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With the children both in bed at last, Melanie Pritchard came back along the hallway to her guest.

Melanie glanced in at the huge, cluttered dining-table where he sat, the table over three metres long and very narrow--it extended all the way out from the kitchen and well across the dining-room--and she imagined with a sudden self-conscious pang that this whole setup must look a bit strange for visitors. But they'd knocked down the dividing wall between the kitchen and dining-room when they first started on restoring the house and then they left it as one extra-big area. Not a load-bearing wall so it wasn't a problem. And it was handy. Lots of space, and a single table that spanned the whole deal and worked for both family-meals and entertaining. A kitchen-table that sort of turned into a dining-table, or vice-versa--the thing was flexibility personified. Melanie came in and poured herself a full helping of white wine from one of the bottles he'd brought. Felt the cold hooch chilling her fingers through the glass.

Tall, blonde-haired, pale-skinned Melanie Pritchard, with her heart-shaped face and her fine, pretty cheekbones beginning to flesh out these days from motherhood and early middle-age. She was parking a fairly generous bottom on that chair, Peter thought. Not as he'd known her back in their student days; that was when everyone was willowy and they could eat and drink anything. Fulfil any appetite, back then, whenever it crossed their minds. The body regenerated so quickly, like elastic.

She spoke, and he watched her sticking her jaw out slightly in a way that was supposed to be tough and provocative, but with the steel mostly in the educated sound of her voice. She'd always spoken with an educated accent, despite always considering herself 'street'. 'You were going to tell me your idea'--Melanie paused on idea for a little irony and smiled--'the thing about Shakespeare.'

'Oh yes.' He poured himself a second glass of wine. Using one of the children's blue-plastic juice cups--they'd run out of actual wine glasses for visitors. He was wondering from that sardonic, early-evening grin of hers whether he really should proceed. And he was ahead of her with the drinks now. He'd had his first while she was off reading to the kids. He said, 'With Shakespeare, there's always another new idea.'

Well, time was running out for him, he thought: it was make a success of the biography or bust. Not like Melanie, oh no. She was onto writing her third novel, and the first two had both made a suitable impact. Nominated for the Montana with the first. And the second was a bigger, much better book--to tell the truth he'd not liked the first at all. But with the second he'd been genuinely impressed, and he'd said so in a lengthy review for the Listener. And now her third, she told him whenever he came up to see the family, it was a science-fiction thing about dogs. Well, it was he who'd bought her the only dog she'd ever owned: when they were students at Canterbury and she'd been depressed and kept saying she was feeling 'clucky'. Her word: 'clucky'. A dog from the SPCA, a little ratbag of energy, paws, teeth, floppy ears and fur. Jemima. With friends they'd taken the new puppy for a walk in the Botanical Gardens--he remembered the place, so English, so twee it had looked, exactly like gardens from the other side of the world. Flat as a pancake, all the grass mowed down tight and heavy, ornamental, deciduous trees positioned hither and yon in artificial bunches; while their group, walking on and off the scrunchy grey gravel paths, they were your standard-issue, scruffy local students. They were ordinary people wandering around in some long-dead settler's fantasy that had snuck over on the first four ships. Jemima tried stepping into a shallow pond, heading across the broad green leaf of a water-lily. No comprehension that the elegantly wrinkled leaf had nothing under it, was all green show on the pond's surface. He remembered fishing her out by her tail. Piece of luck he'd been right there on the spot. How well could puppies swim?

Shakespeare. She watched him sip at his wine absent-mindedly, he couldn't concentrate. He was furrowing those desiccated creases deeper into his hollow cheeks--age, she supposed--working those worry lines in further each time he pushed out his bottom lip under the rim of the cup. She thought it was remarkable--no, that wasn't the word; it was interesting--that they'd never actually slept together. Maybe not even so very interesting. After all, he'd wanted to; he'd made it pretty clear when they first met. Peter Donohue, a year older and a bit of a literary wonder child round campus. He'd even got first prize in some short-story competition or other. Melanie thought hard...first prize? No, actually Peter came second. Now, that was just like him: to be clever enough and then miss at producing what people really wanted, and only come in second. His hair was greying, was it even thinning a bit? Yes, he'd be the type to wear a wig. She doubted he was going to get very far with this biography he'd been working at for years, the big book on the North Shore's answer to James Joyce. When they were students, the professor's wife, Alice something...Jones perhaps, she'd been convinced they were having a torrid affair. Melanie smiled again. She'd told him about the prof's wife just the other day and he'd blushed. It was news to him.

She cocked one ear to check on the children: Jan sometimes had trouble getting off to sleep, even at her age. But nothing. Then Peter put down his chunky cup on the table-top with a distinct thump, as if demanding attention. Melanie waited for him to speak--but he didn't.

What did they get up to that time, fooling around--was that really what you'd call it? But it was just the once, and they'd never gone much beyond a kiss and a bit of a grope. She couldn't picture it well, even sitting here with him opposite for inspiration, so it couldn't have been all that memorable. Melanie definitely recalled she'd been hooked up with someone else at the time--she couldn't remember who--someone before Alan, though. Now Alan, there was the grand passion of her student days. Still nice to think of him sometimes, from a safe distance. His sensitive, full-lipped mouth, the things he could do with it. While Peter Donohue's love-life, she told herself, had always been a bit of a mystery to her. Girlfriends yes, but she'd never thought any of his girlfriends was up to snuff, and she'd even told him so. She remembered him very drunk one night and admitting to some grand passion of his own: someone in his same year, he'd implied. But with no name offered, and it was just like him to tell some limp little lie in an effort to keep up.

Anyway, she was married now; they both were. And both of them happily married as far as she could see. On such vaguely repressed stuff are long-term friendships made. So Peter could stay with his friends Melanie and Jim and use the shed in the back yard as a sleep-out when he was up in Auckland for research on the endless book, no problem. Her conscience with Jim was clear. God, it actually was, there was no issue. And Peter got on well with Jim, and with the kids. Bringing chocolates up from Palmerston North for Jan and Steven every time he arrived. Who said you can't buy love?

Peter picked up his kiddie-cup again for one more sip.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I got myself distracted by what you said earlier over dinner to Jim, about Jan going missing.'

'About how paranoid I got?'

'Nightmare scenarios, you said, running through your mind. You know, it's natural--you couldn't find your daughter. Had she wandered outside and fallen into a ditch? Had somebody taken her, kidnapped her with malicious motives? Had she stuck her fingers into the light socket at the other end of the house and died? Pardon me for being a bit morbid. But something wasn't right. The normal fabric of your life had changed: you looked around for your daughter and she wasn't there. And you thought the worst, and as you faced these frightening scenarios you were actually trapped in a space and time where your daughter was dead--done away with or whatever--and where you're a desperately grieving mother. It was happening, taking over. And you were a sort of Schroedinger's cat. Was your daughter somewhere, or what? I'm only guessing, but I can imagine you were already feeling a good share of grief in that situation, along with the feeling that enormous panic is rising in your throat. Oh God, help me, save us, save my child. And you just want to get out of that thread of narrative, the one that goes "Mother Loses Five-year-old Daughter in Tragedy," that often-repeated news story you seem to have blundered into--but you can't. You're trapped. The new narrative is upon you and, like a dream, like a nightmare in which something devastating has happened, it will not let you go.'

Melanie watched Peter still holding up his hands from punctuating, with his fingers in the air, the newspaper headline he'd just extemporised. He was feeling pleased with himself at dramatising it all, that curl of a smile licking along the edges of his lips. And he wasn't finished.

'Then you have a wonderful stroke of luck! That's probably how you think of it now: luck. You remember Jan wanted to play house by putting her new doll in the open clothes-drier and you wouldn't let her. And so you head outside to the wash-house, moving faster, and as you start to run, you know you're all right. This is the narrative; you've banished the nightmare. Your intuition is saving you--not God of course, we think we're too clever for that, at least when we're confident of our material world again. And sure enough, you find Jan sitting on the lino with the doll in the drier, looking glum that you've disturbed her. Wonderful. But you weren't really just lucky, were you. Really, it's as if you thought your way out of the tragedy--you were resourceful. You were an active agent in this, a child yourself of free will. Searching your mind, you found a possible scenario that wasn't a tragedy, and that then made it become real; it was something convincing that you convinced the universe with, and anyway, as you hug your daughter, you've already forgotten what it might have been like if somehow...somehow you hadn't managed to remember that Jan wanted to play house, or if thinking of that solution so very hard hadn't succeeded. So very, very hard. You've forced your way out of the tragic narrative you were in by an act of mental willpower. Otherwise...hell, you'd have been trapped there still, in a nightmare world, and then you'd have lost your daughter.'

'That's a scary thing to tell a mother in the middle of the night!' Melanie laughed.

But she could hear more than an edge of discomfort in her own voice; there was really a whole shelf-full of discomfort that she hoped she'd hidden. How much passion Peter could waste on losing himself in a tale--they could all do it, hell, they were literary people! Melanie thought how glad she was that she'd married a film editor. Even if he did have a rush job on, poor Jim. Even if he was down in the editing-shed at the bottom of the garden for the next God knows how many more hours, so that Peter wouldn't be able to sleep there till it was done and they were having themselves a 'literary' evening over a few drinks. An evening which, she was pretty sure, was going to end up revolving around Peter Donohue's ego, even when the subject was her own daughter...she could see he was still waiting for a better response to his little story.

