Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard Page A

was alone in their flat. He put his tracksuit on, so that in the unlikely event of his being seen in the corridor he could pretend to be going running. But he never had been. By five past he was in Caroline’s flat, and in the bedroom she shared with Ben. They had almost an hour and a half of sleeping and love-making before breakfast television began.
    Not that Michael watched it with the enthusiasm of Caroline. Sometimes he took a book along and read it while Caroline was drawing in her breath in horror at combustible toys, or tut-tutting at some defaulting businessman who had left his customers in the lurch. He would lie there immersed in The Mechanics of the Money Supply or Some Problems of Exchange-Rate Theory —something reasonably straightforward, anyway, because he had to read against the voice from the set, and from time to time he was conscious of Ben looking directly at him. He never quite got used to that.
    It didn’t bother Caroline at all.
    â€˜Oh look, his tie’s gone askew,’ she would say, or: ‘You know, Ben’s much balder than he was twelve months ago—I’ve never noticed it in the flesh.’ Michael seldom managed to assent to such propositions with any easy grace. He was much too conscious of balding, genial, avuncular Ben, grinning out from the television screen, as he tried to wring from some graceless pop-star three words strung together consecutively that actually made sense. ‘I think he’s getting fatter in the face,’ said Caroline, licking marmalade off her fingers.
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    â€˜I am not getting fatter in the face,’ shouted Ben. ‘Balder, yes, fatter in the face definitely not.’ He added in a voice soaked in vitriol: ‘Bitch!’
    He was watching a video of yesterday’s love-making on a set in his dressing-room, after the morning’s television session had ended. His friend Frank, from the technicalstaff, had rigged up the camera in the cupboard of his study, next door to the bedroom. The small hole that was necessary in the wall had been expertly disguised. Luckily Caroline was a deplorable housewife. Eventually she might have discovered the sound apparatus under the double bed, but even then she would probably have assumed it was some junk of Ben’s that he had shoved there out of harm’s way. Anyway, long before then . . .
    Long before then—what?
    â€˜Hypocritical swine!’ yelled Ben, as he heard Caroline laughing with Michael that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had really wiped the floor with him in that interview. ‘She told me when I got home yesterday how well I’d handled it.’
    As the shadowy figures on the screen turned to each other again, their bare flesh glistening dully in the dim light, Ben hissed: ‘Whore!’
    The make-up girl concentrated on removing the traces of powder from his neck and shirt-collar, and studiously avoided comment.
    â€˜I suppose you think this is sick, don’t you?’ demanded Ben.
    â€˜It’s none of my business,’ the girl said, but added: ‘If she is carrying on, it’s not surprising, is it? Not with the hours we work.’
    â€˜Not surprising? I tell you, I was bloody surprised! Just think how you would feel if your husband, or bloke, was two-timing you while you were at the studio.’
    â€˜He is,’ said the girl. But Ben hadn’t heard. He frequently didn’t hear other people when he was off camera. His comfortable, sympathetic-daddy image was something that seldom spilled over into his private life. Indeed, at his worst, he could slip up even on camera: he could be leant forwards, listening to his interviewees with appearance of the warmest interest, then reveal by his next question that he hadn’t heard a word they were saying. But that happenedvery infrequently, and only when he was extremely preoccupied. Ben was very good at his job.
    â€˜Now they’ll have