He was dying for a drink and tried to get Nigel to go with him into the Childon Arms. But Nigel wasn’t having any.

‘You can have a drink in Stantwich,’ he said. ‘We don’t want all the locals giving us the once-over.’

So they hung about until five to one. Then Nigel went into the bank, timing his arrival for a minute to. A middle-aged woman came out and Nigel went in. The girl was alone. She looked at him and spoke to him quite politely but also indifferently, and Nigel was aware of a certain indignation, a resentment, at seeing no admiration register on her large plain face. He said he wanted to open an account, and the girl said the manager was just going out to lunch and would he call back at two?

She followed him to the door and locked it behind him. In the lane at the back he met Marty who was quite excited because he had seen Alan Groombridge come out of the back door of the bank and drive away in his car.

‘I reckon they go out alternate days. That means the bird’ll go out tomorrow and he’ll go out Monday. We’ll do the job on Monday.’

Nigel nodded, thinking of that girl all alone, of how easy it would be. There seemed nothing more to do. They caught the bus back to Stantwich where Marty spent the twenty five-pences on whisky and then set about wheedling some of Mrs Thaxby’s loan out of Nigel.

3

Fiction had taught Alan Groombridge that there is such a thing as being in love. Some say that this, indirectly, is how everyone gets to know about it. Alan had read that it had been invented in the middle ages by someone called Chrétien de Troyes, and that this constituted a change in human nature.

He had never experienced it himself. And when he considered it, he didn’t know anyone else who had either. Not any of those couples, the Heyshams and the Kitsons and the Maynards, who came in to drink the duty-free Bristol Cream. Not Wilfred Summitt or Constable Rogers or Mrs Surridge or P. Richardson. He knew that because he was sure that if it was a change in human nature their natures would have been changed by it. And they had not been. They were as dull as he and as unredeemed.

With Pam there had never been any question of being in love. She was the girl he took to a couple of dances in Stantwich, and one evening took more irrevocably in a field on the way home. It was the first time for both of them. It had been quite enjoyable, though nothing special, and he hadn’t intended to repeat it. In that field Christopher was conceived. Everyone took it for granted he and Pam would marry before she began to ‘show’, and he had never thought to protest. He accepted it as his lot in life to marry Pam and have a child and keep at a steady job. Pam wanted an engagement ring, though they were never really engaged, so he bought her one with twenty-five pounds borrowed from his father.

Christopher was born, and four years later Pam said they ought to ‘go in for’ another baby. At that time Alan had not yet begun to notice words and what they mean and how they should be used and how badly most people use them, so he had not thought that phrase funny. When he was older and had read a lot, he looked back on that time and wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who knew it was funny too and to whom he could say it as a tender ribaldry; to whom he could say as he began to make love with that purpose in view, that now he was going in for a baby. If he had said it to Pam in those circumstances she would have slapped his face.

When they had two children they never went out in the evenings. They couldn’t have afforded to even if they had known anyone who would baby-sit for nothing. Wilfred Summitt’s wife was alive then, but both Mr and Mrs Summitt believed, like Joyce, that young married people should face up to their responsibilities, which meant never enjoying themselves and never leaving their children in the care of anyone else. Alan began to read. He had never read much before he was married because his father had said it was a waste of time in someone who was going to work with figures. In his mid-twenties he joined the public library in Stantwich and read every thriller and detective story and adventure book he could lay his hands on. In this way he lived vicariously quite happily. But around his thirtieth birthday something rather peculiar happened.

He read a thriller in which a piece of poetry was quoted. Until then he had despised poetry as above his head and something which people wrote and read to ‘show off’. But he liked this poem, which was Shakespeare’s sonnet about fortune and men’s eyes, and lines from it kept going round and round in his head. The next time he went to the library he got Shakespeare’s Sonnets out and he liked them, which made him read more poetry and, gradually, the greater novels that people call (for some unapparent reason) classics, and plays and more verse, and books that critics had written about books – and he was a lost man. For his wits were sharpened, his powers of perception heightened, and he became discontented with his lot. In this world there were other things apart from Pam and the children and the bank and the Heyshams and the Kitsons, and shopping on Saturdays and watching television and taking a caravan in the Isle of Wight for the summer holidays. Unless, all these authors were liars, there was an inner life and an outer experience, an infinite number of things to be seen and done, and there was passion.

He had come late in life to the heady intoxication of literature and it had poisoned him for what he had.

It was adolescent to want to be in love, but he wanted to be. He wanted to live on his own too, and go and look at things and explore and discover and understand. All these things were equally impracticable for a married man with children and a father-in-law and a job in the Anglian-Victoria Bank. And to fall in love would be immoral, especially if he did anything about it. Besides, there was no one to fall in love with.

He imagined going round to the Heyshams’ one Saturday morning and finding Wendy alone, and suddenly, although, like the people in the Somerset Maugham story, they had known and not much liked each other for years, they fell violently in love. They were stricken with love as Lancelot and Guinevere were for each other, or Tristram and Isolde. He had even considered Joyce for this role. How if she were to come into his office after they had closed, and he were to take her in his arms and . . . He knew he couldn’t. Mostly he just imagined a girl, slender with long black hair, who made an appointment to see him about an overdraft. They exchanged one glance and immediately they both knew they were irrevocably bound to each other.

It would never happen to him. It didn’t seem to happen to anyone much any more. Those magazines Pam read were full of articles telling women how to have orgasms and men how to make them have them, but never was there one telling people how to find and be in love.

Sometimes he felt that the possession of the three thousand pounds would enable him, among other things, to be in love. He took it out and handled it again on Thursday, resolving that that would be the last time. He would be firm about his obsession and about that other one too. After this week there would be no more reading of Yeats and Forster and Conrad, those seducers of a man’s mind, but memoirs and biography as suitable to a practical working bank manager.

Alan Groombridge wondered about and thought and fantasized about a lot of odd and unexpected things. But, apart from playing with banknotes which didn’t belong to him, he only did one thing that was unconventional.

The Anglian-Victoria had no objection to its Childon staff leaving the branch at lunchtime, providing all the money was in the safe and the doors locked. But, in fact, they were never both absent at the same time. Joyce stayed in on Mondays and Thursdays when her Stephen wasn’t working in Childon and there was no one with whom to go to the Childon Arms. On those days she took sandwiches to the bank with her. Alan took sandwiches with him every day because he couldn’t afford to eat out. But on Monday and Thursday lunchtimes he did leave the bank, though only Joyce knew of this and even she didn’t know where he went. He drove off, and in winter ate his sandwiches in the car in a lay-by, in the spring and summer in a field. He did this to secure for himself two hours a week of peace and total solitude.