'History is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake,' she said at last.

'Not my history. Middle-class Pakeha boy from Palmerston North.'

Grew up with lots of advantages, he thought, and got myself a decent education. But this is no time to get self-conscious. Or maudlin about not being rich and famous. Melanie'll be rich and famous enough for both of us--and Peter felt a distinct pin-prick of jealousy which he did his best to avoid. A pin-prick, not an 'Oh Jesus!' sort of pain, but it was there. Well, she had talent, and she worked hard. She'd learned discipline doing all that hack work in Australia. He didn't know very much about it, that transformational period in her own life which he imagined a would-be biographer might one day want to hear of. Her biographer, some earnest, spotty-faced guy in a hand-knitted woollen jersey sitting in the living-room with a tape-recorder switched discreetly on and asking him to describe: what was Melanie Pritchard really like? But he didn't know anything about the good stuff, the transformational stuff. He'd been off in England on his O.E., checking out the great world and pursuing his brilliant career as a Masters student at London Uni, and after six months away he'd got a letter that said she'd met Alan. Melanie and Alan. They'd wandered off to Sydney together. And that was that: Alan. So instead of thinking of Peter Donohue in his absence, she'd met somebody else--but she was always meeting somebody else. Alan Taylor, this leftover hippy. It was amazing that there were so many of them knocking around Christchurch even in the late 1970s, slaves to a lag in fashion, as if the last ripples of the swinging sixties moving across the globe had finally played themselves out in marijuana-filled student flats in the South Island of New Zealand. When he'd arrived in London in 1980 with his own long hair, his scraggy beard and his sheepskin ug boots--a Furry Freak brother in the Queen Mary College classroom among all the spiky coiffed, chains-and-safety-pins, Anarchy in the Back Yard crowd--he'd looked like, well, a colonial.

She and Alan, God knows what they'd got up to. She'd always implied it was pretty debauched, even by the grubby standards of the time. But when Peter met her again in Auckland, sans Alan, she'd been more-or-less the same person as ever, that much was true--but a different kind of writer entirely. So what kind of writer was she in those olden days? He could still remember her sitting at her wooden desk in her Gloucester Street flat when he'd dropped round--not long before heading off to England, it was. Christchurch days. She was writing half-stoned, and chortling away to herself for having described a woman's exposed breast as looking like a bag of marbles. Undisciplined, self-absorbed, unoriginal, uneven, and with most of her writing done in intermittent binges fuelled by unwarranted enthusiasms...he'd thought so even back then as he watched her lighting up the wrinkled, Zig-Zag-wrapped roach on her desk, though he was really, let's face it, just as bad himself. A case of the pot calling the kettle black. Yet when he met her again after Australia, she was no longer any of those things. Only he was, just him. Because, for him, putting pen to paper had gradually turned into some game which he played to convince himself that life wasn't a total waste of time; it was Melanie who'd built up a career.

The story of how they'd met again by chance in Auckland. Almost a decade after he'd headed off for his eighteen-month England stint...and it was a story, Peter had never told her the truth. He'd been up in Auckland on one of his first research trips for the biography, so glad to get away from being just an English-language teacher at the Manawatu Polytech. It was evening, late, and he'd been walking up Parnell Road to the motel he was staying at, an old place right at the top, the sort of cheap flophouse often described in advertisements as 'reasonable'. Sweating in the typically humid Auckland air. Thinking about her, actually. About how Auckland was her home-town and how he didn't know anybody here, but she was in Australia so there was no point in looking up 'Pritchard' in the phone book. Then he just glanced in the window of an Italian restaurant as he trudged by and there she was. No mistake. God, New Zealand could be one big small town; you could conjure up people out of nowhere. In the restaurant lights--the same fluid fall of blonde hair, her pointed jaw. It was her right enough. And he kept right on walking. Pretend it never happened, he'd told himself, all blood under the bridge now. He didn't fancy wandering into some restaurant full of strangers to start those how-have-you-been, you-haven't-changed-a-bit games. Certainly he didn't want to risk not being fulsomely welcomed, that sort of embarrassed half-heartedness that he knew his fellow Kiwis could give master-classes in, where mere courtesy amounted to a brushoff. And anyway, no, he just wasn't in the mood for memories. Because those memories weren't really enough in the first place. It was--damn it! he told himself, as he feigned not having noticed and strolled onwards--time to grow up. Yes, he was growing up, and that was when he'd heard his name being called on the street, called out loud. Melanie had seen him and rushed outside and was calling, and he'd turned. Well, he couldn't not turn, and so he had to pretend to be surprised instead. Gosh, it's you, how have you been?--that was how the story started, and they'd stayed with the narrative ever since.

She was there with her husband, Jim. Their baby daughter was at home being minded by her parents. And Jemima was with her parents too, did he remember Jemima? He'd nodded vaguely: talk about Kiwi half-heartedness in action, Christ!--he remembered perfectly. It occurred to Peter that he'd been afraid back then to give too much away. Melanie was saying to him that her parents had taken Jemima in when she'd gone to Australia, and now she and her Australian husband had moved to Auckland. Just the day before, in fact. And so what an amazing coincidence! She spoke of it in those terms: amazing. He was flattered. And you know, she said, Sydney was far too expensive now, who could afford a house there? That was why they'd come across the ditch. But...after one day over here, she and Jim were already getting bored--what a little town Auckland was. What was there to do? What was going on here? Anything? Did he know? Peter didn't know. Now that he was once more living in exciting Palmerston North, Auckland always seemed fairly large; but he understood the feeling far too well, the narrow, hemmed-in feel of being back in New Zealand again, which he and everyone else who returned from overseas attributed to the tiny size of the country, though which he was beginning to suspect wasn't about small-town size at all but something worse: the social fabric of the bloody place. The Swiss, the Japanese, they always hated being home after coming back from overseas. The Italians didn't feel that way after spending time in the States; people returning to Las Vegas didn't pine for the bright lights of Paris. Conformist countries, that was what it was. You could be free enough in a small town if you could be yourself. But even in Auckland it wasn't going to happen. The size thing, that was completely relative: Tokyo was a tiny, tight-arsed megalopolis--or so he'd heard. In the Parnell restaurant Peter's mind ran on like this while Melanie talked, leaving him cut off from the conversation. She'd dragged him in, she'd made him sit down at the table, introduced him to Jim, the hubby, and started catching him up on her doings. And so he didn't get a chance to share his nifty idea about conformist lands with Melanie or with Jim, even though he'd taken to Jim right away as a thoughtful, pleasant sort of guy, and pretty soon they'd all three gone hunting for a bar where they might have an after-restaurant drink. In Parnell after eleven, what chance do you think they'd have? Of course it turned out to be hard work, but they found one, had that drink and promised to stay in touch.

'I once got caught in a narrative like that, but of a more positive kind,' Peter said. But instead of continuing, he took a moment to think of how easily anyone--someone simply walking about in the next house, maybe--might look in and see them here, see the whole interior of both rooms through the uncurtained windows. This rundown, rafferty villa which Melanie and Jim had bought in the heart of unfashionable Grey Lynn; they'd been doing it up for years now and it was still a mess. He glanced around at the half papered-over walls that had pictures, originals by arty friends, already hung on them, the bare wooden floor covered here and there by slippery, chintzy, hand-crocheted rugs. And dark--the place was mucky dark: small sash windows that were jammed up to close to the neighbours' houses--while Melanie and Jim hadn't even got around to putting up some drapes yet; although in many ways he blamed Melanie more than Jim. It was unfair but...he stopped himself. Never mind the feminism, feel the inconvenience; they had two kids now and the place was a pit, like a dingy student flat. People could see everything inside the house. Even the obvious collection of empty bottles on the table, the dirty dinner plates that had yet to be cleared away from the clutter of the meal earlier--a meal Melanie had made for them all, he admitted--and then the various glasses and his cup. He said out loud, 'I had an adventure. A real adventure. You know how these things sometimes drop into your lap and you can't quite believe this is happening to you. That sort of thing, it's always an invigorating experience.'

'You had an adventure?' Melanie said, emphasising the word. 'Awww. You sound like Winnie the Pooh.'

'Yeah, I might as well have been. If I'd written it down as a short story, say, you'd just complain that it's a bunch of stereotypes and cliches. And rightly so, I suppose. But this happened during my first Christmas at London University; I went to Amsterdam for a week. Do you want to hear about it?'

Melanie drank from her glass and wished she'd prepared a few after-dinner snacks. If she was going to have to put up with Peter's pretentious tales all evening, then she'd have preferred something more to munch on. Well, she knew she could just say no, she wasn't interested, but that was not the way you start off an evening's conversation about literature and life. Do you want to hear about it?--fuck, it wasn't a question, it was a plea for validation. It meant: 'reassure me that I'm not boring you with pointless crap; stroke my frail ego; tell me that I matter.' God, it was such a male thing. They were all such little boys at heart, and if you wrote as much in a novel, look out. Suddenly you were a trouble-making, ball-busting, bull-dyke feminist. Melanie winced. She knew how it worked: she wasn't a real writer because she sold mostly to women. As if men could read. Men, they got given footy books for Christmas and stared at the pictures while breathing through their mouths. Their idea of heavy-duty reading material was the instruction manual they threw away at the start of assembly. But it didn't matter how many women you sold to, and she sold to a lot of women, a shitload of women, then you were a women's writer. You weren't a person who slaved and struggled to get words down on paper that had meaning, rang true and sounded beautiful, you were a women's writer. 'A writer' untainted by any kind of limiting adjective, on the other hand, was someone who could convince the boys in the club: that mere half-a-dozen boys throughout the whole country who'd once read a few words and expressed an opinion and got themselves set up as literary gatekeepers in consequence. Melanie felt a moment of pure self-hatred as she did the demure thing, the expected thing, the required thing and said, 'Yeah, go on.'

