparative.)

I was thinking about our room upstairs, where the bride was changing, and probably saying the last tearful goodbye to her mother. Acres of net curtain material rustling to the floor, probably standing up on its own like a phantom bride (unless she had the sense, taste, and money to go for one of the silk jobs that you could actually wear again without looking like the fairy on the top of the Christmas tree). My thoughts were ended by the wall of noise that we walked into in the bar. It was a wedding reception. Do I need to describe it? Women in hats you thought nobody wore any more; men in suits that must have seen their grandparents' weddings; bored, jelly-smeared children; adolescents eyeing up the talent; and all the normals comparing kids, cars and mortgages (a nice little two year old girl, costs £300 a month without rates and does 38 to the gallon), and how long it is before they can expect to start their mid-life crisis.

'What're you having?' asked Jake.

'Probably a breakdown,' I replied.

The barman who served him had a wolfish grin. He glanced across to me and nodded reassuringly with his eyebrows, as if to tell me that it was all right, and Jake wasn't having a quiet flanker. Was that the legendary Len, I wondered? He looked about the right age.

We took our drinks and hunted for a table. It was then that I noticed the jungle. Let me explain. As you came in the door of the hotel, the reception desk was straight ahead, the lift on one side of it, the stairs on the other. Large double doors led off the foyer to left and right. But the two rooms to which these doors gave access joined again round the back of the staircase. It was obviously a huge open space which was bar, dining room and ballroom, and you divided it up as required. And what they had used to divide it up was the jungle. I don't think I exaggerate. Huge square tubs of dark peaty soil, some of it topped with gravel, ran in a line down to the far wall, where there was a gap by the windows to let people through. They'd have needed a machete to get through anywhere else. Philodendron, monstera deliciosa, cissus antarctica, grape ivy, fatshedera, various kinds of Tradescantia, all clung and wound and rambled over trellises and each other. Between and among them glowed the lurid colours of the peacock plant, begonia rex, Joseph's coat and (what else at a wedding?) mother-in-law's tongue.

A small table nestled in under all this foliage, and we took it. It turned out to be not only a table but also a space invaders' machine, and I could see a constant battle in Jake's eyes between attending to me and following the electronic mayhem that they give you for free as an enticement.

'The fifties, you see,' he was saying, 'were just a quite different time, and that's what you have to get across - I mean, there'd just been this big war which seemed actually to have sorted quite a few things out - and - there were all these people who thought the rules still applied - sure, there was rock and roll and teddy-boys, but you could see they were just the exceptions, the anti-social elements - '

There was a woman on the far side of the room, all on her own against the dark panelled wall, and I could see she didn't belong either. She was enjoying it, though, in a sad kind of way. She smiled occasionally at all the animated people who were talking too loudly to other people they spent the rest of their lives avoiding. The longer I looked at her, the more familiar she seemed. Then I realised why. My mother had done her hair like that. I'd seen it in old photographs, grainy black and white ones from about the time Paul was born, or just before.

' - Real people, normal people, had their hair cut once a month regular, whether they needed it or not, maybe every three weeks - I don't know why, maybe because of the National Service or something, they all had it done, scalped up round the ears - nobody had beards - ' - he pulled at his, as if to make sure it was still firmly attached - 'but nobody! They were all so clean! All so well-scrubbed! God knows how they managed it, with English plumbing - '

'They took the coal out of the bath, and put it in the washbasin,' I said helpfully, and too softly for Jake to hear.

'None of your fancy perfumed soaps - carbolic - the smell of cleanliness - '

I was about to burst out laughing at Jake's vehemence, when I was suddenly aware of a scent in my nostrils. His rhetoric had never affected me that powerfully before. I sniffed again, and it was still there. Carbolic soap. Paul had used it, till his first girlfriend (aged ten) had told him it smelt like the stuff they used to disinfect their hamster's cage. There was no mistaking it. A smell from my childhood. Jake was in a kind of brown study, shaking his hands in abortive gestures as he wrestled with the next sentence and tried to shake off the mesmerising influence of the space invaders. I turned slowly to my left, to try and see where the smell was coming from. There was a rustle in the jungle and a young man's head peeped through.

