PAPER MONEY by Ken Follett

cologne. There was an old bottle in the wall cabinet.

He went back to the bedroom. She was still asleep. He found his dressing

gown and cigarettes and sat in the upright chair by the window.

I was pretty terrific in bed, he thought. He knew he was kidding

himself: she had been the activist, the creative one. On her initiative

they had done things which Tim could not suggest to Julia after fifteen

years in the same bed.

Yes, Julia. He gazed unseeing from the first-floor window, across the

narrow street to the red-brick Victorian school, its meager playground

painted with the fading yellow lines of a net ball court. He still felt

the same about Julia: if he had loved her before, he loved her now. This

girl was different. But wasn’t that what fools always told themselves

before embarking on an affair?

Let’s not be hasty! he told himself. For her this might be a one-night

stand. He could not assume she would want to see him again.

Yet he wanted to decide where his aims lay before asking her what the

options were: government had taught him to brief himself before

meetings.

He had a formula for the approach to complex issues. First, what have I

got to lose?

Julia, again: plump, intelligent, contented; her horizons contracting

inexorably with every year of motherhood. There had been a time when he

lived for her: he bought the clothes she liked, he read novels because

she was interested in novels, and his political successes pleased him

all the more because they pleased her. But the center of gravity of his

life had shifted. Now Julia held sway only over trivia.

She wanted to live in Hampshire, and it did not matter to him, so they

lived there. She wanted him to wear check jackets, but

Westminster chic demanded sober suits, so he wore dark, faintly

patterned grays and navy blues.

When he analyzed his feelings, he found there was not a lot to tie him

to Julia. A little sentiment, perhaps; a nostalgic picture of her, with

her hair in a ponytail, doing the jive in a tapered skirt.

Was that love or something? He doubted it.

The girls? That was something else. Katie, Penny and Adrienne: only

Katie was old enough to understand love and marriage. They did not see

much of him, but he took the view that a little father-love goes a long

way, and is a great deal better thin no father at all. There was no room

for debate there: his opinion was fixed.

And there was his career. A divorce might not harm a Junior Minister,

but it could ruin a man higher Up There had never been a divorced Prime

Minister. Tim Fitzpeterson wanted that job.

So there was a lot to lose–in fact, all he held dear. He turned his

gaze from the window to the bed. The girl had rolled onto her side,

facing away. She was right to have her hair short–it emphasized the

slender neck and pretty shoulders. Her back tapered sharply to a small

waist, then disappeared beneath a crumpled sheet. Her skin was faintly

tanned.

There was so much to gain. “Joy” was a word Tim had little use for, but

it entered his thoughts now. If he had known joy before, he could not

remember when. Satisfaction, yes: in the writing of a sound,

comprehensive report; in the morning of one of those countless small

battles in committees and in the House of Commons; in a book that was

correct or a wine that was right. But the savagely chemical pleasure he

had with this girl was new.

There; those were the pros and cons. The formula said, now add them up

and see which is greater. But this time the formula would not work.

He had acquaintances who said it never did.

Perhaps they were right. It might be a mistake to think that reasons

could be counted like pound notes: he was reminded, curiously, of a

phrase from a college philosophy lecture, “the bewitchment of our

intelligence by means of language.”

Which is longer–an airplane or a one-act play?

Which do I prefer–satisfaction or joy? His thinking was getting woolly.

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