6

Murphy, Pkofflunnel and the nurse walk away from the burning house. The nurse's name is actually Dorothy. She says, "I can't believe ye'd do this for me."

"I love you," Pkofflunnel says.

"No, I love you," Murphy says.

"Were you talking to me or to her?" Pkofflunnel says.

"Who do you think?"

"It's probably Dorothy, but with the dress you were wearing and those stories in the papers..."

"You can't believe everything you read in the papers, especially stories about you that you know to be false."

"I love both of you," Dorothy says. "I don't care what paper prints that."

Neither of them can tell if she really feels this or if she's saying it out of honour, seeing as they've both just played the role of the knight in shining armour and she was the damsel in distress. Honour is a suit they need to fit into. Pkofflunnel isn't even drunk when he suggests a duel to settle this. It's part of the knight-in-shining-armour vision he has of himself.

The last time they had a duel they didn't go far enough away from each other before shooting, but this time they go too far. The long walk in the snow clears their heads and when the fog is gone, confusion reigns. They both feel something for Dorothy, but they love Maria too, and there's a slight tinge of curiosity aroused by the newspaper stories. Neither of them has the will to shoot the other.

Murphy keeps walking. He knows he has to find Maria. Pkofflunnel stops and turns back. He finds Dorothy waiting for him. They wait for Murphy but he doesn't return. "This is his way of accepting defeat," she says.

Pkofflunnel has never been one to let go of a victory, no matter what it entails. He takes her in his arms and he kisses her. He enjoys what this victory entails.

Maria is getting bored of the high life with Hank. He leaves for work early each morning and he doesn't come home until eight or nine. He's often away on business, which leaves her with nothing to do but sunbathe by the pool in his mansion by the sea, or sunbathe on his yacht. She has nothing to do apart from doing next to nothing while wearing even less. There are butlers and maids to do everything for her. She misses the joys of making tea and sandwiches, of preparing picnics, of attempting to make cakes and starting fires.

She takes up hobbies, but nothing really interests her. She goes to the theatre and to art galleries. She meets so-called friends who are just as bored as she is, and the ones who aren't bored are entirely vacuous.

She complains to Hank and he buys her flowers or dogs or a Ferrari, and he takes her out to dinner. For a while everything smells of roses again and they walk through the rose garden in moonlight, but on the following morning he's off to work, gone to another country, communicating with her by text and getting delayed with Japanese businessmen who want to get drunk and cry.

She goes to an art gallery with Hank's brother, Daniel. He's an artist. She's been to all of the art galleries many times before. She looks at paintings and it's like looking at walls. She rarely comes across interesting walls these days. When she was younger she loved walls. She was always finding new ones, original creations, walls that were the products of wild imaginations. Even plain beige walls could fill her soul with a gale-force thrill that would leave her speechless for a while. But now walls can no longer leave an imprint on her soul. She looks at them and sees lifeless functionality. She looks at walls and it's like looking at paintings.

But Daniel brings paintings and walls to life again. They spend hours walking around the gallery. The last time she was here it took her ten minutes to see everything worth seeing, but it takes hours with Daniel. The glass wall of his words provides a completely new way of looking at the world around her. She feels cut off from the world when she's with him. They're alone behind his glass wall and everyone outside is ignorant of the feeling she gets inside. They can't see things the way she sees them. A painting of a dog licking a hamster takes on a whole new significance when seen through Daniel's words. She sees deep, underlying truths. She feels a dizzying madness as a new reality opens up before her feet, a vast chasm beneath her and she wants to fall in with him. He brings the paintings to life and then he brings the walls behind the paintings to life.

He enjoys looking at the paintings with her. She's like a blank canvas for him to paint his theories on. They go to see a film and then to a cafe to discuss the film. They talk for hours, constantly digressing and getting distracted and forgetting where they are and laughing at stupid things, like people's hair or kids falling out of trees, and this is the type of conversation she loves. It's the type of conversation she used to have with Hank before he became engrossed in his work. Being engrossed in Daniel makes it much easier to live with Hank. She doesn't mind when he goes away on business. It's a chance to go somewhere with Daniel, to a gallery or out on the yacht or for a simple walk along the seafront or on the beach, or archery, or eating ice creams on a cliff top or standing in an apartment in silence, a beautiful silence late in the afternoon when the sun is heading for the horizon and it fills the apartment through the vast windows overlooking the sea, a silence you could hammer a nail into and hang a picture from and if your hit your thumb with the hammer or hammered the nail into your finger you wouldn't break the silence, you'd just smile and then make love to the person keeping up his/her end of the silence.

They find themselves together when their clothes are elsewhere, and they can't help what follows. They're in an apartment overlooking the sea as late afternoon imperceptibly becomes evening while they're engrossed in the silence, and who knows where their clothes are? Nearby, as it happens, but who cares. He paints her picture while she's draped in the curtains and they make love in candle-light. They can't resist each other after this. They couldn't resist each other shortly before it either. She knows it's wrong, but she feels alive with him. He feels guilty because of what he's doing to his brother, but he feels fantastic because of what he's doing to her.

They nearly get caught once when Hank comes home, and he said he was going away but here he is very much at home and to make it even more emphatic he says, "Hi honey, I'm home." That's his joke but it isn't very funny and she manages a nervous laugh, hoping that in Hank's mind he'll hear that and picture her in the bath or washing the dog or looking at a wall or getting something from the drink's cabinet or looking under the bed, and not desperately trying to un-do the undressing with Daniel, who's deep into dressing, terrified of being caught by his own brother.

Daniel's dressing might be at an advanced stage but it's still nowhere near the end when he leaves through the window with shoes in hands and bare feet having to endure the pain of unidentified sharp objects without the compensation of releasing a stream of obscenities. Maria fixes her hair and her dress and composes her head even though it's ringing like a bell but she smiles and breezes into the living room, looking like someone who's just been talking to the dog or pointing at the wall and saying, "You," or looking under the bed or laughing at something her sister said or polishing glasses or writing a letter of complaint to an ostrich farm. Hank kisses her and the internal bells are ringing, not wedding bells or bells of joy, more like alarm bells. She starts to relax when he starts talking about how his secretary is getting stupider by the day.

"Stupider, is it?" Maria says.

"If I asked her to book me a flight for Tuesday afternoon, I could end up with a Shetland pony on Wednesday night."

"Is that what you ended up with?"

"No, I ended up with a flight on Wednesday night."

"Are you going on it?"

"Yeah, I'll have to. I'll be back again on Thursday."