“Something clearly has happened: in fact you probably remember it. More important, something’s going to happen.”

He thought how you never really pictured a friend when you spoke to them on the phone: they had the shadowiness of memory, of something not looked at directly; you saw a presence in a half-remembered room or merely a floating image of their house or street. The phone Jane was a subtly stronger character – darker, more capricious and capable – than the Jane he lived with and loved. He said, “Have you got another interview?”

“Oh really.” There was a pause in which he pondered why this was wrong. “Robin, I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

It was the “we” that disconcerted him. He thought for a moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And even when he saw, almost at once, that he must himself be the father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done this without him.

“Oh Janey, that’s fantastic”

“Are you pleased?”

“Of course I am. Christ! When will it be? I mean it will change everything.”

“Oh”

“Or a lot of things. Will we have to get married?”

“Well, we’ll have to think about it, won’t we? It’s not till June.” She sounded mischievous, dawdling; and also to Robin indefinably larger. His blurred mental image of her had taken on already the pronounced jut of advanced pregnancy.

He dawdled himself when the call was over, with its awkwardly near-simultaneous “Bye’s” and “Love you’s”. His eyes ran abstractedly over the “NO LOITERING” sign while the news moved slowly and spasmodically through him. In a play or on television the phrase “I’m pregnant” was often a clincher, it solved things, or at least decided them. Robin gasped softly, and chewed his lip, and then smiled and nodded in a good-humoured acquiescence which there was no one there to see.