He was smiling, catching no trace of anything extra in her tone. And she was hanging back. Hanging back: it was the right move for a girl in any situation, by dint of letting the men go first. Melanie wondered if this was what, from her point of view at least, being in bed with Peter Donohue would have felt like. Like hanging back. It would have been her trying to act as if everything was fine and dandy: her having him believe that, down there, he was Mr Technique: but also her thinking, 'come on, just hurry it up and let's get this over with.' Yeah, about as much fun as receiving a suppository, and only half as good for you.

'It was in 1980, as I recall. In those days my travel arrangements were always astoundingly naive,' Peter began in a story-telling voice. 'I put on a warm grey-blue air-force-surplus overcoat I'd recently bought to face the English winter, got my pack and some traveller's cheques, and scooted along to the Victoria Coach Station. Spent the evening on a Magic Bus saying goodbye to the white cliffs of Dover and then sitting locked below decks on a bumpy ferry to Zeebrugge. A drive through the night till early in the next morning the bus reached Amsterdam and parked on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal near the Central Station, and I realised at last that I'd nowhere to stay and nothing special to do. Not a clue. I was just there. Probably not the first person to turn up without a plan, I think, because the bus driver recommended the Magic Inn as accommodation over his p.a. system, and so I wandered a little up the street and checked in. The Magic Inn at Christmas--it was the same type of thing as the Bible, I was probably lucky to get a bed. It was like a really grubby flat, as I remember, crowded and very short on any sort of comfortable space, hippies everywhere in the corridors. A girl at reception pointed me towards a steep, tortuously narrow staircase that twisted up and up and had bunk-rooms off it tucked away, and in my little allotted room right up at the top on the fifth floor, the walls lined to busting with occupied bunks, amongst the other people crammed in there, a Rajneesh guy in maroon pyjamas, someone like a unwashed tramp, some fellow backpackers, was a young French junky who was having a run of good luck--I found this out over the next few days. Roger, his name was. You had no choice but to get to know him, because he was the guy who'd march around amongst us in the tiny room, muttering and gesticulating, before he'd shoot himself up. And he shot himself up a lot--later he told me he'd stolen a ton of money from his best friend and was spending it all on cocaine-heroin combinations. It was quite a show, watching him get ready and shoot up, at least if you weren't too squeamish, though I noticed a number of people quietly disappeared whenever he started to get agitated. So anyway, I checked out the room, claimed a bed, went downstairs and, after storing my pack and things at reception, there I was outside again. In Amsterdam--just standing on the cobbles beside the big windows of the hostel, halted in the damp, slushy remains of a snowfall from a few days before. The shop fronts, the whole street around me seeming like a study in old brown and grey stone, looking very continental, which it was of course, with rows of black metal balusters marking the edge of the pavements and piled-up, forgotten snowdrifts covering the gutters. The traffic going calmly by, and the trams too with their rolling, clunking noises, and people walking here and there about their daily business, and me wondering what to do. I was simply there, waiting for it all to happen--though what exactly was going to happen I wasn't too sure about, and the truth is that mainly I was there because of big talk I'd been impressed by when we were students back in Christchurch. And I was only now beginning to realise that this is a pretty stupid idea, when I hear someone say: "Are you sociable?" A slightly desperate tone to it, a female voice. So I look around and there's this woman in her early thirties, thin to the point of being skinny, with long, straight, dirty dark hair, and in a big woolly-hemmed Afghan coat and in jeans with knee-high boots, and she's asking for help to open the lock on her bicycle. See, the bike's been left there in front of the inn for a long time, for months, and the lock's rusted. So I start playing Sir Galahad. It turns out her name is Irene Millier; she's originally from Kent, but now she's living in Amsterdam.'

'She's an ageing hippy-dippy,' Melanie interrupted. 'Was she pretty?'

'Pretty enough, yes. Black eyes, very olive skin. She was an English Jewess, I think, and she'd wandered back onto a continent where, let's face it, only forty years earlier she'd have been put to some horrible death. Anyway, I was no good as a colonial Sir Galahad; I couldn't get the padlock open, so we carried the bicycle--I mean, I simply lifted up the locked back wheel and walked while she steered at the front--to a cycle-repair shop that Irene knew about over in the next street. An obliging Dutchman broke open the lock with a crowbar and then fixed a puncture in one of the tyres while we sat in his store and had a cup of his scalding-hot coffee. All this is on the edge of the red-light area, and on the way over to the shop my reaction to what's all around us, even at that time of the morning, my embarrassed excitement, my boyishness, you know, was sufficient to convince Irene that she'd like to show me round some cafes. So, we hop on the newly mobile bike. I'm pedalling up front, and she sits sort of regally on the carrier, holding onto my shoulders. We wobbled a bit to get going, and I remember struggling to get us up over one of those stone bridges you see a lot of in photos of central Amsterdam--you know the bridges: the humpbacked ones with heavy black iron railings. Pedalling us up, it was hard, it was physical labour--and the cold air I gulped at was stinging the innards of my lungs and coming out again as steam. And then we're rolling down over the far end of the bridge and alongside the canal on wet cobbles, going faster and faster, between a row of bare elm trees and the narrow brick house-fronts that look like children's toys. Whooping. The sun out, and the light cutting sharp and clear. I remember the details--hanging like mad onto the bike's rattling handlebars and with Irene still gripping my shoulders, swinging her legs with joy and laughing into my ear. Frightening the ducks up out of the icy water on the canal. That's my adventure--or, at least, the start of what turned out to be several adventures. Wonderful! I remember, I was so tremendously aware of my own sudden happiness as we bounced over those little, cobbled streets and the passers-by stared at us. I'd only been in Amsterdam for a couple of hours; but now I was riding with a woman on a bicycle in one of the prettiest, seediest corners of Europe and I was a part of it all. We saw some Hare Krishna's in their pale-orange, pseudo-Indian get-up on the opposite side of the canal. Those gaudy, thin, swishing robes, flowing from their shoulders to their knees--I remember they had woollen socks on with their sandals to avoid the cold. They'd just come out in single file from a building, following someone with a tambourine, and they stopped short and watched us go by. Life! the narrative had changed and it was magical to be in it--I was living that romance-story, the one you see up on the wide-screen, that boy-meets-girl-in-exotic-place scene shortly before the complication; all of that had overlapped with me now. I mean, I'd simply wandered into it.'

Peter stopped. He leaned across the table and started picking in a careless way at a loose corner of the damp label on the wine bottle--just when Melanie wanted him to go on. But he'd finished. Made his rather obscure point about narratives, all right, but didn't he ever get it, didn't he understand when it was really time to offer some more? Melanie sighed. Auckland's answer to James Joyce, she thought, was in a lot of trouble if this was how his biographer worked.

Peter registered that sigh. He was already wishing he hadn't brought all the Irene stuff up--the wine, he supposed. In vino self-dramatisation. Well anyway, he could certainly understand the attraction of a place like Amsterdam for Irene: the reason why somebody might want to dwell in the town forever as one of the self-appeasing lotos-eaters. While he was there he'd done some Amsterdam-touristy bits and pieces. Along with looking at the Rijksmuseum and the Rembranthuis and so on--after all, he wasn't a complete philistine--he'd even walked into the infamous Flying Dutchman Cafe, which was only a few doors down from where he was staying. Another place with a reputation derived from big talk back in Christchurch. But going in, his first impression was of somewhere much cosier than he'd expected: the cafe's whole long, narrow interior having a congenial look of dark, polished panelling, with lamps on its walls, and a bar with seats beside him just past the door. Rows of exotic-coloured bottles ranged up on shelves across the wall behind the bar and the stooped, cheerful mine host nodding to him as he moved further within. He'd hesitated about making for some steps off at the back and up to a seating area where, he learned later, the house dealer plied his trade; but instead, no, he'd sat himself down close to the window on a barstool, with his elbows up on the worn wooden counter--similarly unwashed guys perched on either side of him--and ordered a beer. The barman poured out a small, cosy-looking glassful and brushed the head off with a comb. Peter was still admiring this, the neatness of it, feeling relaxed as the glass was handed to him and he tried a taste, when a joint came passed along the bar; so he accepted the rolled, wrinkled thing from the guy on the stool beside him, took a toke and passed it on. All very cool and casual...well, Amsterdam, man. Then some music was starting up on the cafe's stereo. Steely Dan's Gaucho album--it had just been released and he'd not heard it yet. And he sat there, now quite nicely stoned, sipping his beer, letting the funky sounds of 'Babylon Sisters' walk through his mind and feeling at peace, feeling an extraordinary oneness with all the other freaks in the room, and hell! he'd only popped in to see what the place was like. It was like...for the second time in this town he felt at home. Put that in your narrative and smoke it. But he heard Melanie was saying something.

She asked, 'Was there a complication? With Irene.'

'Oh, there were all sorts of complications. Irene, she took me to a coffee-house called De Gouden Haan and we ate vegetarian food and smoked some hash. And while we were sitting and talking, feeling comfortably off our faces, she told me in this dead casual way that she worked in the sex business.'

