Pulse

always, in his own mind, refer to as the water feature.
    It was now on the colder side of chilly. Ken poured more red wine, and Martha offered a move indoors, which everyone politely refused.
    ‘Where’s all this global warming when you need it?’ asked Alex cheerily.
    Then they talked about patio heaters – which really gave out a blast but were so unecological that it was antisocial to buy one – and carbon footprints, and the sustainability of fish stocks, and farmers’ markets, and electric cars versus biodiesel, and wind farms and solar heating. Ken heard a mosquito fizz warningly at his ear; he ignored it, and didn’t even wince when he felt it bite. He sat there and enjoyed being proved right.
    ‘I’ve got an allotment,’ he announced. The marital coward’s ploy of breaking news in front of friends. But Martha didn’t indicate either surprise or disappointment, merely joined in the raising of glasses to Ken’s laudable new hobby. He was asked about its cost and location, the condition of its soil, and what he intended to grow there.
    ‘Blackberries,’ said Martha before he could answer. She was smiling at him tenderly.
    ‘How did you guess?’
    ‘When I was sending off the Marshalls catalogue.’ She had asked him to confirm her arithmetic; not that she wasn’t competent to add up, but there were a lot of small sums often ending in 99p, and anyway, this was the sort of thing Ken did in their marriage. Like write the cheque too, which he had done after making a couple of additions to the order. Then he’d taken it back to Martha, because she was the Keeper of the Stamps in their marriage. ‘And I noticed you’d ordered two blackberry bushes. A variety called Loch Tay, I seem to remember.’
    ‘You’re a terror for names,’ he said, looking across at her. ‘A terror and a wiz.’
    There was a short silence, as if something intimate had been mistakenly disclosed.
    ‘You know what we could plant on the allotment,’ Martha began.
    ‘What’s this we shit, Paleface?’ he responded before she could continue. It was one of their marital jokes, always had been; but one apparently unfamiliar to these particular friends, who couldn’t tell if this was a vestigial quarrel. Nor could he, for that matter; he often couldn’t nowadays.
    As the silence continued, Marion said into it, ‘I don’t like to mention this, but the bugs are biting.’ She had one hand down by her ankle.
    ‘Our friends don’t like our garden!’ Ken shouted, in a voice intended to assure everyone that no quarrel was likely. But there was something hysterical in his tone, a signal for their guests to make sly marital eye contact, decline a range of teas and coffees, and prepare their final compliments.
    Later, from the bathroom, he called, ‘Have we got some of that H c 45 stuff?’
    ‘Have you been bitten?’
    He pointed to the side of his neck.
    ‘Christ, Ken, there are five of them. Didn’t you feel it?’
    ‘Yes, but I wasn’t going to say. I didn’t want anyone criticising your garden.’
    ‘Poor thing. Martyr. They must bite you because you’ve got sweet flesh. They leave me alone.’
    In bed, too tired for reading or sex, they idly summarised the evening, each encouraging the other to the conclusion that it had been a success.
    ‘Oh bugger,’ he said. ‘I think I left a piece of chicken in the barrel thingy. Maybe I’d better go down and bring it in.’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ she said.
    They slept late into Sunday morning, and when he drewthe curtain a few inches to check the weather, he saw the terracotta oven on its side, the lid in two pieces.
    ‘Bloody foxes,’ he said quietly, not sure if Martha was awake or not. ‘Or bloody cats. Or bloody squirrels. Bloody nature anyway.’ He stood at the window, uncertain whether to get back into bed, or go downstairs and slowly start another day.

At Phil & Joanna’s 3: Look, No Hands
    FOR ONCE, IT was warm enough to eat outside, around a table whose slatted top was beginning to buckle. Candles in tin lanterns had been lit from the start, and were now becoming useful. We had talked about Obama’s first hundred days and more, his abandonment of torture as an instrument of state, British complicity in extraterritorial rendition, bankers’ bonuses, and how long it would be to the next general election. We had tried comparing the threatened swine-flu outbreak to the avian flu that never arrived, but lacked anyone approaching an epidemiologist. Now, a