Elizabeth looked round the restaurant,

Elizabeth looked round the restaurant, which was filling with shoppers, workers, even tourists who had strayed north of the shops on Oxford Street. These were the lines of her life, these were the things that concerned her. Order books and Lucca's salad; Robert's awaited calls and the criticism of Lindsay and her mother. Strikes and economic crisis. Trying not to smoke yet keeping the endless check on her weight. A planned holiday with three or four others in a rented house in Spain; a snatched weekend with Robert in Alsace, or even in Brussels itself. Her clothes, her work, her flat: its small orderly ways maintained by just one weekly visit from a cleaner while she was at work. No elaborate system of cr鑓he, day care, and mother's help as exhaustively discussed by her married friends. London in approaching winter, the wail of traffic through the park, and cold Sunday morning walks that issued into jovial meetings in the pubs of Bayswater that seemed to last an hour too long. And the sense of a larger life inside her, excited and confirmed by pictures she saw in galleries, books she read, but particularly by pictures; something unfulfilled, something needing to be understood. Sometimes she went away on her own to wilder parts of northern England, where she read or walked. She didn't feel self-pity because she could see nothing to feel sorry for; the mundane concerns and preoccupations of her life were interesting to her. She found bed-and-breakfast cottages and small pubs in guidebooks where she sometimes fell into conversation with the owners or with other guests, and sometimes just read by the fire. Once in a village in the Dales a boy of no more than nineteen began talking to her at the bar of the pub. She was wearing her reading glasses and a thick grey-and-white-speckled sweater. He had fair hair and an unconvincing beard. He was at university and had gone off walking in order to do some reading for his studies. He was awkward with her and used set phrases with signalled irony, as though referring to books or films they both knew. He seemed unable to say things without suggesting that they were quotations from someone else. After he had drunk two or three pints of beer he became calmer and told her about his studies in zoology and about his girlfriends at home. He implied a riotous love life. Elizabeth liked his enthusiasm and the pitch of excitement at which he appeared to be living, even in this primitive pub on a Yorkshire hillside with only the landlord's steak-and-kidney pie to come.

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