'She was a whore?'

Melanie sounded surprised--she leapt on this. Peter was quietly amused to have shocked her at last. That was no mean feat with Melanie, who liked to style herself as something of a sexual virtuoso, a modern woman with a full kit of erotic knowledge and control, both in print and in conversation. But he remembered Irene telling him those exact words--'the sex business'--with her offhand tone concealing how carefully she was testing the waters, watching his response.

He said, 'Well, she worked in a sex show. That's what she told me. With a guy and another woman, and what she called "some props." She said she'd been doing it for about three weeks; and she'd be going to work again that evening. She said the first night, it was hardly like work at all, you know? I remember she said exactly that: you know?--and I had to admit to myself that I didn't really know, I had no idea whatsoever. But she also made it pretty clear that the, er...what do you call it? the novelty had worn off, and now she didn't like it and it was getting to be really hard yacker.'

'She was a whore!'

'Well, I think you're being a bit judgemental. I mean, when I was sitting there with her in the cafe, I just thought there was something sad about it--I could easily imagine the way her life, any attempt at controlling it, was spiralling out of her reach, and how any means of just holding on was starting, obviously, to get more and more desperate. I mean, everything about her seemed provisional. She told me she was staying in the house of a family in Herenstraat who were away at the time: she was house-sitting. But I can recall wondering what on earth she'd do when they came back. Where would she go? As it was, I went round there on her night off and I sat in her kitchen while we had a meal together.'

'Did you sleep with this woman? Was that it?'

There was a note of triumph in Melanie's voice, Peter thought. He saw it on her face. She reckoned that she'd figured it all out.

'Nope,' he said truthfully. 'Although I would have, if she'd made the slightest move in that direction. But I was too shy, and anyway I don't imagine she needed any more sex action in her life. No, it wasn't like that--Irene took me under her wing, is what happened. I was naive and she explained things to me, like how whores charge their customers, itemising the parts of the body which you can touch and all that. This was news. Remember, I wanted to be a writer--I'd come to Amsterdam for experience. I was lapping this stuff up, practically taking notes. And after the coffee-house she took me all over De Wallen. She even walked us down the Zeedijk, scared the hell out of me.'

'You didn't sleep with her...'

'No, I didn't.' Peter could tell, exasperating as it was, that Melanie knew he wouldn't lie about not scoring. He said, 'I had a meal one evening with her and a couple of friends of hers: all crammed round this small kitchen-table. And after the others left, which was pretty late, I helped her carry a large roll of carpet back to the house from somebody's car--I forget the details, maybe it was her car--I was just carrying this roll of carpet through the dark and the cold on a little undulating cobbled road, going along with this heavy, awkward thing balanced over my aching shoulder, and my breath heaving. Then I humped this huge roll of carpeting up the stairs of the house, right up to the top floor where she slept, and we put it down across the floor to make the room warmer. Well, she'd never have got the bloody thing all the way up there on her own. Sir Galahad again. I remember, it was the children's room she slept in. There were children's beds and toy-things, and on the wall there was a big, hand-painted mural of Huey, Dewey and Louie looking giggly, you know Donald Duck's nephews, with a bubble coming out of their heads saying: "stoned again." And then I wished her a good night, headed for the stairs and left. Irene, I remember, she smiled a very broad, happy smile from the top of the landing--her teeth seemed almost transparent in her dark face--looking down on me as I glanced back up the stairwell.'

Melanie grunted. 'It'd make a better narrative if you'd got your leg over.'

'Oh, it was an adventure, no matter how it ended. It was riding that bike along the canal and through the town with someone, feeling that I wasn't absent from life--I mean, I wasn't as far away from it, from life, as I am these days, being on the wrong side of the world and mostly watching it happen to other people. I told you, those moments are invigorating. And they're so important for people like you and me, because after all we're people from a provincial background. We always grow up feeling that life on the other side of the hill is more interesting anyway. And that's partly because it is. I mean, Shakespeare didn't write plays by sitting in his woodland wild in Stratford on Avon with a bit of hey nonino. He pissed off to the city as quick as he could and took his chances.'

And that scruffy guy next to me at the bar in the Flying Dutchman, Peter thought. When we talked--when we were no longer shit-faced and were actually capable of talking--and he heard I was from New Zealand; he told me he'd done the overland from London to Sydney, hitchhiked all the way--twice. The Iran-Iraq war had started up now, so he didn't think it would be possible to do the trip anymore. But he'd done it, the whole thing. Twice. In his early thirties, a little scrawny guy. The type of guy who'd get through a dangerous place by bringing nothing with him but the clothes on his back, a pair of sandals and a simple, hippy string-bag dangling on his shoulder with his copy of the I Ching inside; he'd get through because he'd be too insignificant to be noticed, he'd survive where the more conspicuous, the better organised, they'd be stopped, turned back, arrested. This guy, he'd done it, he'd slipped past all the nets. He was a survivor.

'All right, we've established that you couldn't sleep with the biggest slut in Amsterdam--'

'Don't say that.'

Melanie heard the plaintive tone in his voice, the little-boy-whine, a bit much coming from someone who was so smart at varsity and gifted, and so lazy--Peter was always half in love with the notion of his own failure. Oh, he was precisely the sort of pretentious literary type who'd think that writing the words down in drafts, shoe-horning them into books and actually selling the stuff didn't matter as much as his mystic, mumbo-jumbo allegiance to art; as if somehow the commercial aspect even sullied the true process, the search for beauty. That amateur type. The fuss-budget of the perfect paragraph. Trying for the sort of over-perfect writing people don't care about anyway because it's bloodless, it's just affected, and it's boring, boring, boring. Some people even manage to publish it, but mostly you can't, thank God. Of course then he wanders round complaining that nobody reads anymore, when really he means that nobody reads him. And look at him--he'd reduced himself to writing reviews, and damn, his reviews were super-bitchy ones. Exercises in sarcasm. She'd had some guy in Auckland ring her up a few weeks back because he didn't know how to get hold of this Peter Donohue prick, but this guy who rang her, he'd heard somewhere that the two of them were friends. Yeah, Peter had slagged off his book in the Listener. Criticised it for being too wrapped up in the Maori characters. Called the sex scene in the London Museum toilets 'perilously close to pornography,' that was prissy of Peter--she'd gone right out and bought the book. And so this guy on the phone, he'd chewed her ear off for about fifteen minutes, and she'd loyally taken it, really had, though she didn't know why. She should've just handed the guy Peter's address, drawn him a map. The bloke had been mad enough, bad enough and bloody dangerous enough to go down there to Palmerston North armed with a crowbar. Typical amateur response, of course, to a mean review: far too invested in one tiny, overwritten piece of fluff. And so...what the hell was the matter with Peter and sex? I was too shy. He wasn't shy; he was embarrassed, tentative, too fastidious for his own good. He didn't understand that what he needed--and Melanie remembered that, to her credit, she'd told him so--what he required was a nice, mousy, little submissive type of woman who'd worship him unconditionally and do anything for him. The maid-servant type, who'd let him be the boss and the fancy artist and whatever, while she washed his smelly socks. But he hadn't married that kind of person. He'd never admit it--he was a typical male like that, basically old-fashioned--but what he'd really done was marry his mother. Someone the same as her. They always did. And he was quite good-looking, after all: tall, broad shouldered, and with his dark hair and strong jaw. Again, conventional stuff, good but not that good-looking. Still, he just didn't understand--if he was physically attractive, then he could get somebody worshipful and also like his mother if he so desired. Like his mother, or motherly? Melanie tried to stop herself from rocking back and forth in her chair as she thought this out. Hadn't his mum died when he was youngish, not too long before coming to varsity? Yeah, Melanie remembered, he'd been inclined to drop hints to anyone who'd listen, all about how he deserved a lot of pity--one of Peter Donohue's least attractive features. But there was something else there too, something standing in the way, contained in that locked-up sexuality and that prissiness: perhaps he was keeping another kind of secret from himself? In a moment of sudden malice she hoped so; she thought how neat and tidy it would be if she was right.

'Shakespeare,' Peter said, as if suddenly divining the tenor of her thoughts, 'was not gay. Auden said so too, and he had every reason to hope that Shakespeare was.'

'All right, my dear'--Melanie put plenty of irony into my dear while she reached across the narrow table and patted his arm, and watched him shrink away slightly from her touch--'you tell me about Shakespeare.'

'You don't really want to know.'

'I'm all agog. You tell me.' Melanie leaned back in her plain wooden chair and felt comfortable. She gave him her hard look, the look of someone eyeing up a specimen in a glass case. She said, 'You tell me your theory.'

'How do you know it's a theory I've got?'

'Because you've always got a bloody theory.'

She's right, he thought, I've become that sort of person, the one with the peculiar views, the one who manages to be both brilliant and stupid at the same time: an isolated, provincial crank. An intelligence that isn't contained within any form of discipline because it's robbed of context. Richard Pearse. After a lifetime's effort, you end up inventing a flying machine that's no good because no one else around you has ever thought of it as something necessary, or otherwise ever to be desired; and so people still won't accept it as really possible, even though it's there, done, made. Or they do react, and you wind up in the nearest nut house, expounding on your methods for flying or talking to the local flowers. Or both. Janet Frame. Hey nonino. Peter took a deep breath. Impress her, he thought, rise above all this shit, be urbane. He spoke.

