He sighed with relief, listlessly checked his watch for the third or fourth time and frowned at the continuing nonappearance of his train. As he did so, his right hand semiconsciously sought out his gut, cupping and probing the surplus flesh as though searching for a key to its existence, some way perhaps to disentangle himself from it. Four years ago, at thirty-one, he had been slim, even skinny. Back then, not in truth so long ago as it seemed, his twin passions had been the flesh and the mind. More specifically, his loose-hipped girlfriend, Lucilla, and Carrying the Can, his PhD dissertation on television comedy. But ever since The Can had been published to quite favorable reviews, leading to both his appointment as Lecturer in Ocular Studies at the University of the Metropolis and, on the strength of his elation, to a proposal and consequent engagement to Lucilla, his feelings had begun to alter. All the energy he had once expended on lust and learning had been diverted into his feelings for food. He did not binge and purge, he was not exactly a problem eater, but dinner, he realized rather sadly, had become his favorite part of the day-more important than either the work that preceded it or the sex that, albeit less and less these days, came afterwards. The real turning point, he knew, although he shuddered to think of it, had come three years earlier, five months after the publication of The Can and as he was beginning research for his next book project, when it had become plain to Chester, suddenly and painfully plain, that he had reached the limits of his own cleverness. He was sitting in his office one afternoon reading an article on the phenomenology of video nasties when he realized with a start that it made no sense to him at all-the prose seemed, all of a sudden, as dense and pathless as an old-growth forest.

[...] His father, an electrical appliance salesman, was in himself a man of moderate wit and cheerfulness, but his profession had encouraged him to explore such unnatural extremes of affability that by the time he returned to the family home at six or seven o’clock he had nothing left for his wife and children but brevity and sourness. [...]

[...] How he wished he could cast it all off, admit his ignorance, embrace his normality. He entertained absurd fantasies of giving up his teaching job and becoming a plumber or a van driver instead. If he thought for more than a few minutes, however, he realized that this was impossible. The idea of normality still revolted him. The people he saw every day-with their haircuts, their glasses, their well-chosen shoes-they had never welcomed him before, and he had spent his adult life leaning away from them. How could he now seek succor in their ranks?

So, deported from the higher state of intellect and ideas, and unwilling to take up citizenship in a more mundane country of skin and bone, Chester had for the past three years been stuck in a limbo, stranded in a purgatorial Heathrow of indecision and inertia. His marriage remained an engagement, his book a few contradictory jottings, all he didassiduously and almost every hour-was eat. He guzzled up to seven meals a day, and the departmental snack bar became his de facto office.

His problems? No one cared. They were the great green tide, and he was just another fat Canute, foolish and alone.

What kind of life must that be? Eight hours up and dowp on a train, into the Railway Arms to drink yourself silly, dinner from a frying pan, a terrible hangover and then begin again. Moving from job to job, shedding friends, gathering illnesses. Chester stopped chewing for a moment and let the possibility of desolate and dreary singleness sweep over him like a gust of secondhand smoke. He had always thought that life, his life at least, would end, whatever its meanderings and false starts, in an undefined but surely well-deserved, satisfaction. Now, as he pushed on towards forty, and in the sad half-light of this disheveled steward, it began to occur to him, slowly and embarrassingly late perhaps, that this was not necessarily so. Some mistakes once made were never rectified; some chances missed would never reappear. Looked at from this perspective, life struck Chester suddenly as harsh and inadequately explained, and happiness as a matter not of time but of desperate human effort.

She had met Chester at a house party in Bedfordshire in 1988, a month before her finals. By that point she had given up studying almost entirely. Her life was devoted to cocktail parties and the drama club, and the thought of writing an essay practically sent her to sleep. Chester, in contrast, was in the flush of graduate-student enthusiasm: his long, shy silences would be broken only by loud outbursts against formalism and in favor of Belgian semiotics. He struck her at first as an exotic oddity-as dark, intense and badly dressed as a Russian dissident. Once they had been out together a few times, however, she began to interpret his seriousness, his desperate almost painful need to succeed and his concomitantly dreadful if inarticulable awareness of failure, as a sign of maturity. None of the males she had been with before seemed to care very much about what was coming, probably because they assumed that their lives would be much like their parents’ except with more sex and better gadgetry. But for Chester the future was a fearsome, shaggy-headed ogre which every day he would have to wrestle to the ground and which every morning would be on its feet again strong and resistant as ever. Although these anxieties arose mainly from the particularities of his temperament and class, for Lucilla they were signs of a wonderfully premature oldness. At twenty-four he was fatherly. Within a month she had decided, in the silent but irreversible way of hers, that they had mated for life, and the actual events that followed: Chester’s appointment at the University of the Metropolis, his book, her sparkling success at The Daily Continent, their engagement, were to her just delightful bubbles on the surface-froth while the dark strong riptide of their life together ran irrefutably on.

It had taken quite a while for Chester’s growing girth and his continuing refusal to set a date to complicate this thinking. In the previous eighteen months they had attended twelve weddings, five christenings and a bris. The effects had been incremental; each on its own did not trouble her but taken together they signaled to Lucilla that at some point in the recent past the chronology of her life had gone seriously awry. Chester was fat and uncommunicative; she was wealthy and well-known; they talked only about television and restaurants, and rarely had sex. Theirs was the lifestyle of exhausted fifty-year-olds, but they were not even married. She had never given birth!

For Chester, who had never been abroad, it was all a delight and a revelation. Sitting in a bar the afternoon before they left, he looked around at the French people with their long, dark hair and unusual raincoats and thought how strange they seemed in some ways, but in other, more important ways, how familiar. He was one of them now. They were all in it together-loving, being loved, the great pandemonium of desire.

At about the same time, Lucilla began to blag the occasional celebrity interview, the proceeds of which she squandered on new clothes for both of them: for her, little patterned sundresses and great clunky shoes; for Chester, Paul Smith safari suits and gut-tight rollnecks.

Thus refashioned, they went to drinks parties in Hampstead and Notting Hill, and instead of rooting himself, as he previously would have, by the buffet table, Chester mingled. At first he felt dreadfully adrift and vulnerable among the yakking shoals of writers and consultants. But he realized quite quickly that their conversation was mainly burnished gossip and routine innuendo, and that the people he had feared or despised were, depressingly perhaps, no more or less competent or entertaining than he was himself.

After eating, Chester would, as a rule, spend twenty minutes contemplating his own unhappiness, its nature and its depth. This was like dropping a stone into an old quarry and waiting for the eventual splash, except every year the wait was longer, and while he waited the empty sound of loneliness screamed in his ears and his face felt as numb and nerveless as if he had been novocained. Occasionally he drooled.