A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe Page A

and when they went down to the second division that season she started supporting Liverpool instead, because they were league champions. Naturally she didn’t want the bag any more, so she gave it to me. The next day this unfortunate chap had slipped his love letter into it. I ended up fancying the pants off him for about two terms, and finally had my first sexual encounter with a friend of his in the shower after a cross-country run. And I’ve never looked back since.’ Lawrence smiled again and drank up the last of the tea, including a few leaves. Then he assumed a more worried look. ‘This girl Amanda – you didn’t tell her where I was, did you?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Paul, and added, casually, ‘You’ll stay for some lunch, I hope?’
    ‘That would be very pleasant,’ said Lawrence. ‘And then I really must be getting to Derby.’
    ‘I’ll just go out to the shop,’ said Paul, ‘and get a few things.’
    He was lying, of course, but he had a good reason: for Amanda had convinced him, over the telephone, that Lawrence had suicidal tendencies, and he had promised to keep him in the house until she arrived.
    And now, I suppose, you will be wanting me to explain how she had come to hold this belief.
    The truth is that Lawrence’s sister, who was a highminded sort of woman, worked for the Samaritans; and Lawrence, having failed to obtain any answer from her home telephone number, had called her at work. Amanda had been trailing after him all day as usual, and she was hanging around within earshot of the telephone booth when he spoke the words, ‘Hello, is that the Samaritans?’: from this, coupled with his troubled demeanour, combined with his rapid flight from campus, she drew an erroneous, though understandable, conclusion.
    Lawrence, meanwhile, had dashed back to his room, looking out for policemen on the way, and had thrown some clothes into a bag, pausing only to ask a neighbour if she had any travel-sickness pills he might use (he was prone to travel sickness). No, she had said, but Timothy’s room is open, and he has some: he keeps them on top of his bookcase. Now this would have been true, three days before; but since then Timothy had split up with his girlfriend. This had induced a fit of depression which he had attempted to counter, one morning, by rearranging the furniture in his room, a process which involved, among other things, moving his travel-sickness pills to the drawer of his desk, and moving his sleeping pills to the top of his bookcase. Lawrence had swallowed at least four of these before his train arrived at Derby (puzzled at the time, as to why they appeared to be doing nothing for his travel sickness), so it is no wonder that he was still half asleep when Paul and his colleagues met him at Sheffield station.
    An hour or so later Paul and Lawrence were sitting down to a fine lunch of toast and cheese when there was a knock at the front door. Paul went to answer it: Lawrence followed him and lingered in the hallway. The callers were two policemen and a woman whom he immediately guessed to be Amanda.
    ‘Is he here?’ one of the policemen asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Paul.
    ‘Good work. Now let’s have a word with him.’
    Lawrence turned and fled up the stairs. The policemen started to clatter after him but Paul told them, ‘It’s all right, he can’t get out that way’, and they came back down.
    ‘You fool, that’s not what we should be worried about,’ said Amanda. ‘What about the upstairs windows? Let me go up and talk to him.’
    She climbed two flights of stairs and found Lawrence in the topmost room of the house, in the process of opening the window and scrambling out onto the window ledge.
    ‘Come any nearer,’ he said, ‘and I’ll jump. I mean it.’
    He was telling the truth, for, if we might undertake a bit of psychology at this point (it hasn’t been the strong point of this story so far, I admit), Lawrence genuinely did not consider his life to be of any