Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey

window, as if he had nothing better to do than sit with me. There was something of the sunlight about him, something fair, though he was in late middle-age and solid. Short, corpulent and balding. But definitely of the light. Just to see him made me feel better. Just to have him sit by me, exuding his immense, unfathomable calm. His warm serenity assured me of the inevitability of my survival.
    Just a few months after I recovered I read in the papers that his son had been murdered – lured into a park by a mystery phone call and beaten to death. He was my age. From the photograph on the front page I could see that he resembled his father. In the newspaper report, his girlfriend described him as ‘a ray of sunshine’.
    I was not a ray of sunshine and yet I had lived. What justice was there in the cosmos when the father should nurse a young woman like me back to health while his own son was taken from him? I said something along these lines to my boss, a kind woman who took an interest in my welfare and found me crying in the staff toilets. ‘You mustn’t brood on this,’ she said. ‘Some people live, and some people die. And there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s a mystery.’
    It’s a mystery, but it haunted me then and it haunts me now.
    The day after I got out of hospital I stood on the bus and trembled all the way home, aware that I was, for a time, an inhabitant of some privileged no-man’s-land; some body in transit between a receding fragility and a re-emergent strength.
    Mr. Parish, you are not forgotten. You are here in the lining of my pericardium, in this heart that is still beating, and I wish you were here now.
    Back at the zoo …
    At my desk I find that someone has left a stack of new brochures on my keyboard.
    * Genderless Negotiation Skills for Women
    * Preparing and Delivering Perfect Presentations
    * How to Handle Employees with Attitude Problems
    * How to Become Successful Taught by People Who Are
(The Seminar of a Lifetime)
    * Empowering Your Employees to Reach Peak Performance
    * Getting Everything Done – How to Avoid and Overcome
the ‘Top 10 Time Thieves’
    * Designing Corporate Culture – How to Convert Vicious Cycles to Virtuous Cycles. ‘Management is not about command and control but designing and managing the culture of a place. If you create a good culture you release energy that’s latent in the group. Many managers focus too much on tasks and not on the culture that would help the tasks to get done.’
    I know where these have come from. Winton has put them there. I file the brochures away under Miscellaneous .
    This is how I spend my lunch hours. I spend my lunch hours paying bills, shopping for kids’ clothes, replacing lost lunch-boxes, looking for Hallowe’en hats, collecting dry-cleaning, buying Happy Anniversary or Get Well Soon cards. Jogging – half-walking half-running – up Hunter Street in my high heels, trying to pack two hours into an hour, eating standing up at the yoghurt and fruit-salad bar in the crowded basement of Centre-point, resenting those languid men who take ten-minute lunch breaks or skip lunch altogether to beef up their flex time until they can have an afternoon windsurfing or walking their greyhounds!
    This reminds me. The pains in my chest are getting worse. I am beginning to feel a creeping panic.
    Frank says, ‘Have you got pain in the arm?’
    â€˜No, I haven’t. Why?’
    â€˜It’s a sign of heart trouble,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, it’s probably stress or indigestion. You do bolt your food down, Kay.’
    â€˜That’s because I’m always in a hurry, or being interrupted.’
    I ring up Diana. ‘Have you found me that yoga class?’ I ask. Or perhaps I just need a night at the Russell Hotel.
    Romance offshore
    The first time.
    The first time that Frank and I sought solace in a private hotel we skipped dinner. The