Free Something to Hide by Deborah Moggach

as they listen to the football results. He says that in every town, on market-day, a guy sits in a booth recharging mobiles, due to the lack of electricity.
    Suddenly I long to go there. I’ve only been to Africa once, on safari in Kenya when the kids were small. The Masai danced for us as the shutters clicked; I could see the aristocratic contempt on their faces. Paul, my husband, kept missing the perfect shot. The moment we spotted a lion his battery had died; Kenya echoed to his curses.
    Cameras clicking, the Kikanda clicking and whistling. My husband never whistled, up on his ladder. What was their secret, those hunter-gatherers who had no cornices to clean? What had Paul and I missed, all those years? Why had that happiness evaporated? Because we had been happy, for a while.
    And now we’re in Uniqlo and, like a wife, I’m holding up a shirt for Jeremy’s inspection. He takes a blue one and a red one. He’s fallen uncharacteristically silent. I’m wondering if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, the wife thing. Perhaps he’s missing Bev, who must have done this with him a thousand times. Tiny, girly Bev, with her tinkly laugh and glossy chestnut hair.
    The lighting is pitiless. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, tall and gaunt. My face is blanched. Nobody says this about ageing, how the glow bleaches out until one gradually becomes colourless, like an etching of one’s own self-portrait. The tiny lines, of course, add to this effect. How has Bev aged? I haven’t seen her for years but in the countless photos she posts on Facebook she looks exactly the same. She and I are such a contrast – she small and curvy, me tall and skinny. Somebody once compared us to a chihuahua and a lurcher.
    Jeremy buys the shirts and now we’re chattering again. We’re discussing
The News Quiz
, a programme to which we’re both addicted on our different continents. From there we get on to Japanese food. Jeremy, who has lived out there, loves it. I say I find Japanese restaurants sterile and beige and painfully polite.
    â€˜I mean, who’s ever had sex after a Japanese meal?’
    â€˜The Japanese, I expect.’
    We leave the purgatory of Oxford Street and saunter through Soho. Jeremy was at some funding meeting this morning but has the rest of the day free so I suggest a cup of tea at my favourite place in the world, Maison Bertaux. I know I should be working on the Prague book but he’s only here for a few days and it seems a shame to sit at my computer. This truanting is becoming a habit.
    We walk down Dean Street in companionable silence. Over the past couple of days we’ve been together so much that our conversation ebbs and flows like a married couple’s. My life isn’t usually like this. It’s staccato. Friends come and go – a meal, the cinema – and then there’s a gap till we see each other again. It’s what happens in a city when you live on your own; there’s no continuity, you can’t work up a rhythm with anybody. I realize how much I miss it.
    â€˜Good God, they’re all poofters!’
    â€˜Duh.’ I nudge him with my elbow. ‘Do keep up.’
    Jeremy is astonished by the change in Soho. He hasn’t been here for years and there’s been a population transfusion. The hookers and bohemians have disappeared, to be replaced by men on the prowl. It’s only four o’clock but the pavement’s crowded with them, knocking back the Peroni. They glance through Jeremy without interest and turn back to each other.
    â€˜You’re old, you’re invisible!’ I crow. ‘Join the club.’
    As we walk along he tells me about the geography teacher at his public school. The man used to fondle the boys’ buttocks when they gave in their work but Jeremy says it never did him any harm.
    â€˜Don’t be so bloody English,’ I snap. ‘It must’ve had some effect on you,