'By the summer of 1592, it would have been--Will Shakespeare, at twenty-eight years old, had become a successful new man in the nation's busy capital. A new man. He'd arrived from the countryside with nothing but his talent, and in the city he'd overcome his poor education, his accent, his gaucherie, his own self-doubts. How? Because he'd got into the theatre, this fresh, expanding line of entertainment, and he'd become one of its top writers. Not bad for a glover's boy: that's what they were all saying, the theatricals, with the patronising tone loud and clear in their voices for Will to hear.' Peter coughed. Was the air dry, or was it his throat? He continued. 'And hell, it wasn't as if he was trying to break into the lower circles of the court, Will was just doing what he was good at, and he was good at playwriting--he liked it, a lot, even though he was never quite going to be one of the boys. Never going to have the security of their university-educated background, their university connections. He'd only survive in the game by being better at it than they were. Glover's boy. Hard grind. But as far as young Will was concerned, his life had got started that day he walked across good old London Bridge; the past was just, well, material. 1592: it was hot that summer, and it was muggy weather and close if you were walking the crowded streets between the huge four-or-five-storeyed houses with their sloping jetties all leaning into the narrow space overhead, ordure steaming on the footpath, rats and flies, people calling down to passers-by out of windows, the quality marching along stiff-backed in their colourful clothes and the poor watching from their corners; but Will, he just sat up late every night with the candles burning, trying to improve on what he'd written earlier in the day, because he had to produce, he had to hammer it out, he'd only ever be as good as his next play. So he'd forced his mind to become an image-making machine--he constantly saw things in terms of something else. Take, for example, the Earl of Southampton, a play-going playboy who'd come backstage into the tiring-house with his retinue a few nights earlier and insisted that he shake the hand of the man who, etc., etc.. I mean, everyone else looked at the Earl's loose auburn curls hanging down over his narrow shoulders and his soft, pale skin and those pursed little lips, and they saw a girl. A narcissistic, pretty type with a bit of a thing for poetry. That's all. The whole troupe sniggered about it in the tavern later--sniggered very quietly, of course, because Southampton was a very, very powerful man. Still, not hard to guess which team that one was batting for, if you know what I mean. But Will...he saw a players' boy trying on a girl's clothes and finding they fitted him better than they ought. And then wearing them off-stage, those feminine clothes, when he should have confined himself to the performance, so that they altered even his inner life. Will's mind loved that kind of complication: he could use that.'

Peter paused. Set the scene--he'd worked in all he could remember and everything he could get away with mustering up from fiction. But she'd be wondering why he didn't shove along to the point. He allowed himself a sip of wine for his throat, feeling a little light-headed. Didn't want the vino to get deep into his thoughts just yet.

'And then the plague came, a bad one this time, and always scary. Rumours first. People dying here and there in odd parts of the city every day: a couple or more on the other side of town, a whole bunch in another ward, three just along the street, and the authorities maybe lying about the true numbers. No one knew why the plague visited--just knew you have to keep away from it. Wicked odours. That's what they thought. Foul air. Of course, it wasn't really the air, it was the fleas: a lovely example of science getting too close to the truth with the wrong answer and thus preventing the right answer from being found. When a house got infected, it was completely shut up. Locked and barred. The authorities set a watch at the heavy oak front door, labelling this a quarantine, and absolutely no one went in or out. So that was the end of the poor family inside. They'd scream and curse through the boards on the windows, you'd hear them pleading--and they'd die together. And the number of fatalities kept rising, and when it reached thirty a day they closed the playhouses by order, as officially dangerous places of congregation. Besides, who knew if God wasn't smiting the city because of its obscene theatres? Will saw his fancy pals and colleagues packing up, running to the countryside to beg from family or going on a provincial tour...to precisely the sort of places Will Shakespeare had worked his arse off to get away from. So, okay, he'd got trouble. Got that ridiculous wife and the children back in Stratford that he was supposed to pay upkeep for, and his own rent and expenses here in London. And he wouldn't mind not getting the plague and dying horribly in this dank town, thank you very much. Well, he'd written seventeen poems the year before, on a commission from Lord Burghley--yes! the Queen's Lord Burghley--for that same Southampton, the playgoer, urging him to marry and produce an heir. Not that this was ever going to happen in a hurry--you'd only to look at him. But it seemed likely that one reason Southampton had come backstage a few nights ago was to get a look at him, Will Shakespeare, the one who wrote those sonnets. Charming! No doubt that was why Southampton had mumbled something non-committal about some more writing and patronage, though Will saw the way the Earl looked at him up and down and up again, as if assessing a tavern whore, exploring with his eyes while his pretty lips smiled the whole time he spoke. Jesus, an Earl! That would be a tremendously powerful patron, imagine having someone like that on your side; but Will had been worried about what might come with the package--till now, though...well, now he wasn't sure he'd got any choice.'

'Wait a minute,' Melanie interrupted. 'You're telling me Shakespeare sold himself to some pouf?'

'He dressed himself up in the clothes of patronage and found he liked them, but when he looked in the glass he wasn't sure what he was seeing. Anyway, he hot-footed it to Southampton's castle and got himself the job.'

'Got what job, exactly?'

'Local-poet-factotum extraordinaire. Entertainer. He'd planned to offer his new boss a long narrative poem he'd been working on, Venus and Adonis: saucy stuff, with Venus hot for it and Adonis a sort of yielding youth, the entire thing dedicated to your lordship, etc.. But what Will finds, when he turns up at the castle, is a drag show. Saturday night at Plato's Cave. I mean, the whole Southampton retinue is queerer than a two-bob watch, and it's their castle. And the Earl's saying, yeah, V and A with my name on it, okay great; but what he really wants now, he implies, is a few more of those flattering sonnets. You know, with the cute rhymes and things? And so Will finds himself in the bedroom down the corridor from party central, with no lock on the door, plus a large bag of coins handed over up front that he now has to produce a ditty for if he's going to keep. Well, he's up all night comparing his Earlship to a summer's day and he takes that sonnet along next morning, but Southampton, prince of the local realm and screaming bitch-queen, he wants something a bit more out of the closet. Something that says a lot more than "I love you"--a lot more outre, if you know what I mean? wink, wink. So...Will goes back to his room and writes sonnet 20. Probably the creepiest love poem ever written. There's really no other way to explain that poem. It's not a piece about a gay man admiring a pretty fellow--gay people, I think, must find sonnet 20 as slimy as straight people do. I mean, it's a poem about a man pretending to be a gay man admiring a pretty fellow: someone playing a part. Will says, "Nature made you just like a woman, only better because you're actually a guy; but nature prevented me from having it off with you By adding one thing to my purpose nothing." Eewww. At the close of the sonnet Will's even implying that he envies the women this guy will have sex with; and yet, at the same time, Will's setting a boundary: he's excusing himself from a naughty. But the whole sonnet flirts with fucking, here, there, roundabout, just by being embarrassingly coy--it's chock full of nudge, nudge, snigger, snigger. Southampton must have loved it. Even so, it may have been a bit much to put on paper, because Will never does anything remotely like it again. After that, there's rather a lot more of the conventional love sonnets: conventional, I mean, if the receiver were a woman, and if she didn't mind the fact that the poet keeps harping on about being too old to be worth any sort of physical interest. Too old? Will was only twenty nine at most, and he was more than capable of getting it up for an extremely physical affair sometime later with his dark lady.'

And those later poems, Peter thought, all drenched with sexual bitterness. He remembered, with a clarity which surprised him, that evening after dinner with Irene. Sitting there in the kitchen over coffee, alone with her after the others had gone--not quite sure what would come next. You're studying poetry, she said, tell me a poem. And so he recited all of 'When my love swears that she is made of truth'--Irene probably hadn't understood a word. Because it was one of his favourites, and because he had a feeling that any real relationship with her, anything closer than coffee in a kitchen, would turn out to be sordid and fraught. He'd been trying to put a hint of distance between them. But it didn't matter...he'd probably misread the whole situation anyway, because instead of saying more she'd got up and left the room, coming back with a scrapbook, a much-treasured old exercise book that contained jottings, drawings, bits and pieces of letters and newspaper cut-outs, and amongst it all a well-thumbed picture of a little girl. My daughter, she said--and Irene didn't say another word; but there was no daughter around in the house, not anywhere, and he didn't ask anything more because the mood, the vibe she was giving off, it suggested that behind the picture lay some genuine, undiluted tragedy. Perhaps he should have asked. His not asking--that was what put distance between them.

'So you're telling me,' Melanie was saying, 'that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets out of a sort of sexual blackmail?'

'He wouldn't be the first poet who wrote a masterpiece because he was forced to.'

'Yes, well, these invigorating moments you mentioned, when life just happens, they can involve people actually having sex, too. Like my little lesbian affair...'

Melanie trailed off. But Peter looked up--he'd been staring vacantly at the edge of the table: trying, not least at her prompting, to imagine the Bard as Clarissa to Southampton's Lovelace. Now he stared across the room and suddenly noticed the darkness. It was the long, January light closing down at last; they'd have to put on a lamp or something soon. But the dimness made it easier for him to say, 'What lesbian affair? Tell me.'

