‘Jesus!’ Jane was sneering at her phone.
‘What is it?’
She had to look up to register him. ‘What?’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘With what?’ She stared back blankly. For a woman of forty-four, she was remarkably wrinkle-free. Lots of creams and scrubs. A careful regime of stoicism. A little Botox—but not a lot.
‘Something on your phone,’ he said, nodding his head and tilting his fork toward her, as if poking it over a tiny wall.
‘Oh, no, don’t worry about it.’
With this he dropped the fork on the plate and sighed and sat back, a trifecta of movements that he hoped would signal that he was tired of being ignored. And yet some part of him also worried that he’d overdone it, that she would turn on him, punish him for his breach of decorum, and so he tried to smile. The effect of all of this at once, to any observer, would have seemed rather sad. But no one was watching. Jane was still fixated by her screen, immersed in a shared story about local scandal involving no one she knew beyond reputation. Philip gazed around the restaurant again: other couples, no families. Mostly the men were much younger than he was, muscles still firm, hair still dark. The din of voices and oriental mood music made it impossible to tell what they were saying to their partners, but the leaning postures — all reciprocated — connoted interest, youth and passion.
He wondered how long ago he Jane had last had sex? Fishing through recollections for an image or a colour, he struggled to place anything.
Philip mulled this tired crease as he finished his final piece of squid, ticking all the old excuses: children and work, the natural settling of age. He’d passed the stage of writing odes to his lover’s eyebrow sometime back. Which stage was he meant to be in now? He could never recall more than half the monologue before skipping to the final lines about oblivion and missing teeth… He remembered Jane skimming an article about sexless couples in Japan and commenting on it while he was in the kitchen — how long ago was that? — bringing it up in passing and in such a way as to preclude any reply. Very advanced culture, she’d said, before leaving the room like a breeze through a window.