Ian McEwan - Solar

But Beard had turned aside to touch a waiter's elbow.

The pale pension funder with the little moustache said, 'So these stories go the rounds like dirty jokes.'

'Exactly.'

'Have you heard this story about Bristol Zoo and the car-park attendant. You see, for twenty-four years…'

Beard said to the waiter, 'I don't care, as long as it's not a single malt. A triple, straight up, one ice cube, and would you mind bringing it immediately.'

It was six forty-five. There remained only thirteen minutes of contracted mingling. That it would soon be with him, in his hand, his first serious drink of the day, was already reviving his spirits. That, and the prospect of an evening with Melissa. Confident that a waiter in such an establishment would take the trouble to track him down, he walked away from Mellon, who was holding forth on narrative subtypes of blameless theft, and crossed the room to talk to a mild-mannered man in derivatives.

She was beautiful, she was interesting, she was good (she was truly a good person), so what was wrong with Melissa Browne? It took him more than a year to find out. There was a flaw in her character, like a trapped bubble in a window pane, that warped her view of Michael Beard, and made her believe that he could plausibly fit the part of a good husband and father. He did not understand and could not quite forgive this lapse of judgement. She knew the history, she had some good evidence in front of her, and there was much else she should reasonably suspect, but she remained steadfast in her delusion that she could reclaim him, make him kind, honest, loving and, above all, loyal. Her longing was not, as he thought she saw it, to transform him as he approached his seventh decade, but gently to return him to his natural state, his truest self, the one he failed to lay claim to. This was an unstated ambition. For example, it was not hectoring or denial that would help him lose weight, but lovingly concocted, wholesome, delicious meals, which would ease him back to the shape he had at thirty – his Platonic form. And if her recipes failed, she would have him as he was.

She endured his absences, the silences from abroad, because she was certain he was bound to see the matter her way in the end. Besides, her own life was busy enough. Her patient conviction was touching, and Beard, never a complete cad, felt it like a reproach. During the period of his press bother she had seen him at his worst and was undeterred. She seemed to love him more. With all the passion of a rationalist, she bore him up through the unreasonable storm. But she never brought her reason to bear on her love. If she had, the affair could have been over in minutes. It troubled him to discover that she was one of those women who can only love a man in need of rescue. And she preferred the rescuee to be much older than her. Was he to fall in line then with her sad troupe of past lovers and one ex-husband, elderly dullards, reprobates, losers, louts – exploiters all – whom her kindness had failed to recuperate and who had cheated her out of a child? None of them had banqueted with the King of Sweden, but they were comrades of a sort. Allowing himself to be Melissa's one success would be a proper mark of distinction, but he did not think he was up to the job. He thought he too would cheat her out of a child.

'Why me?' he once asked, when he lay post-coitally supine on her bed. The question seemed ripe, and complimentary in the suggestion that he was not worthy.

'Because,' was her reply, and she moved to sit astride him and brought him on again, her rotund slow-moving Michael, who had long thought that an encore within the half-hour was light years behind him.

She owned a string – if three was a string – of shops across north London selling dance clothes. Professionals from the London companies were her customers, as well as all kinds of amateurs, including young mothers who had tired of yoga classes, and even men as ancient as Beard, inspired to take up tap or tango in one last throw at feeling young. But at the centre of a barely profitable business was an unageing core of tiny dreamers, an inexhaustible corps de ballet replenished down the generations – little girls with an old-fashioned yearning to be in tutus, tights, leggings, pumps, twirling before the mirror and the rail, under the stern eye of a flinty ex-prima donna with a heart of gold. The dream of hard work on scuffed boards, of the first night, the first breathless leap onstage before astonished gasps, had survived the electronic age, the girl bands and TV soaps. The resilience of the fantasy gave an impression of genetic compulsion. The smallest tutu in Melissa's stock would fit an infant girl of twelve months. The mothers of these girls remembered their own dreams and sometimes spent hard to live them vicariously.

But dancing in the modern age was precarious. In public consciousness, it surged and fell like a futures market, and Melissa had to be quick in response down the line to distant warehouses. A sudden TV documentary, and during one week four hundred men were in her shops wanting a certain shirt to tango in. A certain movie, a certain musical, a clip on MTV could drive an insatiable, transient need. One lavatory-paper advertisement with a Swan Lake theme, and there were more little girls than ever, but clamouring now for rainbow tights, or leggings with a laddered look, or a leotard with an artful tear, just like they wore in the film. And then came lean times when no one danced but dancers and the core of little dreamers, and no one even wanted to look like a dancer, and Melissa could only wait. Useless, she said, to make predictions.

As a hedge against these fluctuations, she widened the appeal of her shops. The eight-year-olds who longed to be ballerinas were a small fraction of their age group, but they shared with their cohort an inexplicable taste for the colour pink. Not just any shade, but a particular soft, candied, babyish pink. All three shops made over part of their window displays to this gentle enticement. Beard visited Melissa at work one Saturday morning and stood in the high-pitched throng to witness the strange power wielded by a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Who was instructing the girls, how did they know how to behave, how to crave a pink pencil and sharpener, or pink trainers, bed linen, hair grip, satchel, notepaper? Pedantically, he tracked down a paper by an esteemed neuroscientist in Newcastle whose work suggested a gender difference in retinal sensitivity, with females tending to favour the red end of the spectrum. But that hardly explained the Saturday stampede through the shop, or the radical reduction Melissa was able to make in her bank borrowing within the year. In the pink for months! Then, suddenly, colour exhaustion set in and the magic was gone. Overnight, girls did not need pink things. Unwanted stock could not be unloaded in a knockdown sale. It was beyond explanation. There should have been a younger generation of little sisters fresh to pink, but they were not moved. It was not as if another shade took its place. As a sole motivator, colour itself had faded. Pink went to ground, and then, to her credit, at the moment of its resurgence, Melissa was ready.

Despite this liability and daily worries over staff and suppliers, Dance Studio appeared to Beard a haven of innocent aspiration and pleasures. Once, calling at the Primrose Hill branch to take Melissa to lunch, he waited for her on a stool at the back of the shop and took it all in – Lenochka, the assistant with spiky cropped hair dyed black, lisping Russian-inflected cockney through pierced-tongue jewellery, the piped Tchaikovsky, the scent of sandalwood, a general air of unmockable devotion to children and adults at play. Sitting in the gloom among half-unpacked cardboard boxes he indulged a fantasy (a windowless room sometimes worked on him this way), incrementally erotic, of retiring from the world's ills and gripes and labouring back here, Melissa's partner in all things, cocooned in the stock room, perhaps improving the inventory software or planning special events, with talks and demonstrations, and so placidly tracing the passing years in a swoon of sex and dullness, and one evening, obedient to Melissa's prompting – impossible tawdry dream! – persuading Lenochka to make a threesome on the wide bed in the meticulous flat on Fitzroy Street, and discovering for himself how it felt, a flesh-embedded tongue-jewel's most intimate touch. He surprised himself. He could pass a lifetime right here, dreaming among the unsorted leggings.