‘I feel sorry for them,’ I said to Steven. All the same, I ran through a list of possible candidates in my head. I was human.

‘Don’t. He probably deserves it.’

Steven took a bite of his sandwich. ‘Are you going to let me get on?’

By chance, Nathan stepped out of the lift with Peter Shaker, his managing editor, as I was going in. ‘Hallo, darling,’ I murmured. Nathan was preoccupied, and the two men conferred in an undertone. It always gave me a shock, a pleasurable one, to see Nathan operating. It was the chance to witness a different, disengaged aspect of the man I knew at home, and it held an erotic charge. It reminded me that he had a separate, distinct existence. And that I did too.

‘Nathan,’ I touched his arm, ‘I was going to ring. We’re due at the restaurant at eight.’

He started. ‘Rose. I was thinking of something else. Sorry. I’ll – I’ll see you later.’

‘Sure.’ I waved at him and Peter as the doors closed. He did not wave back.

I thought nothing of it. As deputy editor of a daily paper published by the Vistemax Group, Nathan was a busy man. Friday was a day packed with meetings and, more often than not, he stumbled back to Lakey Street wrung out and exhausted. Then it was my business to soothe him and to listen. If the look on his face was anything to go by, and after twenty-five years of marriage I knew Nathan, this was a bad Friday.

The lift bore me upwards. Jobs and spouses held things in common. With luck, you found the right one at the right time. You fell in love with a person, or a job, tied the knot and settled down to the muddle and routine that suited you. I admit it was not entirely an accident that Nathan and I worked for the same company – an electronics giant which also published several newspapers and magazines under its corporate umbrella – but I liked to think that I had won my job on my own merits. Or, if that was not precisely true, that I kept on my own merits.

Poppy hated what Nathan and I did. Now twenty-two, she had stopped laughing and believed that lives should be useful and lived for the greater good, or she did at the last time of asking. ‘Why contribute to a vast, wasteful process like a newspaper?’ she wanted to know. ‘An excuse to cut down trees and print hurtful rubbish.’ Poppy had always fought hard, harder than Sam, and her growing up had been like a glove being turned inside out, finger by finger. If you were lucky, it happened gently, the growing-up part, and Poppy had not fared too badly, but I worried that she had her wounds.

When I returned to the office, Minty was talking on the phone but when she saw me she ended the conversation. ‘I’ll talk to you later. ‘Bye.’ She resumed typing with a heightened colour.

I sat down at my desk and dialled Nathan’s private line. ‘I know you’re about to go into the meeting, but are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course I am.’

‘It’s just… well, you looked worried.’

‘No more or less than usual. Anyway, why the touching concern all of a sudden?’

‘I just wanted to make sure nothing had happened.’

‘You mean you wanted to be first with the gossip.’

‘Nathan!’ But he had put down the phone. ‘Sometimes,’ I addressed the photograph, ‘he is impossible.’

Normally Minty would have said something like: ‘Men? who needs them?’ Or: ‘I am your unpaid therapist, talk to me about it.’ And the dark, slanted eyes would have glinted at the comic spectacle of men and women and their battlegrounds. Instead, she took me by surprise and said sharply, ‘Nathan is a very nice man.’

Knocked off guard, I took a second or two to answer. ‘Nice people can be impossible.’

‘They can also be taken for granted.’

There was a short, uncomfortable silence, not because I had taken offence but because what she said held an element of truth. Nathan and I were busy people, Nathan increasingly so. Like damp in a basement, too much busyness can erode foundations. After a moment, I tried to smooth it over. ‘We’re losing a page because there’s a demolition job going in.’

‘Bad luck to them.’ Minty stared out of the window with a sauve qui peut expression. ‘So, it goes on.’

Again, it was unlike Minty not to demand, ‘Who – who?’ and I tried again. ‘Are you going shopping this evening?’ I smiled. ‘Bond Street?’

She made a visible effort. ‘I may be getting too fat.’

