Fidelity

"Can you talk about it?" the priest asked softly.

"No," Neal said emphatically, striding out of the cathedral.

Their three-roomed apartment was in Berwick Street. The place was in disarray, with soiled clothing, empty food cartons, bottles, cutlery and crockery lying everywhere. Claire was a hopeless housekeeper, and it had always fallen to him to keep the place tidy.

At the desk beside the slanting window Neal found her notepad. Inside was a draft of an unfinished poem. It was barely decipherable, being defaced with vigorous crossings-out, scrawled insertions and amendments. It began:

In the morning I awake,

Warm from some faint, forgotten dream

The next few lines were irrevocably scratched out. And then:

But memories intrude

My thoughts like bleating sheep

Press in and drive away

The blissful oblivion of sleep

Several more lines had been erased with venom, as though Claire despised herself for committing them to paper in the first place. Two more had been rewritten:

No answers; only consequences

The empty kitchen, cold as stone

Another emphatic deletion before:

As I sit at the breakfast table, alone.

There was no more. He tore the page from the pad and put it in his pocket. Then he phoned Malcolm on his mobile number. And got straight through.

"Malcolm? It's Neal. They're going to operate on Claire."

"Operate? I thought she was all right."

"It's psychosurgery. She's signed the consent form."

A pause and a muffled sound. "Well, well. I never thought she had it in her."

"I don't think she has. I think it's a spur-of-the-moment thing that she'll regret. How can we stop it?"

There was another pause. It was obvious Malcolm was in a meeting.

"Have you talked to the doctors?" he said.

"Yes. Legally they have an air-tight case. They won't budge."

"You aren't suggesting we break in there and spirit Claire away?"

"No, of course not. But maybe they've overlooked some loophole in the law which we could invoke to get the operation delayed."

"Hmm, it's possible, I suppose. I'll get in touch with Bardon. He's been sitting idle for the past year, anyway. It's about time he got his legal teeth into something juicy."

"Malcolm, thanks. I don't know how I'll ever repay you."

"In the present circumstances it would be indiscreet of me even to drop a hint."

He sat waiting all afternoon, drinking Bombay Sapphires with lemonade, the only drink in the place. The big photograph of himself and Claire on holiday in Tanzania still hung over the mantelpiece. Taken three years before on Claire's twenty-first birthday, it showed her, russet-haired in a calico dress, exuberantly posing arms flung wide while he, lean and dark and intense, held her around the waist as if she might otherwise fly away.

At six-thirty Malcolm phoned back. They had no levers. The operation would go ahead.

Malcolm sounded paternally concerned. "What are you going to do now?" "Get stoned," Neal told him.

He drank himself into a stupor, and when he woke the following morning he went out and bought more booze and began drinking again. Reporters started ringing, leaving urgent messages on the answerphone, wanting to know what was happening. The doorbell rang several times during the day but Neal didn't answer it until he recognized Malcolm's particular staccato. Malcolm, as burly as any bouncer, pushed his way in through a small pack of reporters, forcing the door shut behind him. Reassured by his presence, Neal passed out on the bed, and then it was dawn and he was rising out of a night of turbulent dreams into the first new day of Claire's transmogrified existence.

He phoned the hospital and was told that she was still under sedation. They advised him to call again tomorrow. Perhaps she'd see him then. Malcolm, genial and affable, cajoled him into going out that evening to watch the City Players do "Macbeth" at the New Criterion in Jermyn Street. He found the play tedious in the extreme, the cast incapable of breathing fire into the Master's exquisite lines. Malcolm shared his disillusionment, remarking that they "behaved like a herd of cows, masticating lines as if they were fodder."

Neal laughed, though it sounded like the cry of an endangered species.

"It's to be expected, though," he said. "We're breeding a world of manicured people who function perfectly but are thoroughly devoid of creativity."

Malcolm dabbed his lips with a paper napkin (they were in a restaurant).

"I must admit we do appear to be heading that way," he agreed.

"Claire's a fool. She'll regret the operation." He wanted Malcolm to agree with him.

Malcolm steepled his fingers under his chin.