He was very handsome, there was no doubt about that, even though his hair was cropped rather severely, and there was a look of extreme disorientation in his eyes, which he was fighting to master as he stared around the room. His glance fell on the woman who didn't belong, and stayed there. She was pouring out the rest of her Perrier water and didn't see him. But he kept on looking. There must have been thirty years between them. What was she for him? A mother figure? Jake goes on about my search for father-figures. He's jealous of my professor, the consultant at the hospital, elegant, grey-haired, sixty, a world-renowned expert on certain forms of cancer, married to a charming wife - all those things that Jake isn't. Perhaps he's right to be jealous. Maybe I understood the young man better than I thought.

There was another rustle in the jungle, and he was gone. I heard footsteps and thought, aha, he's going to come round to this side. But the woman who didn't belong had chosen this moment to get up and go to the loo. I downed my drink and followed her.

My instinct had not been wrong. When I pushed through the swing door, I saw her collapsed on a tubular metal chair beside the washbasin. Her face was grey. Her breathing was laboured. As I watched, it became steadier, and a little colour returned, but not enough. I knew, because I'd seen people in that state before. You can't help reading what you type, and you treat them that bit differently when they phone up or come in; you're gentler with them; you give them the appointment they want and make someone else wait.

'Can I help?'

'Thank you - I think I'm all right now - it's so funny - I thought I saw - someone I knew - but then, I've not been well lately, and not always seen things that were there - my doctor said I shouldn't really have come here, but I wanted to so very much - it has memories, you see - '

She had her handbag open, had taken out a compact and was powdering her nose - really! - the smell of the powder reminded me of those shopping trips with my mother to the big stores, where we went to the Ladies' Powder Room together. Her name was carefully written in indelible ink on the flap of her handbag: Miss Marchbanks, and an address in South London. The bag was very old in style, but carefully preserved. There was a strong scent of lavender, too, the sort of perfume you used to give your granny with a box of hankies.

'I do hope I'm not intruding,' I said.

'Not at all,' Miss Marchbanks replied, smoothing down her skirt. 'I feel a bit better now. I shall just go and finish my drink, and then go up to my room - not the one I wanted, they told me that was already booked, but a very nice one, anyway. I may well have dinner up there, too. Very good dinners they do here. Very good catering in general, in fact.'

She was clutching her room key, to make sure she had it. I noticed the number: 43. I noticed her hands: delicate, translucent. She wore one ring only, on the third finger of her left hand; it was a solitaire diamond, rather modest: clearly an engagement ring. She was in her mid-fifties, but seemed both older and younger.

'Perhaps we shall meet at breakfast, then,' I said politely, and held open the door for her.

I was a little longer than I had expected to be, and when I got back Jake was at our table, in my seat, so that he could survey the room for a change, with two fresh drinks. As I passed by Miss Marchbanks, I saw that she was looking at an old photograph she had taken from her handbag; it was upside down for me, but I could see that it was of a soldier, a young officer in a peaked cap, smiling reservedly and very handsome. I thought he must be dead. All the men in pictures like that are dead. It's what gives them their charm. That's why everyone buys those books of Wilfred Owen poems with his picture on the front, smiling at you out of the past. He won't get old, smelly and catarrhal.

'You okay?' said Jake.

'More or less,' I replied.

'There's this guy,', said Jake conspiratorially, 'he comes in here to buy a drink, and all he's got on him is pre-decimal money. Even the notes. Big white folding fivers. I intervened, because I reckoned he must be some poor colonial, like me, and needed help - he thought he could get a pint of beer for a shilling, or less! Makes you wonder where he's been. Specially with that hair-cut.'

'Where is he now?' I asked.

Jake nodded towards the far end of the room. There he was, hunched over his pint, staring at Miss Marchbanks. He was wearing a voluminous old-fashioned mackintosh that gave no hint of what clothes he might have on underneath. Too far away for me to smell the carbolic.

'I bought him the pint,' said Jake, 'seemed the least I could do for somebody who isn't particularly at home in the present-day. By the way, Len remembers your mother.' Jake smiled at the barman, as if to tell him he was passing on all the gossip he'd received. 'Says he's retired now, but they always get him back to work over Christmas - busiest time, apparently. Got some good stories - like the ball where the lock busted on the ladies' powder room door, and they all had to be helped out through the window in their big dresses. A lot of leg, he said, a lot of leg.'

