as though he were already well known to her, as presumably he was by repute. Later, reeling from the shock of the encounter, he woke Martha as he got into bed and learned that she was a friend of Jessica’s and they had been out together for the evening. He still claims not to have slept a wink that night, after making such an unsettling discovery.
Steve rarely mentions his Jewish background, which Martha does not share, and never allows it to colour his position on any issue: he persistently takes a pro-Palestinian stance on the situation in the Middle East. Yet he is aware of traces in himself, which he does his best to conceal, of the more traditional outlook associated with Judaism. Obscured for years, these ancestral leanings have surfaced in a protective attitude towards his daughters, which Jessica in particular claims to place her at a disadvantage in relation to her friends. Confident though he is in most aspects of his life, he sometimes feels disabled in his dealings with her by an unresolved conflict between reason and a powerful paternal instinct.
‘What do you think, Martha?’ he asks.
The two girls smile and exchange a look at this evidence of their father’s growing reliance on their mother. Martha is soothing (a quality he has come to need more with the passage of time), has great reserves of common sense (denigrated by Steve in the classroom and lecture hall, it has its use in solving family disputes) and, perhaps most valuable of all, a quality of attentiveness that gives her judgements particular weight. Whatever problems are brought to her, at home, at work or within her own large circle of friends, she is apparently able to put herself on one side, so that even when her advice is not to the liking of those who have sought it, they feel she has offered it in their best interests.
‘I think we should be preparing Jessica for university,’ she says, ‘not academically – that’s taken care of – but in how she handles the social life. Once she’s away, we won’t know where she is or whom she’s with at any given time. We should trust in her good sense, but we’ll make sure she has a mobile, in case there are problems she can’t deal with. And meanwhile, Jess, I’ll ring Louisa’s mother –’
‘Oh, Mum, do you have to?’
‘– and make sure that she’ll be there and expecting you. We’ll also insist on knowing how you intend to get back to Louisa’s.’
Shortly afterwards, once Jessica and Emily have gone off to their rooms, Steve and Martha settle down to enjoy a glass of wine before they summon their daughters for dinner.
‘So,’ Steve asks, ‘how was life among the stacks today?’
Martha works at the British Library, which has been beset by difficulties since its recent move to Euston Road. Steve is often amused by her stories of life at the library where, despite the reputation enjoyed by librarians for having quiet, retiring natures, there seem to be as many prima donnas as there are in the academic world.
‘Don’t even ask. This is a day when I’d prefer to forget all about it.’
Steve watches as Martha performs her own exhaustion. She lets her head flop to one side, her arms go limp, while her legs, which are already stretched out in front of her, relax apart. Her eyes are closed, so she doesn’t notice that he takes in the details of her appearance – her long legs, still shapely, clad in black tights as they were when he had first met her, her body still pretty much what it was then, slim and agile, in a black skirt ending just above the knee and a soft blue polo-neck sweater. Her face is more lined but, he is pleased to note, not sagging, and while she doesn’t inspire in him the kind of pride of possession that he feels for his daughters, he has for her a growing tenderness. The adjective that is most likely to hover in his mind in connection with her is ‘steadfast’: as their time together lengthens, it becomes increasingly appropriate.
Having made her point, she recovers her original position and says, ‘In fact, I’m feeling so feeble this evening that I’m going to curl up after dinner with a Joanna Trollope that I bought on my way home.’
Steve throws up his arms in mock-despair and says, affectionately, ‘What are we going to do with you?’ This is one of their recurring routines, provoked not just by Martha’s occasional taste for light fiction but by the chocolate wrappers that sometimes emerge from the debris of her handbag, the furtive cigarettes that, once or twice a week, he finds her smoking in the garden or in an empty room with the window open, and by the long, involved, often raucous telephone conversations she has with her friends. In truth, however, he admires her capacity to find pleasure in small, harmless acts of self-indulgence, while he can never enjoy more than fleeting moments of contentment. He is always measuring himself, not by what he has already achieved but by those goals, not yet reached, that he is currently pursuing, and is too easily cast down by setbacks.
‘So, what about you?’ she asks. ‘Any news yet?’
This is the moment Steve has been dreading, as much as he’s been longing for it, throughout the day. He needs to unburden himself, but an admission of failure is painful, even to an audience as loyal as Martha.
‘I didn’t get it,’ he says, staring into his glass; and as his smile fades, she sees the look of utter desolation.
‘Oh, Steve, I am sorry.’
He was being considered as the front man for a series of projected programmes on Ireland, covering history and broader cultural issues. When he was asked to apply he had embraced the opportunity as the ideal platform for his talents, the escape route that had become necessary since his return from Ireland. He has discussed the project endlessly with Martha, and although she has done her best to share his enthusiasm, his craving for celebrity – however it is dressed up and disguised, that’s what it comes down to – has saddened her. She respects his ambition, but can’t help feeling that he’s elevated something essentially tawdry above the valuable work to which he’s dedicated his life. At the same time, the deep shame she reads into his averted gaze, as though he can hardly bear to look at her, arouses in her an instinct to protect and comfort.
‘It’s probably a political appointment, rather than one based on merit,’ she says, hoping that if it isn’t it can be interpreted in Steve’s favour. ‘Did they tell you who is doing it?’
‘Oh, some Irishman,’ he says, then laughs at his dismissive tone.
‘Well, then, at least it isn’t personal.’
‘I know, I know, and of course, objectively, I can see that it’s the right thing. If I’d been making the appointment, it’s probably what I would have done. But it makes me wonder whether I’m doing the right thing in changing direction, whether I’ll ever be taken seriously. There are those already who see me as something of an opportunist, which is allowable as long as one is successful in seizing opportunities. But a failed opportunist becomes a laughing-stock.’
Martha takes a deep breath while she considers which, among the options available to her, is most likely to lift Steve out of his gloom. Nobody else, not even his daughters, suspects Steve’s talent for despair, the way that after every setback, even the most trifling, he can reduce everything he’s achieved to nothing. She thinks that this was why he married her. There were a number of available candidates, women with flashier intellects or more obvious glamour, but he found in her the one person to whom he could expose his weakness and find solace. She felt then and still feels that if her one advantage over the rest of the field is that she can perform this particular service for him she might as well make the most of it.
‘You do have your book on Joyce, and it sounds wonderful. That will be a far more solid achievement than hosting a few television programmes that everybody will have forgotten within a month or two.’
‘It sounds more wonderful than it is,’ Steve says. ‘I imagined something really creative, but realisation’s dawning that, whatever my talents may be, they don’t lie in that direction. Joyce’s wife said that Joyce envied Shakespeare, and I’m starting to think that maybe I envy Joyce.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true. Not about envying Joyce. Who wouldn’t? I mean about the quality of your own book. I’m sure that it’s only been going badly because you’ve been distracted