'Oh, I was in a flat in Sydney--somewhere, I'm not sure exactly, staying with Alan and his arty friends. It was all very free and easy, you know the kind of deal. This is back when I was a much more passionate young woman, and much more careless. And I was having a bath,' Melanie laughed self-consciously. 'I was lying in this ancient, badly stained enamel tub, a big old thing with lion's claws, and the door opened. A woman just came on in. Well, there's no major surprise there--the place was full of people wandering about, half of them stoned, and it was like a permanent party. I don't think I even knew at the time whose flat it was. Just a big, shabby two-storey house, and Alan and I were sleeping in this tiny room upstairs right at the front...it was while Alan tried to get into the film business, doing God knows what. Acting.'

'This woman came into the bathroom.'

'Yes, all right. She sees me stretched out there in the tub, so she sits on the edge of the bath, kind of mumbling. Talking, but I don't really remember what it was, maybe talking to herself. And then she suddenly reaches down and she starts massaging my breasts. Yes, really. I didn't mind too much; honestly, I didn't know what to think. She keeps rubbing away, and I'm sort of staying reclined there, in the soapy water with my tits going round and round, and I'm thinking to myself: is she getting in here and, if so, should I make some space or what?'

All at once Melanie half-stood up from her chair. She reached behind her, in a lazy lunge, over towards an old ivory-coloured Bakelite switch beside the hall door, and clicked it. Within a couple of flickers the entire room was lit: a glow from two bulbs overhead that lent everything the same rich yellow shade.

Peter asked, 'So what happened?'

'Nothing happened.' Melanie sat down heavily. 'This rather strange woman, she was amazingly self-involved. She mumbled a few phrases more and then she left the bathroom. And I never saw her again.'

'That's your lesbian affair? You said affair.'

'Well, I exaggerated a little. Artistic license.'

You're telling me, Peter thought. He recalled how her last novel had contained two Victorian 'lady travellers' who indulged in some forthright 'Sapphic love' on a beach--presented in the book as if this were somehow important, superior to sleeping with the enemy. But no, Melanie had been spectacularly heterosexual at varsity. Always with a man in tow, always using her blonde-haired good-looks and lively blue eyes to be the centre of an admiring male circle at any literary-type gathering. The chic one in the clique. And she'd had a little-girl voice that she used to drop into talking with sometimes, when she was particularly drunk and wanted to be provocative; and then, with a supercilious grin on her face and waving a glass of something in her hand, Melanie would tilt her head back and say anything in that laughing, babyish register, anything that might get her some attention, good and loud for the whole party to hear--especially sex-related revelations about anyone she'd slept with. Yes, it was nasty. He'd seen her publicly cut the balls off more than one boyfriend in front of a roomful of people--most times you ended up feeling sorry for the guy. That was the main reason, right there, why he'd never taken advantage of any opportunity to go to bed with her, once he'd realised how much he would make himself vulnerable to that Grand-Guignol type of humiliation. She'd say something--Lord knows what, but she'd work something up with a smattering of artistic licence--and then he'd never forgive her. That'd be the end of a friendship. A much more passionate young woman, and much more careless. Back then she was always airing her emotions and troubles in public and didn't mind who heard, or how much people knew about her. A friend of his had described her as a collection of neuroses strung together by desperate tension. Well, certainly her neuroses were a kind of public performance. She was arty and flighty, that's what she was, he remembered--but then there weren't many people with her wit and intelligence in Christchurch in the late 1970s, or anywhere else much. You could see her talent, even in those days.

'As far as his "gay affair" went, I don't think anything much happened with Shakespeare either,' Peter said. 'When the plague abated once more he went straight--pun intended--back to writing for the theatre, even though by now he'd secured Southampton as patron. The sort of patron that poets dream their whole lives about getting. I mean, both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are dedicated to Southampton, and with all the love and flattery that Shakespeare can cook up. Well, after all, he may indeed have felt some genuine affection for the man who'd kept him alive in tough times, a patron whose only real sin is that he thought his chief poet was spunky and cute. Assuming Southampton did manage to behave himself, they may have come to some sort of an understanding. But you know, if the sonnets had been burned instead of being published as a book, with its in-crowd, inverted-initials dedication to Southampton--if we'd been left with only the plays and the other poems, no one would ever have considered Shakespeare anything less than red-blooded. There's nothing gay about "The Phoenix and the Turtle," for example, it's just terribly sad. "Truth may seem, but cannot be." And it must have been a painful matter for Will, giving up that patronage, which he'd wanted so much. The chance to be a real poet. It was with that in mind that he'd first come to London, not to scribble like mad every night for the Johnny-come-lately stage. But in the end the price was just too high. Believe me, lesbian-lover, I speak from experience.'

'Experience of what?' Melanie chose to ignore the clumsy lesbian jibe. She respected her own large-mindedness instead. She said, 'What experience, going to London for patronage or finding it at a price?'

'Both. A little.'

'You know, you never really have told me about what you got up to in London, when you were a student there.'

'Well, I've told you more than enough tonight. I mean, you've never let me know what you got up to in Australia, when you went over there across the ditch with Alan.'

'There's nothing to tell. It was pretty sleazy. I lived in a lot of dives--student life without having to go to school. Alan slept with anyone he could get close enough to lay his hands on. I smoked far too much dope. You can spend a lot of time fucking and smoking shit, if you really make an effort. And I wrote a lot, as a way of keeping body and soul together, for magazines and PR companies and TV-script places. I mean, I did a lot of bits and pieces of TV scripts, whatever donkey work and rewrites they'd let me try. So when I wasn't misbehaving, I was writing.'

And you came back here with Jim, Peter thought, and a child, and over here you've had another: a two-Kiwi, two-Ozzie family--symmetry. Well, whoever would have thought it, having known the wild colonial girl in Christchurch? He could think of her back then as a girl, it was all right now. The girl--he knew this from the trickle of letters he'd had in London which eventually dried up--the girl who got sadly pregnant to Alan not so long before they went to Australia together and who'd been persuaded by him to have an abortion. The same girl who'd complained in every letter after that about how she was depressed and how she couldn't shake off her endless blues, as if it was some kind of mystery. After an abortion, why on earth wouldn't she feel depressed? A scar remains a scar. Must be a sweet thing for her now though, to have two children. And since Peter's own wife couldn't have kids... He frowned hard suddenly, couldn't stop, but tried to keep that frown inward--not to let it show. For Melanie to go and get herself a suburban family, but then with nothing like that for him when he was so much the suburban-family type, and she'd published all those novels...he felt his mouth growing dry again.

'In London I wrote nothing,' he said suddenly, conscious of the croak in his voice. 'Not a word. Too busy studying literature, learning it. I thought that's how it was done, if you wanted to write. The glorious future: you never think that one day it's going to be a mediocre past. You put in the hours. But my professor, he warned me--he said, be careful because you read certain books and then you feel that with some extra effort and perhaps luck you might write something on, or something near, the same level; but finally you read Tolstoy, or Joyce, Shakespeare, one of those giants, and it's crushing. You realise that you'll never write a single page in your whole life, not one, not once, that'll be as magnificent as anything they've already done, the kind of writing they've already produced which somehow transcends the knowable world. You realise that even your own fantasy version of your own best work isn't up to their level. That's what geniuses do; they crush everyone else's literary endeavour with the sheer power of their imagination.'

And now he taught the English language to foreigners for a living, because an M.A. isn't good for anything, Peter thought, and he felt real bitterness rising from the depths of his stomach. Writing bits and pieces of TV scripts at every spare moment in Australia: that's how you became an author. Peter reached out and poured the remainder of the wine into Melanie's glass, then took the corkscrew from the table to open another bottle. Thinking as he wrestled with the neck, I shall get good and stinking drunk tonight. Why the hell not? 'Love, what is it? A cork and a bottle'--James Joyce. He glanced at the windows, but it was solidly dark outside now and the glass reflected nothing but the top of his own head as he turned a little in his chair. Jim was still somewhere outside in the garden shed, editing his own bits and pieces of his film. Yeah, Jim--he'd been good for Melanie, he'd smoothed all the rough edges off her somehow. No more little-girl monologues. And, of course, New Zealand's most prominent feminist author had her breadwinner to support her while she wrote about strength and independence. Well, that wasn't uncommon. Peter hauled the stubborn cork out of the bottle at last, feeling breathless and flushed in the face with the effort. Not in shape. He sloshed some wine into his child's cup and tried not to think how much of Melanie Pritchard's success might be owed to her powers of self-invention.

'The price was always too high,' he said, aware of the drama in his tone. 'When I got to London, I was in a literary centre with all my little talents lined up on display. I was staying in a postgraduate hostel, in Bloomsbury don't-you-know--mostly with engineering and law students, but I met two American professors who were there researching a biography of Stevie Smith. The elder of the two was from Hofstra University in New York and he had all the right connections in literary London. Of course, there's nothing like writing a biography for getting to knock on important doors.' Peter grinned theatrically. 'Anyway Bill McBrien, this professor, he got friendly--I was almost the only student of literature in the hostel--and he rather liked to take me along with him sometimes to meet literary types. He introduced me to Charles Monteith, the former editor at Faber: this bald, fleshy man with a comfortable manner and an after-dinner voice. He'd discovered William Golding and Joe Orton and he used to have an office just down the Faber corridor from T.S. Eliot. Monteith told me that Eliot liked to do the Times crossword puzzle in his shirtsleeves and leave little scribbled comments in the margin of the paper. It was around the period of the Mercury rocket launches, and beside a report on one of the manned flights Eliot mischievously wrote: "The toilet problem solved." Christ! I mean, this was heady stuff for me; I was from Palmerston North. My whole conception of literature was of something abstract you read in books--now, it seemed you could just go and live in it. I had dinner once with Bill and John Lehmann. We went into Lehmann's flat to pick him up--I'm afraid that's the right expression to use with someone like Lehmann: I mean his perpetual sleazy ambience--and there he was. A huge man with a square, Germanic-looking face and a cigarette in a long holder, leaning on a cane with unnatural nonchalance, as if he'd been waiting in this pose for us to arrive--in his dusty living-room full of literary bric-a-brac. I glanced around and saw a faded menu pinned on the wall, from a commemorative dinner held in someone or other's honour: it was signed by practically every famous name in modern British literature I could think of. People I was taking seminars on. Anyway, our dinner was at Lehmann's favourite local restaurant--he was very old by this time and ill, and the evening's conversation consisted entirely of medical topics passed between himself and Bill, and of people who'd died. I remember, at soup his hand shook violently from the effort of holding onto the spoon.