Jake was smiling. I wondered how many pints had taken advantage of my absence.

'What does he have to say about my mother's?'

'Your mother's what? Oh - no - he remembers this young couple that he gave food to after the collapse of the wedding reception - he tells it like something out of Dickens, you know - the poor bride spent the night in the bridal suite on her own - think about that.'

I thought. Over on my left I was aware that the mysterious young man was shifting in his seat; he seemed to be getting up his courage to go across to Miss Marchbanks.

'And what did happen to the groom?' I asked.

'Malaya,' said Jake. 'The jungle. He was an officer.'

All of a sudden, there was a tremendous noise of shouting and applause. The room had been getting slowly emptier, but now a flood of people burst in. They must have been waiting in the lobby for the bride's triumphal sweep down the staircase in her going away outfit, and now they were jostling round her as she paraded through the remnants of the reception. I watched as a tide of humanity rushed in and sundered Miss Marchbanks from her mysterious admirer.

It was just like the sea: it swirled, paused, deposited its load of pebbles and shingle at various tables and seemed about to eddy and withdraw, taking the bride and groom with it like a couple of pieces of flotsam - a plastic bottle and a rubber ball. But in that momentary hesitation between the flow and the ebb a kind of whisper went round and the sea of people set solid as pack ice. They were all linking hands across their bodies. No one escaped. I saw Miss Marchbanks dragged to her feet (she tried to link hands with the radiator beside her to steady herself, but a vast lady in a floral dress got there first). Jake and I hardly survived any longer. We were all standing there, chained together in a human chain, arms crossed in a strait-jacket of corporate rejoicing.

It's not what you expect at a wedding; it's not even what you normally do at Christmas; but I suppose they felt that New Year wasn't that far away. Besides, there aren't many other ways in which the English can rejoice corporately: the hokey-cokey is definitely lower-class and can get a bit violent; if you start a conga, there's no telling where it's going to finish up; Circassian Circle and the Paul Jones require organisation and instruction; so, short of Ring-a-ring-a-roses, it's got to be Auld Lang Syne. It even turns up in Dickens, where Mr Micawber tries to interpret the second verse. This lot barely knew the first one. But they were determined that old acquaintance should not be forgotten.

By the time all the arm-pumping and mutual smiling was over, Miss Marchbanks had done a Houdini and was presumably off to her room. The admirer - Miss Marchbanks' young man, as I found myself wanting to call him - had managed to stay miraculously clear, but had been held back like a spectator at the Coronation by the linked arms in front of him. I watched him blend back into the jungle at the far end of the room.

Like surfers, Jake and I rode the surge of farewells out into the lobby, spun round in a flurry of confetti, grabbed our key from reception and went upstairs.

The minute we entered the room, before I could register the flowers on the bedside tables, the subtle lighting, or the perfume the bride had worn, Jake flung himself on to the bed with a flying leap and an animal grunt. There was such an almighty crack from the poor piece of furniture that I couldn't help going down on my knees to peer underneath and see what damage it might have sustained. The first thing I saw was the utility mark. Have you ever seen one? It's a sort of civilised version of the broad arrow. They put it on almost everything during the war and up to the end of rationing - 'to show they were things that were made to last' as my granny said to me when I was using a duster at her place that had been one of grandad's old vests, and I asked her what he'd been put inside for, because it had that funny mark on the label.

I was down there so long, Jake must have thought I'd gone Muslim.

'This is probably the very same bed,' I said, feeling rather tender towards it after the blow it had just taken. After all, it could have been me underneath Jake's flying body.

'You mean the one your parents - '

'No,' I said, 'don't be daft, Jake - they hadn't the money then to have the bridal suite - besides, it was occupied that night - even if only by one person.'

'Yeah,' said Jake, in that throaty voice which he thinks is sexy and I think sounds like laryngitis. He narrowed his eyes suggestively, which made him look like a very hairy pig. I felt I'd better speak out.

