Later, lying beside Tom trying to sleep after making love, all the other occasions when he had sunk into a dismal mood for no or little reason passed through my mind. Any slight mishap or misunderstanding might set him off. Once he had over-cooked a casserole, not ruinously but badly enough to carbonise a few bits of meat and turn some chunks of vegetable into rather odd goo. It was still edible, and the chips and cauliflower he had cooked separately were fine, but he over-reacted and apologised again and again for hours afterwards. Nothing I said could take his mind off it. On another occasion in a restaurant a knife slipped out of his fingers and dropped onto the tiled floor with a clatter. He hardly spoke through the rest of the meal except to apologise: 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you, I'm sorry,' or 'I can't help it, I'm clumsy I know I am, I'm sorry.' In fact he was anything but clumsy, but for the whole evening every time he picked something up he did so with extreme caution, as though the wine glass was about to shatter in his fingers or his coffee cup break away from its handle. Reassuring words or attempts at humour did nothing to bring him out of these fits of self- denigration.

The next morning, following our misunderstanding in the Mercedes, he was the one who was in the more cheerful mood. After breakfast to my surprise he was keen to take the wheel again, and we showed my prize off along the King's Road and went on to Regents Park. We took photographs of each other in the driving seat, and asked someone from the garden centre to take one of us sitting together in the car, and standing, arms around each other's shoulders, beside it.

That evening in the Beckford Arms Tom asked everyone we knew if they had seen my new car, boasting about how it looked and handled on the road. Among the 'Wow!', 'Really!' and 'Fantastic!' responses were a couple of sour comments: 'more money than sense' and 'public transport's best, causes less pollution.' What was important was that, despite the misunderstanding of the night before, he was now happy with the Mercedes. Whether others liked it, loathed it, or were envious mattered not at all.




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