Free A World of Other People by Steven Carroll

knows, broken an understanding that has been largely observed over the months — that they will not talk of his work. For she has noticed that he likes to keep the conversation light. And, what’s more, that he is very good at controlling it. A little like a schoolmaster saying, ‘Now, we all know the rules.’ And Iris has just broken the rules, which explains the answer. For it is an answer that says don’tcome too near and don’t ask too much. She has been politely told that rules are rules. And that that won’t happen again. It is all part of the game, the game of pretending that they could all be just anybody, just any band of fire-watchers on a designated roof filling in the time between signing on and signing off. Yes, they all know the rules of the game, but it’s Mr Eliot who has made them up.
    And as she watches him retreat and join the other two in light and easy talk of a detective mystery one minute and the sad loss of their favourite French cheeses the next, she can see that he is at home with light talk. Relaxed. Just, she suspects, as he is in a public place. In a lecture hall or at some crowded public event. For he is, she suspects, one of those who hides best in plain view. And the dark three-piece suits, the hats, the umbrella — the uniform of someone who could be just about anyone — are all part of the official version. The uniform of the public figure, the best kind of camouflage because nobody notices you — while the ‘you’ gets on with its private life in plain view. But because they have shared these hours on the rooftop over the last year — on and off, for there are times, frequent enough, when he stays in thatcountry house in which he spends half his week — he recognised that she expected something a little more than the official version. Hence the glint in his eyes, fleeting as it was. For he knows that she has witnessed and seen roused into inspired, animated life the unofficial version inside the uniform of ordinariness. Nonetheless, she won’t make the same mistake again and leaves them to it for the time being. Not that she is put out, and it is not so much a slight as a playful reminder that rules are rules. The glint in his eyes is all she gets. All the same, written into that almost conspiratorial glance is the hint, the consolation, that it’s more than most get.
    She stares out across the square, in darkness now, pondering that brief encounter in the park and wondering who on earth the young man might have been. This young man who seems to have been dropped into her life, sort of parachuted into it. What is his name? She never got his and he never asked hers. Does it matter? There’s every chance they’ll never meet again and she tells herself she’ll be relieved if they never do. Still, and she smiles to herself, no ‘official version’ there. No games. No play. No rules to break because he broke them all. No, she correctsherself, they broke them all, for she approached him, and acknowledged the elephant. When she recalls his eyes, it’s not the colour or the shape or anything of that kind that she recalls, but the intensity that she always knew would be there. Eyes as intense as the times. Eyes that played no games. And insisted on no rules.
    As she joins the rest of the watch, glancing back at that dark square opposite — the summer foliage, the lawn, the pathways round it, and the rich, deep red of the roses, all sleeping now under cover of night — she is asking herself once again if there really are such things as casual promises. Or is it on such things, airy words thrown up in haste to make a quick escape, that whole lives turn?
    She’s watching Pip. Pip, whom she’s known since her first year at university. They were in the same year. Stood together for the same group photograph. All women. All feeling special. And so they were. And those first encounters, Iris and Pip and all the others from that class of 1937, never felt incidental, for they were