'Jake, darling, the only quick one we're going to have before dinner will be in the bar.'

'What d'you mean?'

'It's not going to be such a dirty weekend as we'd hoped. But it could be rather messy. I've started my period.'

I feel sorry for men sometimes. I think they probably really do mean quite a lot of those fine words they come out with, but when they try to put them into practice it all turns into heavy breathing and a grab for your breasts. Not that they don't have their own problems. After all, they're only trying to show you that you are desirable, and that they personally desire you, and are indeed desiring you at that and every other moment - which is pretty improbable really, but it's what they've said in the blurb so they have to stick to it. It's not respectable for a man to have a headache when it matters. Was it ever any different? Well, I don't imagine Petrarch ended any sonnets with 'Get 'em off!', but then I don't think he got close enough to Laura to do anything about it anyway, so it doesn't really prove a thing. As for carbolic-scented young men with utility marks on their behinds, I doubt if they were any different when you got down to it, though they may have taken longer to get down to it.

Poor Jake's face crumpled like a balloon on Twelfth Night. So I started kissing him all over it, and it plumped up again in no time. In fact, we had such a good cuddle we were nearly late for dinner.

Like some wines, Jake and I are at our best with food. And when the food is good, we are quite unbeatable. We appreciate the perfect serving of a perfect meal as a real Gesamtkunstwerk. Give us a good wine and a good waiter into the bargain, and paradise is regained for a couple of hours. We don't just talk about the food - if it's that good, you don't need to say much about it - we talk about the other diners, about other delicious meals we've had, about the waiter, even about ourselves (a subject we usually avoid). The conversation can get metaphysical, because the physical side is being so perfectly taken care of. And Len was every bit as good as my mother remembered.

After it was all over, we rose rather gingerly and went for a walk. Somehow, the darkness surprised us. We wondered what had happened to the summer day we had left outside, and where the time had gone. Lights drew us into a shopping mall, and we wandered idly up and down outside a huge furnishers, laughing at the names they gave to their beds, settees and wardrobes. There was a whole range of divans named after Great Writers which Jake found particularly amusing.

'Are you gonna want to sleep on top of Shakespeare? If they'd called it Hathaway I could have understood - have they got matching bed-linen? pillow-case designs called Othello and Desdemona?'

Sometimes Jake seems to forget that I'm the one with the degree in English. Also, when he makes a good joke he tends to trample round on it.

'Wordsworth - but it doesn't have a daffodil pattern - Tennyson - yeah, well Tennyson always did send me to sleep - Marlowe - that's the one with the spring that comes up and stabs you in the heart - hey, where're you going?'

It wasn't just the orange-squeezing approach to humour. I'd suddenly thought about other couples coming to look in the window and not laughing, because they were choosing things for a new home together. Why, they'd even have been proud of the utility mark on the back.

In the hotel lobby, they hadn't swept up the confetti yet.

'Christmas!' said Jake. 'What a time to have a wedding! At least you're not so likely to forget the anniversary, I s'pose.'

He looked at me, but I was silent. I was looking at the Christmas tree, which I hadn't noticed before. It was tucked round the corner, obviously to be out of the way of the wedding guests, and it looked a perfectly respectable tree, not too tall, not too short, the lights better than normal, the glass balls restrained, one or two other ornaments, but nothing vulgar. Underneath it there was a pile of presents, neatly wrapped in colourful paper, and one or two small packets were balanced among the branches. I couldn't decide whether it made me happy or sad. Funny, the way we always want to recapture our childhood, even though we know it won't be the same. And who were the presents for? The staff? Then why have them in the lobby? The guests? Hardly. Were they really presents, or just empty boxes? How many years had they been waiting for somebody to claim them, sitting all wrapped up with nowhere to go, the names on the labels slowly fading?

I put my hand out behind me and Jake took it and drew me to him. We went upstairs with our arms round each other.

Even the subdued lighting couldn't disguise that the furniture in the bridal suite generally was 'd'un certain age' (as the French say so politely about women who're getting past it). As I undressed, I wondered how long it took before things that were merely old-fashioned became examples of a historical style, and how long it was after that before they actually became antiques, and therefore respectable.

