A Shock to the System by Simon Brett

I’m going to Miami . . .’
    â€˜Business?’
    â€˜No, I just need a break. I’ll be reading reports and things, of course . . .’
    â€˜So how about the one after?’
    â€˜Sounds fine.’ Graham remembered that that was yet another weekend that Lilian was coming to stay. Which made it sound even finer.
    He assimilated Robert’s news about the weekend in Miami. It was the sort of flamboyant gesture he might have made a few years back. When he’d had the money. A move designed to impress and confuse his colleagues.
    With difficulty, Graham resisted the temptation to be impressed and confused.
    In the Levi sweatshirt, too, he could recognise his own style. He had worn his flowered ties for the same purpose (though he liked to think he’d never looked quite that scruffy). Nowadays, like George Brewer, he favoured suits.
    No, Robert Benham was using all Graham’s old tricks, so Graham would have to beat him at his own game. Because there was no doubt, one way or the other, he was going to beat him. He’d lost the latest round due to carelessness, but now he had the measure of his opponent, he was not going to be caught napping again.
    Suddenly, Graham remembered that he was about to be arrested for murder, and the incongruity of any future planning seemed laughable. He felt a surge of almost manic irresponsibility.
    As he left George’s office, he asked Stella if she’d like to meet for a drink after work.
    Travelling home on the Tube, he thought about Stella. Talking to her had taken him back into a world from which he had long been unwittingly banished.
    First it had been, albeit mildly, a sexual encounter. No physical contact had been made, no suggestions voiced, but the circumstances, a man inviting a woman to have a drink with him a deux , had sexual overtones. And the automatic way in which Stella walked with him out of the building to a wine bar rather than turning right by the lifts to the company bar, showed that she recognised this.
    Graham also found, to his surprise, that he slipped easily into the observances of ‘chatting up’. It was a style of speech which he had not practised for over fifteen years, but it seemed to come back. Again, it was very mild, just small-talk, but relaxing. It was so long since he had spoken to a woman he did not know to the point of tedium, or about topics of mutual interest, rather than mutual responsibility.
    The second difference he felt with Stella was that between their worlds. She had been divorced nearly as long as he’d been married and was childless, so her preoccupations were totally unlike his. For her, spare time was for entertainment, not for maintaining houses, tolerating mothers-in-law, and marshalling unresponsive children. She spoke of films she had seen, theatres, exhibitions. For Stella, London was a huge complex of varied entertainments to be explored and tasted; whereas, for Graham, it was somewhere he lived so that he had a less intolerable journey to work.
    Her need to fill spare time so avidly was perhaps born of the single person’s obsessive fear of loneliness, but to Graham it seemed an ideal of freedom. It joined with Robert Benham’s trip to Miami in an image of a world he had once known, and might still know, if he hadn’t taken another course.
    Since the reasons he had taken that other course – wife and children – now meant nothing to him, he felt unjustly excluded from the free world, in which people did what they wanted to when they wanted to without committee decisions and unwelcome company.
    He wanted to be shot of his family.
    It was because he was a murderer that he could feel so irresponsible. Once again he thought how trivial other lapses were when compared to the crime of taking human life.
    â€˜Where have you been?’
    Merrily looked wan and weepy when he got home. It was not late, still daylight, so he felt annoyed by her demand.
    â€˜Why?’