Private joke. Bond Street catered for size eight. Since Minty possessed fawn-like slender limbs, a tiny waist and no bosom, this was fine. No assistant fainted at the size of her arms. But I was forced to shop in Oxford Street where the stores grudgingly accepted that size fourteen did exist. Ergo, together we formulated the Law of Retail Therapy: the larger your size, the further from the city centre a woman is forced to forage. (Anyone requiring the largest sizes presumably had to head for the M25 and beyond.) Apart from that, Minty and I suffered – and, in our narrow retail culture, I mean suffered – from big feet, and the question of where to find shoes for women who had not taken a life’s vow to ignore fashion was a source of happy, fruitful speculation.

The conversation limped on. ‘Are you doing anything else this weekend?’

‘Look, Rose,’ Minty shut her desk drawer with a snap, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Right.’

I said no more. After all, even in an office, privacy was a basic right.

I had to make a decision between two reviews because one had to be sacrificed. The latest, and brilliant, book on brain activity? In it, the author argued that every seven years our brain cells were renewed and replenished, and we became different people. This seemed a quietly revolutionary idea, which would have clerics and psychotherapists shuddering as they contemplated being put out of business. Yet it also offered hope and a chance to cut chains that bound someone to a difficult life or personality. However, if I published the piece, I would have to drop the review of the latest novel by Anna West, who was going to sell in cartloads anyway. Either the book that readers should know about, or the one that they wanted to know about.

I rang Features. Carol answered and I asked her if they were running a feature on Anna West.

Carol was happy to give out the information. ‘Actually, we are. This issue. Big piece. Have you got a problem?’

‘I might have to spike our review so I wanted to make sure there was coverage in publication week.’

‘Leave it to us,’ said Carol, delighted that Features would have the advantage over Books. I smiled, for I had learnt, the hard way, that a sense of proportion was required on a newspaper, and if one had a habit of bearing grudges, it was wise to lose it.

I worked quickly to rearrange the two remaining pages, allocating top placing to the seven-year brain-cycle theory. Ianthe, my mother, would not see its point: she preferred things uncomplicated and settled.

As the afternoon wore on, the telephone rang less and less, which was perfectly normal. Minty dealt with her pile of books and transferred them to the post basket. At five o’clock, she made us both a mug of tea and we drank it in a silence that I considered companionable.


*

On my way home, I slipped into St Benedicta’s. I felt in need of peace, a moment of stillness.

It was a modern, unremarkable church, with no pretensions to elegance or architectural excitement. The original St Benedicta’s had been blown up in an IRA terrorist campaign thirty years ago. Its replacement was as downbeat and inexpensive as a place of worship should be in an age that was uneasy about where the Church fitted.

As usual, on the table by the glass entrance doors, there was a muddle of hymn books and pamphlets, the majority advertising services that had taken place the previous week. A lingering trace of incense mixed with the smell of orange squash, which came from an industrial-sized bottle stored in the corner – presumably kept for Sunday school. The pews were sensible but someone, or several people, had embroidered kneelers that were a riot of colour and pattern. I often wondered who they were, the anonymous needlewomen, and what had driven them to harness the reds, blues, circles and swirls. Relief from a drab existence? A sense of order in transferring the symbols of an old and powerful legend on to canvas?

St Benedicta’s was not my church, and I was not even religious, but I was drawn to it, not only when I was troubled but when I was happy too. Here it was possible to slip out from under the skin of oneself, breathe in and relish a second or two of being no one in particular.

I walked down the central aisle and turned left into the tiny Lady Chapel where a statue of the Madonna with an unusually deep blue cloak had been placed beside the altar. She was a rough, crude creation, but oddly touching. Her too-pink plaster hands were raised in blessing over a circular candle-stand in which a solitary candle burned. A madonna with a special dedication to the victims of violence, those plaster hands embraced the maimed and wounded in Ireland and Rwanda, the lost souls of South America and those we know nothing about, and reminded us that she was the mother of all mothers, whose duty was to protect and tend.

Sometimes I sat in front of her and experienced the content and peace of a settled woman. But at other times I wondered if being settled and peaceful had been bought at the price of smugness.

Fresh candles were stacked on a tray nearby. I dropped a couple of pounds into the box and extracted three from the pile. One for the children and Nathan, one for Ianthe, one to keep the house – our house - warm, filled, and our place of our refuge.

I picked up my book bag, had a second thought, put it down again and hunted in my purse for another pound. The fourth candle was for the erring minister’s wife, and my dulled conscience.