Free Close Relations by Deborah Moggach

conversation he had had with Louise for weeks, he succumbed.
    Tim was known to be a keen photographer. The year before he had won second prize at the village fête for his study of a chaffinch feeding her young, an artistic composition of hinged beaks. It wasn’t unusual for him to be seen on his day off with his Olympus strung around his neck. But this tender hoard was his alone.
    He drew them out slowly, sensuously, delaying it. One snapshot showed Louise letting the dog out of her car. Wearing her padded jacket – it was winter – she held open the door of her Space Cruiser. The dog was a blur, half out ofshot. Another, overexposed on a sunny day, showed her at the village pageant. She stood there, maddeningly half-obscured by Arnold Allcock, who ran the pub. Another, shot over her garden wall, was a far view of her kneeling at her lawn-mower. It had broken down. At the time Tim had longed to go to her rescue, but in doing so, of course, he would have had to reveal that he was spying on her in the first place.
    â€˜What are you doing?’ Margot’s voice rang out querulously.
    Tim climbed to his feet. ‘Just cashing up,’ he called.
    Prudence was known for her temperance. Her personality had been forged, to some degree, by the personalities of her two sisters. Louise was the vague one; the girl who forgot her homework books, the woman who couldn’t map-read and who collected parking tickets whenever she drove to London. Maddy was the impulsive one who blurted out home truths and who decided, on the spur of the moment, to pack in her job and go to Nigeria. Somebody had to keep things in order and that role had been taken on by Prudence, the sensible one in the middle. When her family was quarrelling, Prudence had learned to keep the peace. She had learned to conceal her own feelings in the cause of general harmony. Having reined in her impulses for so long she sometimes forgot that she had them in the first place.
    For a year she had resisted the urge to see where Stephen lived. She had tried to blank off that part of his life – the part that began when he left the office each day. But the imagination is a powerful organism. It swells and festers, like a boil that has to be lanced. Sometimes she thought that she was going insane.
36 Agincourt Road, Dulwich
. She had found the street in her
A–Z
. She had inspected it so many times that her thumb had blurred the print.
    On Friday she went out to dinner in Camberwell. She hadn’t wanted to go. She knew her hosts had arranged a spare man for her, a fact that would be glaringly obvious bothto her and the man in question. They would be seated next to each other and watched, beadily. On the last occasion the man, whose name she had mercifully forgotten, had spent most of the evening telling her all about the wonderful things he could do on his Apple Mac. He had also spilled wine on her dress.
Hell is other people
, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell was sitting next to a man who wasn’t Stephen. When she got home she would be gripped by such loneliness she would feel as if she were dying.
    Sometimes the man asked her out; sometimes she went. The evening would be spent sitting in one of those Italian restaurants near Leicester Square that are listed in
What’s On in London
, the sort of restaurant nobody she knew ever went to, the sort that still served veal in mushroom sauce. The man would order house plonk and tell her how he never saw his children now his ex had moved to Hull. Panic would rise in her, panic for the whole human race.
    All things considered, she preferred staying at home. She was also becoming engrossed in the gardening woman’s novel, which she had begun reading the night before. But she went to the dinner party in Camberwell, just to prove to herself that she had a life. During the meal she was seized with the certainty that Stephen was ringing her at home. She heard his voice, speaking on the answerphone in