Jake was in bed before me, his beard sticking out over the top of the sheet. There had been a time when we'd undressed each other, quivering with passion, taking turn and turn about. It didn't seem to happen any more. How much of a midsummer-night's dream can you expect to have left in December?

'Jake,' I said, as I climbed in beside him, 'does it never worry you that thousands of people have slept in this bed before?'

'How d'you mean?' he asked, blinking at me, having already taken off his glasses.

'Well,' I said, 'nobody buys a second-hand bed for their own home if they can help it, do they? Yet no one worries about it in hotels - in bridal suites - '

'All modern,' said Jake, with a yawn. 'People used to be grateful they had a bed at all. Why, when I was a boy, you were born, and got married, and died, all in the same bed, simultaneously. They called it tradition.' He put on his W.C. Fields face, to go with the voice, and looked so silly that I had to kiss him. Well, one thing leads to another, and, as Jake would have put it, we horsed around some and fell asleep without turning off the light.

That was probably why I wasn't so frightened when I was woken up by the tapping at the door. It was a very discreet and gentle tapping. Jake, of course, was totally oblivious of it. When he's asleep, he looks bulkier than he really is. He lay beside me like a whale, swimming through the sea of his dreams, blowing and snorting from time to time, making little noises and giving a flick of his tail. The tapping came again, and then the door opened a foot or so.

As I say, the light was still on, so I could see who it was, but I could have smelt that anyway, and I wasn't frightened.

'I'm so sorry,' he said, ever so softly, 'I seem to have made a mistake in the room - I was expecting to find - someone else - I'm so sorry.' He seemed to be about to close the door and go away.

'It's all right,' I said, 'no harm done.' And then I added, 'I think the person you want is in number 43.'

'Thank you,' he said, and his face lit up as if there was a candle behind his eyes. 'Thank you. Goodnight.'

'Goodnight,' I said, and he went out and closed the door.

I didn't know what time it was - Jake and I had forsworn alarm-clocks for the holiday, and I'd taken my watch off during the horsing around and popped it under the bed - but it felt like the lonely hour, and time for some more sleep, so I turned off the light and tried to snuggle down into Jake's warmth. But he was lying awkwardly, and we didn't fit. He seemed very separate from me.

As I lay there alone in the dark, the miserable thoughts came to the surface to feed. Did I love Jake? Did Jake love me? What was love anyway? True love (says La Rochefoucauld) is like ghosts - something everyone talks about, but very few people have ever seen. Yet, with Jake in August, I would have sworn - but now - pennies don't stay shiny. They acquire a protective patina. It stops them being too quickly worn away. You begin by wanting to share everything in absolute union and you finish by drawing careful boundaries so the other person doesn't swallow you up. It's like those trees where the flowers come first, a benediction in the middle of winter. Then you get the boring old leaves. The way to true fulfilment is not to have fulfilment, but only to anticipate it. Nothing ever turns out the way it should. By the time you get it, it isn't what you want. Best not to get it at all, and just imagine the way it's going to be. Perhaps the happiest couples are the ones where both partners are capable of fooling themselves completely.

The blackness of the thoughts merged imperceptibly into the blackness of sleep.

It was a very deep sleep and I was very slow coming out of it, so I really only have Jake's word for what went on in the morning.

He says that he woke up around eight-thirty, tip-toed about so as not to disturb me, called room service for some tea, and was told that special Christmas breakfasts were being delivered to all the rooms. Holly on the cornflakes? he inquired, but received no response. He received no tea either, so he went out into the corridor to investigate and found a small gaggle of staff and a serving trolley outside one of the rooms a little further along. He quizzed them about what was going on, secured information and a breakfast tray, and came back to me with both.

'Josie,' he said, 'here's breakfast.'

Apparently I moved but didn't answer. So he climbed on to the bed and started stroking me gently.

'They said to say, sorry it was late, but - the lady in 43 - she died in the night.'

My eyes, says Jake, were still closed. But I spoke.

'Oh, he found her then. That's good.'

'Who?' asked Jake softly - he's used to my talking in my sleep.

And I answered, 'Oh - just an old acquaintance.'

Mike Rogers

Back to Ghost Stories

27th September 1988