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  ‘D’you really think he means to marry you?’ I didn’t feel jealousy as much as a cold curiosity.

  She gave a little gasp. ‘Oh! He has to!’

  I was stunned that Philip had been such a fool. ‘You can get rid of it,’ I said baldly. ‘It’s perfectly easy. You don’t even have to stay in hospital overnight these days. Philip would certainly pay.’

  She looked at me as if I were speaking another language.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she asked.

  Then: ‘Oh! You think I am pregnant?’

  She looked deeply shocked. ‘It’s not that,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’s not that at all! I meant that he has to marry me because I love him. I love him so much,’ she said. ‘So much.’

  We looked at each other with mutual incomprehension. She knew a Philip that I had never met, although we had been friends and colleagues for three years and lovers for one. The Philip who dined with me on alternate Saturday nights and then cooked breakfast with me on Sunday mornings could not have inspired that gasp of longing. My Philip was an efficient lawyer, a cool head, a temperate lover, and a reliable friend.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she asked in simple wonderment. ‘You’ve known him so long. Don’t you feel the same about him? He’s so wonderful!’

  I shook my head. ‘But why marry?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you just live with him? If you’re so much in love.’

  She blushed scarlet as if I had said something deeply improper. ‘I don’t want to just live with him, I want to be his wife,’ she said very softly. ‘I want to never ever leave him. I want to be one of those things …’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘A monogamist.’

  They married at the Register Office on the last day of August. Bambi wore a white miniskirt the size of a little apron and a hat of white ribbon with a white spotted veil. The office had made up a collection and bought them a sherry decanter and glasses. I could not imagine that Bambi would ever serve sherry from a decanter; but I donated my five pounds perfectly pleasantly. Philip had made his choice and I hoped, but I did not expect, that they would be happy. They honeymooned in Greece.

  Bambi never came back to work, she was busy at their new home. She wanted to start a family at once. She was making curtains, painting walls. Philip came to the office with a streak of white gloss in his hair and laughed when someone commented on it. For a month he looked like a man half-drunk. He laughed easily, he walked faster, he left the office earlier every day as if he could not wait to go home. He was sentimental about court cases, especially those involving young women. He suggested that we pay all the clerks more. He irritated all of us unspeakably.

  It didn’t last. By autumn his tan and his look of incredulous joy had both faded. I wondered what it was like for him, to go home to Bambi when he was tired and irritable from a difficult day in court, wanting someone to talk it over with, and finding instead a pretty child in paint-stained leggings wanting him to go out and get fish and chips for supper.

  He had agreed that they should have the baby she wanted. But she did not conceive easily. He never mentioned it but Bambi herself telephoned me once or twice and said that the nursery was painted, the ducks stencilled on the walls and the carpet laid down, but no baby was on the way.

  Then, six months after the marriage, on a wintry grey February day she came into my office looking pale and drawn. A Bambi lost in the cold snow.

  ‘Can you do me a divorce, Miss Cook?’

  I have trained myself to look calm and impassive but I think my jaw must have dropped. ‘Bambi?’

  Her rosebud mouth drooped. ‘Can you do me a divorce, please? I don’t want to be married any more.’

  I straightened my pens beside my blotter. ‘Why d’you want a divorce, Bambi?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘He doesn’t love me any more,’ she said simply. ‘He’s cross all the time. He just kind of stopped loving me. I don’t know why. I’m just the same, I think, but he has changed. He doesn’t want me any more.’

  I compressed my lips on my irritation. ‘This doesn’t sound like a job for a lawyer,’ I said as patiently as I could manage. ‘You must talk this through with Philip. People often have difficulties in the first years of marriage. You have to get used to each other, you have to adapt. You have to give and take.’

  All the old clichés flowed easily enough; but Bambi’s fair head just dropped lower and lower. When I finally finished she looked up at me. ‘It’s not like that for us,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It’s not working at it and give and take for us.’

  I had forgotten how irritating she could be. I uncapped my fountain pen which in the old days, when she had been Bambi the new temp, had been a clear signal for her to leave.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Bambi. But I do know that you will have to talk this through with Philip. You must explain to him how you are feeling, and then he will tell you if he has any difficulties, and then you must work together and resolve them. Then, if you cannot reach an agreement, after you have really tried, you must find another firm to handle your affairs.’

  She was not listening to me. She shook her fair head with a strange childish stubbornness. ‘We got married for love,’ she said. ‘Not many people do that, you know. They think they do, but most people get married because they know each other really well, or because they’re used to each other, or because they’re afraid they can’t get anyone better. Or because they like doing things together. But we got married because we were madly in love. Madly.’

  I waited. None of this made any sense at all.

  ‘So when we stopped being in love,’ she glanced at me, ‘madly in love … there was nothing else.’

  ‘What d’you mean, nothing else?’

  She gave that sad little shrug again. ‘We aren’t friends, we don’t like the same things. We don’t do the same things. We don’t even like the same food …’

  I thought of Bambi’s cream cheese sandwich lunches and fish and chip suppers, and Philip’s preference for the best restaurants and the most elaborate service.

  ‘So now he’s not in love any more there’s nothing to hold us together,’ she said. ‘There’s no … glue.’

  ‘Glue?’

  ‘People marry for love but they stay together because it works for them,’ she said, a wise child. ‘They own things together and they do things together. They have children together and they bring them up together. People who marry their friends have thousands of things to do together and to talk about. But for us, there’s nothing. All there was ever was being in love. And now that’s gone … there’s no glue.’

  ‘Perhaps you can make love come back?’ I suggested, sounding, even to myself, like an advice columnist of the most romantic type.

  Bambi shook her little head again. ‘Not love like that,’ she said. ‘Not mad love. When that’s gone, it’s gone forever. That’s why I want you to do me a divorce.’

  I pulled my legal notepad towards me. When she had worked in the office we had called her Bambi the Bimbo behind her back, and once or twice it had slipped out and someone had called her Bambi the Bimbo to her face. She had not minded. She had smiled that appealing defiant little smile and tossed her blonde head. ‘I might be thick; but I’m cute,’ she had said last summer.

  Only now when I agreed to represent her for her divorce did I realise that she was wiser than I. She was wiser than Philip. She knew when something had started and she knew when it was over.

  ‘I’m still glad I did it,’ she said. She had her tiny handkerchief out and she blew her nose in it. ‘It’s good to be in love madly – just once in your life. Even if it can never last. Isn’t it, Miss Cook?’

  But I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

  The Playmate

  She leaned forward against the constraint of the seat belt. ‘I can remember it from here,’ she said. ‘The trees make a tunnel, a tunnel of green. When I was a little girl we used to sing from here …’ Sh