'I think Bill enjoyed how starry-eyed I used to be at these sorts of encounters--I was very much the provincial acolyte. I didn't mind. Of course, I was expected to stay largely out of the fray and more-or-less in one corner, observing, but it was a great corner to be in. And you know, I was there partly for decorative reasons, because most of these people we met were gay. As was Bill, who made no secret of the fact that he liked the look of my arse. So I guess the price of each meal was that these people must have looked at Bill and me, and put two and two together, though Bill always behaved himself. Admiring, but not the least bit predatory. I'm sure if I'd ever had a change of mind, etc., etc....I must say there really is a gay mafia in the London arts scene, or there was then, and they really did look after their own.'

'Now it's my turn to say eewww,' Melanie said. 'What on earth were you doing there?'

'Trying on the player's clothes, at last, and finding out how much I liked them. I've nothing against gay people etc., etc., you know the drill. Plenty of them around when we were at varsity. I knew I wasn't gay, not even the least twinge--but I was in a straight minority there in the London literary scene, or at least the part of it I'd managed to break into, where being straight was a definite liability.'

'You mean, if you'd been prepared to take your pants off....' Melanie paused, as if sorting out the best response. 'Awww, poor little Peter, off on another awfully big adventure.'

'Well all right, let me give you an example--it's an extreme case but, remember, in this world it's who you know, right?

Melanie grinned and didn't bother answering. Because Peter just didn't get it, with his pretentions to making everything difficult. She hadn't written her own novels because she knew the right people, and he'd no idea about the stuff she'd got sitting in a drawer from before her first publication. He was lazy, he was precious about what he did write, and he didn't understand the grind in it. Who you know. Try writing with two kids to take care of, and a husband, and a house that wouldn't stay clean. She managed to get herself three hours every evening if she was lucky--no writing today, she'd got a guest--and that was it, you shoved it out then or not at all. Never mind about eternal lines to time; eternity'd better shift for itself. And Peter just didn't get that. He had excuses. About being from Palmerston North, as if the James Joyce of the North Shore, the subject who was being endlessly researched, had once been any better off; or some nonsense about being 'crushed' by Tolstoy--Tolstoy for fuck's sake! And what now? Did he honestly think that literature was something that rubbed off with a handshake, or a hand down the pants or whatever? It was hard to believe he hadn't got the talent, but...she wondered. Just write a fucking novel, she thought, with anger and pity competing in her mind. And when that doesn't work, write another one. Don't sit there telling me some pompous story about why you haven't. Stop blaming your future on the past.

'It was the start of my first winter in London,' he was saying, 'not too long before I went to Amsterdam. Bill invited me to dinner with George Lawson: this guy was the manager of a well-known company dealing in antiquarian books and manuscripts. Bertram Rota, I think, was the firm's name. There was some connection with the Stevie Smith biography, though I don't know what. The other gay American professor and junior partner in writing the Stevie thing, Jack Barbera, he didn't want to go because he'd met Lawson before and once was enough. That should have been a hint. But I'd spent the whole day in my little hostel room reading Nightmare Abbey for class, so I wasn't going to pass up this opportunity to get my bum off the chair. And Bill was saying intoxicating stuff like: this guy sells Beckett's manuscripts to American university libraries and his boyfriend is the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. So I put on my only suit and also the blue air-force coat, I remember, because it was the only coat I had--unlike Bill's rather smart Burberry--and off we went to Covent Garden. Lawson's flat was located above the shop there, and we were buzzed up to go get him. Buzzing people up was another thing very new to me, very London. At the top of the narrow stairs, waiting for us a little anxiously, was this small, middle-aged man with a bald head and a very long jaw and nose. Round-shouldered, a physique so stooped that, as he shuffled back from the stairs, he seemed a bit more rotund than he probably was. And red-faced, he was already several drinks into his evening. We followed him into the flat to have some wine before going out, and I remember there was a lot of rickety, antique furniture scattered around in this under-heated living-room and only one comfortable chair, and Lawson took that for himself. So we sort of settled where we could on the edge of things, and Lawson starts up this angular conversation with Bill. His place was all fashionably dim lighting but the walls were covered with David Hockneys--originals, Lawson was a friend. He'd just come back from a holiday in America with Hockney. He had a stack of photos from the trip about a foot high piled on the coffee table, no kidding--I remember, because he said everyone takes lots of pictures on holiday but "David can actually afford to develop them all." And he showed us a few; they were taken at some kind of amusement park. Just ordinary snaps, except that some had a boyish, sandy-haired fellow in them with round-rimmed spectacles and a flat, shit-eating grin. Anyway, Bill's working hard at the conversation, really pouring on that clever, American East-Coast charm. After a while I went to use the loo at the back of the flat, and in the next room there was a large Hockney painting of Lawson himself, sitting at a piano. It was unfinished, and there was a grid marked on it that Hockney had obviously been filling up, like a colouring-in set. There were also more photos in the next room of the jolly holiday, so I put a couple in my pocket.'

'You stole them?'

‘Yeah. Why not have my own personal Hockney?--I'd already begun to size up the atmosphere in the place. Tense, self-serving and unpleasant. Heartbroken George. He and his dancer boyfriend were apparently going through all sorts of trouble, and somebody had to suffer for it--and it wasn't going to be Georgie. He was a nasty guy. I mean, I stole a couple of snapshots, but he stole my evening. He was nasty to everybody, and he couldn't wait to make me his target, but at the flat he only warmed up with a few general put-downs. Then we walked, the three of us, to an Italian restaurant nearby that Bill said Lawson and Hockney had put on the map. So I guess it meant he was an important customer there and could do whatever he wanted; but when we got inside, I have never seen anyone bully waiters the way he did. Bully: there's no other word for it. The place was too hot, turn down the heat--never mind about taking his jacket off. He didn't like the background music--he wanted Beethoven. You know, that well-known Italian composer. They didn't have any Beethoven. He explained to them that the reason was because they were vulgarians. And they were too slow bringing the wine--we hadn't ordered any, but they knew what he liked, didn't they? That kind of shit. Pretty soon we were knocking back the most delicious white wine I've ever tasted as if it were chateau cardboard on a Saturday night. Bill, clever again, drank nothing for "health" reasons. Anyway, Lawson started to pick on me in earnest. When I ordered from the menu, he considered my choices and approved of them in tones that suggested he really didn't. He learned that I was studying Modern Literature and he asked me when Modern Literature began. What, did he think we never played this game in New Zealand?--it was such an obvious move. "1910", I said. "Oh is that so?"--he had a look of triumph in his eyes--"Some people would say it began in..." and off he went naming alternatives, till he swings round and asks me again: and why did I say 1910? "Because the course is called Modern Literature: 1910-45," I said. Stupid prick. He didn't like that at all. He pushed his chair back and hunched forward in this sitting-up but semi-foetal posture--I mean, curled right over and head far down--with his face practically against his hands in his lap, looking about as depressed as a well-connected, wealthy, literary socialite can be. He did this several times during the course of the evening: I noticed it was always when he felt that he wasn't getting his own way. Despite the sophistication, there was something incredibly naive and unformed about him; he was more of a spoiled child than a man.

'Anyway, the meal came--I remember the first course was a variety of pasta that Lawson imperiously ordered for the three of us, though I must admit it was by far the best pasta I'd ever tasted. Also, my stomach and heart had been living on hostel food--and hostel food in England too--so it was a wonderful break. Lawson ate nothing and complained the pasta was cold. Well it was, if you ignored it for long enough. Bill tried to get him talking about various literary matters related to Stevie Smith, and about Glenda Jackson's portrayal of her in the movie version of her life, but it was no good. Lawson was more interested in the next wine bottle. With all the East Coast charm and French phrases Bill could manage--because Bill loved to drop into a little French, I think he fancied all the British spoke it--he started tiptoeing around the notion of Lawson writing an introductory piece on the British Modernists for a special issue of a New York literary magazine. He and Lawson tossed famous names around like ping-pong balls, but...nothing. Lawson went right on drinking and complaining, until he became genuinely incoherent. I mean he was hunched over again, muttering about "Wayne", that's his boyfriend, and then any other free-associative thoughts that seemed to bump into the front of his mind. After a while, I remember, he straightened up and really started to round on me again. I hate to think of how much of our being, our existence, results from how we're perceived by others--maybe other people's perceptions shape everything of us. I know that in Britain I was usually viewed as a sort of genial antipodean barbarian even by friends and fellow students, so where does that leave me with Lawson? Perhaps he saw me as an easy target, or perhaps he saw everybody like that. Macaulay's New Zealander came in for a bit of stick, as I recall: something about how the sketch of the ruins of St. Paul's wouldn't be any good. He also told me that in his opinion I had "much to learn, and so much to learn." And he looked very smug about this little piece of sophistry, until I asked him which I should learn first: so much or much. He went back into the foetal position for a while before coming out with "so much".

