Perfect Day

her hands around.
    ‘No, but, if you look at the sea... oh, come on, I’ll show you.’ Frances never likes to lose an argument

Nine

    The Soho pavement’s not wide enough for both of them to walk separately side by side. Kate is a couple of paces in front of him, falling back into yesterday’s pattern. He catches her up and puts his arm round her, making them one unit. She looks up at him in surprise.
    ‘What did you tell your boss?’ he asks.
    ‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder,’ she says.
    She’s got a ridiculously smug smile on her face.

    On Regent Street where the pavement’s wider, they hold hands. Her thumb caresses his palm. He remembers that there was a whole system of meaning involved in the position of fingers and thumbs when holding hands as a teenager. Like all the codes in the courting process, it was devised and understood solely by girls, with boys struggling to think down their pubescent erections at the same time as trying to remember which position of thumb their previous girlfriend had confided to them meant that full sex might be on the agenda.
    Alexander lost his virginity to a girl called Juliet whose parents were such impeccable Hampstead liberals that they not only went out for the evening in question, but also insisted their daughter use their double bed for the event. Alexander has always slightly regretted the ease of his first full sexual encounter, the absence of all the surreptitious foreplay his less fortunate friends had to go through. The only secret about Juliet, he now remembers, was that her mother Lola informed him quietly that she was alone in the house every afternoon if he was ever passing and fancied dropping in.

    ‘Look at that,’ Kate says, stopping outside Hamleys .
    The latest model of Thomas the Tank Engine is puffing around an elaborate yellow plastic railway loop with his irritatingly perpetual smile.
    The Reverend Awdry’s books were banned in Alexander’s childhood because his mother deemed them sexist and mean-spirited. Unlike other things that were disallowed, like Action Man (‘a bit perverted’) and bubble gum (‘common’), he never craved the adventures of Thomas and James and Gordon. He cannot understand why they are so popular with children now. It occurred to him recently that the experience of train travel for the majority of children in the South-East was probably by steam engine with a silly face tacked onto the front, at one of the many Thomas Days on bits of old track restored by enthusiasts.
    ‘Great, isn’t it?’ Kate says. Her eyes follow Thomas’s progress over a mountain and into a tunnel.
    ‘You could probably buy a small car for what that lot costs,’ Alexander says.
    They cross the road and walk along the quieter back streets that run parallel to Oxford Street . Kate has gone silent, but the space between them feels as if it’s full of her working out something she wants to say.
    ‘What?’ he says finally.
    ‘What?’ she replies.
    ‘What are you thinking?’
    She pulls in a deep lungful of air as if she’s about to say something momentous, and now he regrets pressing her.
    ‘Hey! Look!’
    At the corner of Bond Street she stops abruptly and points. They’re standing beside a camera and video shop. There’s a television screen in the window, and Kate is on it, pointing at them. She looks different on television, larger, and her face is at a strange angle. Alexander peers around the window to see which camera is recording them, and then back at the screen. His face now looms there too.
    Simultaneously, they both wave, and walk on.
    He does not ask what she was about to say, and she does not volunteer.

    ‘How old were you when you came to see Father Christmas?’ Kate asks as they push the heavy revolving door into the cosmetics department of Selfridges.
    He remembers being pressed against other people’s carrier bags as they shoved their way in through this door, the distinctive woollen smell of damp serge overcoats and the atmosphere of bad temper.
    Today, the beautifully cool air inside smells of a thousand perfumes.
    ‘Five, or maybe six,’ he says.
    ‘How old were you when you stopped believing in Father Christmas?’ Kate wants to know.
    ‘Five or six,’ he repeats. ‘We stood in the queue for ages with my mother proclaiming at the top of her voice, “If it makes you understand that Santa Claus is just an out of work actor with garlic breath and a cottonwool beard, it’ll have been