Jackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he'd taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn't have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn't high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he'd bought secondhand four years ago for.Ј13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn't cycle on the road until she was at least forty).

When he'd come home with the Alfa Romeo, his wife took one dismissive look at it and said, "You bought a policeman's car then." Four years ago Josie was driving her own Polo and was still married to Jackson, now she was living with a bearded English lecturer and driving his Volvo V70 with a child on board sign in the rear window, testifying both to the permanence of their relation-ship and to the smug git's need to show the world that he was protecting another man's child. Jackson hated those signs.

He was a born-again smoker, only starting up again six months ago. Jackson hadn't touched a cigarette for fifteen years and now it was as if he'd never been off them. And for no reason. "Just like that," he said, doing an unenthusiastic Tommy Cooper impression to his reflection in the rearview mirror. Of course it wasn't "just like that." Nothing ever was.

She'd better hurry up. Her front door remained determinedly closed. It was made of cheap varnished wood, with a mock-Georgian fanlight, and was the spit of every other door on the estate in Cherry Hinton. Jackson could have kicked it in without breaking a sweat. She was late. Her flight was at one and she should have been on her way to the airport by now. Jackson cracked the car window to let in some air and let out some smoke. She was always late.

Coffee was no good for punctuating the tedium, unless he was prepared to piss into a bottle, which he wasn't. Now that he was divorced he was free to use words like "piss" and "shit" – elements of his vocabulary almost eliminated by Josie. She was a primary-school teacher and spent much of her working day modifying the behavior of five-year-old boys. When they were married she 'would come home and do the same to Jackson ("For God's sake, Jackson, use the proper words. It's a penis") during their evenings together, cooking pasta and yawning their way through crap on television. She wanted their daughter, Marlee, to grow up "using the correct anatomical language for genitalia." Jackson would rather Marlee grew up without knowing genitalia even existed, let alone informing him that she had been "made" when he "put his penis in Mummy's vagina," an oddly clinical description for an urgent, sweatily precipitate event that had taken place in a field somewhere off the A1066 between Thetford and Diss, an acrobatic coupling in his old F Reg BMW (320i, two-door, definitely a policeman's car, much missed, RIP). That was in the days when a sudden desperate need to have sex was commonplace between them, and the only thing that had made this particular incidence memorable had been Josie's uncharacteristically Russian roulette attitude toward birth control.

Later she blamed the consequence (Marlee) on his own unpre-paredness, but Jackson thought Marlee was a winning result and anyway what did Josie expect if she started Fondling his – and let's be anatomically correct here – penis while all he was trying to do was get to Diss, although for what reason was now lost to time. Jackson himself was conceived during the course of a guesthouse holiday in Ayrshire, a fact that his father had always found inexplicably amusing.

He shouldn't have thought about coffee because now there was a dull ache in his bladder. When Woman's Hour finished he put Allison Moorer's Alabama Song on the CD player, an album that he found comfortingly melancholic. Bonjour Tristesse. Jackson was going to French classes with a view to the day when he could sell up and move abroad and do whatever people did when they retired early. Golf? Did the French play golf? Jackson couldn't think of the names of any French golfers, so that was a good sign because Jackson hated golf. Maybe he could just play boules and smoke himself to death. The French were good at smoking.

Jackson had never felt at home in Cambridge, never felt at home in the south of England if it came to that. He had come here more or less by accident, following a girlfriend and staying for a wife. For years, he had thought about moving back north, but he knew he never would. There was nothing there for him, just bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway when France was laid out on the other side of the channel like an exotic patchwork of sunflowers and grapevines and little cafes where he could sit all afternoon drinking local wine and bitter espressos and smoking Gitanes, where everyone would say, Bonjour, Jackson, except they would pronounce it "zhaksong," and he would be happy. Which was exactly the opposite of how he felt now.

Of course, at the rate he was going it wouldn't be early retirement, just retirement. Jackson could remember when he was a kid and retired men were the old guys who tottered between the allotment and the corner of the pub. They had seemed like really old guys but maybe they weren't much older than he was now. Jackson was forty-five but felt much, much older. He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated). Then there were the guys who found themselves in the rut of routine alcoholic tedium – the lost and lonesome highway of your average beta male (his father's way). And then there was Jackson's own chosen path that led to the everyday Zen of a French house with its white stucco walls, geraniums in pots on the windowsills, a blue door, the paint peeling because who gives a damn about house maintenance in rural France?

He had parked in the shade but the sun had moved higher in the sky now and the temperature in the car was becoming uncomfortable. She was called Nicola Spencer and she was twenty-nine years old and lived in a neat ghetto of brick-built houses. The houses and the streets all looked the same to Jackson, and if he lost his bearings for a moment he ended up in a Bermuda Triangle of identical open-plan front lawns. Jackson had an almost unreasonable prejudice against housing estates. This prejudice was not unrelated to his ex-wife and his ex-marriage. It was Josie who had wanted a house on a new estate, Josie who had been one of the first people to sign up to live in Cambourne, the purpose-built Disneylike "community" outside Cambridge with its cricket pitch on the "traditional" village green, its "Roman-themed play area." It was Josie who had moved them into the house when the street was still a building site and insisted that they furnish it with practical modern designs, who had rejected Victoriana as cluttered, who had thought an excess of carpets and curtains was "suffocating," and yet now she was inhabiting Ye Olde Curiosity Shop with David Lastingham – a Victorian terrace crammed with antique furniture that he'd inherited from his parents, every available surface swathed and draped and curtained. ("You're sure he's not gay then?" Jackson had asked Josie, just to rile her – the guy had professional manicures, for heaven's sake – and she laughed and said, "He's not insecure with his masculinity, Jackson.")