'I do know what he wanted. He was lonely, and he needed some nice young man to make a fuss over him and love him. And then maybe Lawson could manage this new boyfriend's literary career, and yes, I know: eewww. I'm not even sure I'd have felt any less eewww if he'd been some ugly old woman. Nowadays though, I'd be a bit sorrier for Lawson. He had the ability to see where his life was going but not to change it--well, who wouldn't develop a drinking problem? Anyway, after the meal we got him out of the restaurant and we were literally propping him up, he was that smashed; but he insisted we go to this place, some exclusive media haunt, called the Zanzibar Club. So we did. I only remember sitting in a very long, flashy-looking room, with far too many mirrors on the walls which customers could see themselves in to be good at that time of night, and with a lot of professional types dotted about like garnish--I was working pretty hard just to hold my own liquor by this stage. So we had champagne, really excellent champagne, of course; I've never had anything like it since and we swilled our way through a bottle of the stuff. And the whole time Lawson's mumbling something about having been conked on the head en route to this club, but he's so far gone that Bill has to explain it to me. Bill had heard the story before. It seems Lawson had got knocked down by a couple of men and had his wallet stolen a few weeks earlier--can't say I'd blame anyone that tried to hit him. But this matters, because at about two in the morning Lawson starts insisting that we have to escort him back to the door of his flat--even though it's really not too far--because the streets aren't safe. So off we go, walking along in London's cold, misty air, which is wonderfully sobering, and Lawson's expounding his theory in a loud voice for the empty city streets to hear that, if you get attacked, you should just lie down in the gutter face up--because then the thugs can't hurt you and you can kick back up at them. I don't know whether he'd put this little theory into practice when he got mugged, that remained obscure; but when he started in on how, if you lay in the gutter, no robber could ever kick you in the head, I thought he was lucky he didn't get robbed in New Zealand.

'Anyway, it was about then that we passed two youngish blokes in donkey jackets, standing around with a large pile of newspapers, and they were rather obviously looking for a place to doss down for the night. Doing no harm to anyone, they were. So what does Lawson have a go at? He walks over and he starts giving them shit. Trying at his semi-coherent, upper-class-enunciated best to tell them that they mugged him. Both of them. Them! And it's going to get ugly--I mean, these guys are a bit confused at first but they soon understand they're being insulted. So I step up and grab Lawson and I say to the pair, "Don't mind about him, mate, he's a bit pissed," doing my best antipodean-imitation Cockney, and I'm raising one hand like I'm holding a glass and smiling and pulling Lawson backwards. Nothing like introducing a little more confusion into the mix. And these guys, I can see them hesitating, making up their minds--though they'll probably let it go if we move on. But that fucking Lawson starts to struggle. He will not leave. I'm pulling him, but it's only when I take hold of his hand in mine that he calms down suddenly and we can move back. So now we wander off down the street with Bill hurrying us along, and Lawson isn't speaking but he won't let go of his grip round my fingers no matter what, and I'm thinking: anything to keep the prick quiet. And then there's a shout from the distance: "Here, why are you two holding hands?" Well, why indeed? And I look back up the street at the dossers to see if they're coming and with my wine-sodden brain racing, because this is how people get killed. It's called gay-bashing, right? But fortunately we're just a bit too far away for them and heading nicely in the direction of the flat and the Hockney's, and I manage to get my hand out of Lawson's at last, and that was that. I had nothing more to worry about than the inevitable hangover.'

Peter had finished the wine in his cup, and he saw that Melanie had too. Perhaps best to save some of the remainder for Jim. They sat silent in the low-watt yellow gloom. Had she been listening? He could see Melanie's eyelids looked heavy--perhaps he'd more-or-less put her to sleep...? But after a moment, she got up and went to a drawer in the kitchen. She pulled it open and took out a packet of tobacco and some matches and rolling-papers.

'God, I was dying for one of these,' she said. She laughed. 'I've been trying to give up, but it's not working.' Melanie came back and sat down clumsily--she was tired. She leaned across the table on her elbows while she began to pull some tobacco from the packet. 'So'--she stuck her jaw out, as she dropped a pinch of tobacco along the crease in a gauzy paper--'you managed to extract yourself from your little gay narrative.'

Maybe he was different, she thought, from the person she remembered at varsity. But then, everyone changed. She'd learned at school that light came in waves and particles...why be surprised by anything else?

Peter didn't know what to say--didn't even want to mumble, again, that he'd said more than enough already. He watched her roll the cigarette, put it in her mouth and light it. She drew back on it and then told him that she'd have to go to bed soon, after this. Got the kids to take care of tomorrow. Would he mind sitting up a bit longer till Jim had finished? It couldn't be too much more. He nodded that it was all okay. Enough, he'd had enough of this. He hadn't told her, he thought, about going back to De Gouden Haan the next summer, after he'd finished his studies and was doing his Eurail trip round the continent. Last fling before what was supposed to be a triumphant return home. Sitting down in the good old coffee-house in Amsterdam, feeling like a veteran of something, a nice touch of deja-vu, while he asked around after Irene Millier. A remarkably bad-tempered hippy-waiter who'd come from behind the counter growled at him, yeah, he knew Irene. She was dead. The hippy shrugged his shoulders--dead, so what. And after the shock the hippy had delivered, all Peter could get from the guy was some grumbling talk about trouble, and cops being all over the place, and a categorical insistence that she was dead--stuff like that, before he threw Peter out of the coffee-house. He'd stood in the street in front of the shop, not knowing what to do. Peter looked at Melanie across the table, smoking; he was thinking only that it was long ago. Well. 'All things are taken from us,' he quoted to himself, realising he'd slipped into a venerable Tennyson standby without really meaning to, as if breaking through a paper hoop into the refined and altered world of literature. But now he really, really ought to be away himself and in bed, ready to get up in the morning in good time for more interviews for the book: early, fresh, bright. Interviews over soggy bikkies dunked in even soggier cups of tea, while his arty interviewees talked and he tried to master the art of seeming interested, something which he described for himself as 'stop, look, listen.' Then he remembered Jim in the hut again and remembered also that he was stranded. And there she was, still smoking roll-your-owns, just as she had at varsity when they'd all puffed away...until he'd finally quit. And there was no chance of him knowing if the angry hippy was lying about Irene or not, because Peter was never really part of the scene over there. He'd gone to the Flying Dutchman, a few other places, and asked around. Nothing.

Melanie stood up. With the cigarette between her lips, she started to carry some of the glasses and things to the sink, as many as she could hold in her two free hands. Peter stayed put, silent as she came back to collect some more, his bum beginning hurt on the wooden chair. He shifted a little, but his buttocks kept on feeling sore. Bruised. He knew he should just get up too, do something to help, but he didn't move...he sat and thought. That night, he remembered, that very night after his mother had died earlier in the afternoon, died suddenly, no warning at all, a massive heart attack and that was it, that was when he had the feeling of being trapped in the wrong story. Of how this couldn't be happening. That night after he'd been told, informed at school: he was only sixteen. His brother was only thirteen. Lying in bed that night trying to do something as simple as go to sleep; it wasn't just shock--shock would have been normal. It was the strong belief that at any moment he could actually wake up from this if he only tried hard enough. Wake up, and find he'd been dreaming this horror. Because he was in bed, and with his father and brother already asleep in their own rooms; they'd taken some pills that the doctor had prescribed for the whole family in a sort of blanket dose: Valium perhaps, he couldn't really recall. Probably. But he remembered believing that if he could just force himself awake, just manage it, he'd find it was only a dream that he was in and his mother would be there again and everything would be all right. Because things were always all right in the end: this didn't happen. He was so sure there was an alternative version, somewhere just beyond his reach, and he wanted so much to get back to it, where this had never happened.

Peter looked up. Melanie was occupied at the sink--too late to tell her now, he'd been so busy burbling on about Shakespeare...all that clever rubbish which he himself didn't think contained a word of truth. The fact was that Shakespeare's sonnets--maybe his plays too--were a kind of tease, an invitation to create your own understanding of what they were about.

Yes, he remembered, lying there in bed awake on Valium, and yet trying to wake up, make this the dream. Eyes propped open, his mind both racing and gone. Then someone was coming along the passageway towards his open bedroom-door, a woman's walk. And there she was: it was his mother, in her dressing-gown, she was just heading for the kitchen in the middle of the night; it was her, it was going to be fine, his heart skipped with joy--he was going to see his mother's face. It was going to be all right. He felt all of the sadness that weighed on him, all of the depression that was forcing him down, lifting. He'd done it...the power of imagination. But he was confused by the clothes--his mother wore a dressing gown, walking along the passage, and yet somehow it wasn't her...because it was his aunt. His elderly maiden aunt. In her dressing gown. She'd come to stay and help, and she was there in her robe, just going to get a glass of water. He watched her pass his door as quietly as she could, his aunt trying in her considerateness not to wake him. So it wasn't a dream--it wasn't. And everything fell. Everything.

Trapped in a life where that woman was his aunt, Peter recalled. Trapped already in the past. He'd never really forgiven her for it.

Copyright Ian Richards, 2023

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