Perfect Day

write, which he could stretch to fill the day, or do in half an hour on Monday morning.
    If he goes home now, he will arrive back at about the same time as Nell is returning from dropping Lucy at school. He pictures her face as she walks towards the house deep in thought, then sees him standing outside their front door. She shakes her head at him for forgetting his keys again, but pleasure shines through the mock-cross features, as she pushes the door open and lets them both in. But once they go into the house together, his imagination runs out. He doesn’t know what happens inside.
    Alexander’s tummy rumbles and he remembers that he has not eaten breakfast. The smell of coffee and warm pastry beckons. He will treat himself to breakfast, and then go home.
    He’s the only person ordering coffee to drink in. He takes the cup and a plate with a pecan Danish on it to a table at the back. The top layer of fatty sugary pastry sticks to the still-tender roof of his mouth. The taste of the coffee flies him to Italy and then to the bar in Soho where he drank espresso yesterday. Quickly he drains his cup and leaves the rest of his Danish.
    Outside on the concourse again, crowds of people are walking towards him looking uniformly fed up. For a moment, he feels accused, but then realizes that they’re just making their way to the tube. He tries to push back through, knowing that he has less than a minute to catch the train.
    A woman complains in a loud voice, ‘I wouldn’t mind if they kept you informed.’ A man says, ‘No trains until further notice, mate.’ It’s a second or two before Alexander understands that he’s talking to him.
    Near the empty platforms, a guard is writing in thick blue felt pen on a white noticeboard .
    ALL TRAINS CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
    ‘Why?’ Alexander asks him.
    ‘There’s some trouble up the line,’ the guard tells him.
    Alexander sighs, then turns around and goes with the crowd. He is about to be washed down into the tube, when he glimpses blue triangles of sky between the scallops of the station awning. He wonders how long it would take him to walk to Charing Cross , where he’ll be able to catch an alternative train.
    The traffic’s so loud it’s a kind of torture, but as soon as he steps into St James’s Park the noise level drops. He pauses for a moment, suddenly aware of his surroundings: the vibrant colours of the flowers, the random, melodious snatches of birdsong. He sits down on a bench. A couple of men in suits walk slowly past him. Civil servants, he thinks, or even MPs discussing affairs of state in low serious voices. A girl wearing running gear jogs past at the same time. Alexander pulls in his long legs to let her by and her smile is so white and orthodontic she can only be American. As he watches the small lime green knapsack between her shoulder blades bumping up and down into the distance, he wonders if the years of smiling a mouthful of metal were worth it for her. Or is the nervous eagerness to please which he caught in her eyes due to all that time lived as an unkissable teenager?
    A man of about his age, maybe younger, approaches pushing a turquoise and navy Mamas and Papas pram. He sits down at the other end of the bench from Alexander, smiles, then takes a cigarette from the packet which is resting incongruously on the pale blue cotton cellular blanket and puts it to his mouth. He catches Alexander looking, picks up the packet and offers him one.
    ‘No, thanks,’ Alexander says quickly, and then, so that he doesn’t appear to be disapproving, he asks, ‘How old is he?’
    ‘Four months.’
    The man lights up.
    ‘ Your first?’
    ‘Yeah. You got kids?’
    ‘One girl. She’s five.’
    ‘ S’great , isn’t it?’
    ‘When they’re sleeping,’ Alexander says, nodding at the baby who’s lying on his back with his hands stretched up beside his head.
    ‘Yeah, right,’ says the man, blowing smoke out, and they both laugh.
    Alexander feels a jolt of disloyalty to Lucy as he remembers the pure pleasure of watching her sleeping this morning, as peaceful and perfect as a baby, and the innocent smell of her skin as he bent and dropped a silent kiss just above her forehead.
    Lucy is great. She’s bright and she’s gorgeous, and he loves the way she sticks her tongue out and over her bottom lip when she’s trying to read, and he loves the paintings she does of herself, all fingers and toes, and he doesn’t know why he’s said he prefers