Free A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe

charming. I’m charmed. Please sit down.’
    For a dreadful moment she thought that he had been going to kiss her cheek; but they shook hands instead.
    ‘What’s it to be? What will you have?’
    She asked for white wine and soda. Then they made small talk for about ten minutes.
    ‘Look, Alun, time’s getting on,’ she said, finally. ‘What’s all this about Hepburn?’
    ‘Well, he’s come to his senses, basically. I’ve managed to disillusion him about what he might have come out with in the way of a court settlement. These people, they read in the papers about people being compensated to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds. I told him that he wasn’t even certain to win, if it came to that.’ He smiled. ‘Well, I’ve saved you some work, haven’t I?’
    ‘Yes, you have. Thank you. I’m very grateful. Not that things are especially busy just now, as it happens.’
    ‘Oh? Business isn’t slackening off, I hope?’
    ‘No, but you know how it is: sometimes you get quiet phases. I’m not complaining, I mean it’s nice to have a bit of space. Two people both doing demanding jobs… it can be a strain.’
    ‘Two people?’
    ‘Mark and I.’
    ‘Of course. I did warn you, though. A lawyer and a medic: what a combination.’
    ‘We knew what we were doing.’
    Alun fell silent and tried to force a meeting with her eyes, but they were elsewhere. Defeated, he began to rummage inside his briefcase, which contained the papers relating to his current cases and also a thermos flask and an apple. His wife made him a packed lunch every day but he quite often ended up throwing it away, preferring to go for pub meals with his friends from work. Meanwhile Emma was thinking of an evening several weeks back, with her and Mark lying side by side and wakeful; she was looking at herself as she lay in that dark and silent bedroom, thinking how stupid it was that she didn’t even feel that she could raise the question of a child any more, and if it was all going to come to an end, which she had started to see as a possibility, at last, then had she really missed her chance, a woman of thirty-four, would she be able to find anyone else quickly enough, someone she liked enough, would she even feel like going through the whole rigmarole again? She had felt so lonely that night, sharing a bed in the dark with a man whose bed she had shared for the last eight years of her life, and she felt lonely now, sharing a drink and a bowl of salad with a man whom she had never, it seemed, had much grounds for liking.
    ‘Let’s talk about Grant,’ he said, and pushed his salad to one side in order to make room on their needlessly small table (there were other, bigger ones free) for a small red notebook.
    ‘Fine,’ she said, genuinely relieved. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’
    ‘You’ve met this chap, have you?’
    ‘Robin? Yes, twice.’
    She noticed a flicker of surprise at the fact that she had instinctively used his Christian name.
    ‘Twice?’
    ‘Yes. We met socially, last week.’
    He left a short, mannish, tiresomely eloquent pause.
    ‘Well, that’s your business. You must know what you’re doing.’
    ‘It’s not like that at all. We met through a mutual friend. A former client.’
    Alun waited, banking on a further explanation.
    ‘Some years ago – I don’t know if you remember – I defended this man called Fairchild. Hugh Fairchild. He was being prosecuted by the DHSS for fraud. He’d finished his Ph. D., and he was doing a bit of teaching at the university, earning about ten pounds a week or something, only at the same time he was claiming the dole. So the DHSS finally cottoned on to this and they asked for everything back. It wasn’t very much, a few hundred pounds or so, but it was far more than he had, and it actually looked for a while as though he might have been facing some kind of jail sentence. They were cracking down at the time and they seemed to have chosen him as someone to make an