Excerpt from Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

To make things worse, my love life--one of those phrases where you can put inverted commas in any configuration: my "love life," my "love" life, my love "life"--had not thrived. In Blackpool I had been going out with a photographer called Michael Middleton. Or rather, a "photographer" is what he would have called himself if he'd been American; being English, he would tell people that he worked in a bookshop, and let them only gradually realize that photography was his chief interest, his main talent, and the whole of what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. (The British see this kind of thing as a form of modesty. Americans--foreigners in general--see it as an especially invidious form of boasting and superiority complex. Nowadays I agree with them.) He used his wages from the bookshop to subsidize the time he spent taking trendily desolate pictures of Blackpool holidaymakers, the piers and the arcades, condoms washed up on the beach, discarded bags of chips, boarded-up shops, dead seagulls, et cetera.

It was in his place of work, the town's only half-decent bookshop, that I met Michael. I was standing at a shelf of staff recommendations, fingering a copy of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus with a label on the shelf below it that said, "Her best yet!" signed MM. The other two books on the shelf were the 1985 Good Food Guide with a label reading, "It'll make you hungry: Kevin," and Martin Amis's novel Money with the label "Amy says: Fabulous prose stylist." I was standing there thinking, I'll read this eventually, why not take the plunge now? On the other hand, I was also thinking, £8.95 for a book? And I suppose another part of me was liking the idea of being the kind of twenty-four-year-old femme sérieuse who bought new fiction in hardback.

"It's dead good," said a voice behind me with an educated Geordie accent. I turned: a boy my age, skinny, good-looking, black jeans and T-shirt, slightly floppy but the accent worked against that. "I'm the one who put it on the recommended shelf," he added, with a nicely friendly "We Angela Carter fans are in this together" air.

"You're MM?"

"Michael."

"So it's better than The Bloody Chamber?"

"If you don't like it," he said, "and as long as you don't tell the boss, bring it here and I'll give you your money back."

I bought it, read it, liked it, came back a week or so later, got chatting, went out for a drink, and so on. We started seeing each other.

Michael-and-me went brilliantly at the start, as these things do when they go at all; then we had the usual getting-to-know-you rows, and then settled into a basically pretty good relationship. The trouble was that I made no secret of wanting to move to the nationals in London, whereas Michael, determined to stick to his policy of "It's better oop north," had a big thing about not doing that; so we had no implied future. In fact, those very words used to pop into my head at times, when I thought about Michael and how much I liked him: No implied future.

Few relationships benefit from the people involved living two hundred fifty miles apart. When I moved to London everything began to work less well, including, for the first time, the sex, with me keen to see Michael roughly every other weekend but less keen to spend the entire two days in bed, which is what he wanted to do. I was glad that he wanted it so badly, while at the same time not wanting it quite as much myself. And I must admit that I wondered what he got up to when I wasn't there, since Michael was a good-looking boy, and Blackpool a holiday kind of town. There were also complicated amounts of feeling invested in the fact that if I failed in London, one of the big obstacles to our living together would disappear: I would be free to move back to Blackpool, or wherever, and Michael would be free to move in with me, which is what he said he wanted. So I at some level suspected him of wanting me to fail. I felt I had to soft-pedal my doubts and general downness about The Toxic, because he was enjoying, or taking comfort from, hearing them. Not good, in short.

Copyright 2002 by John Lanchester. All rights reserved. This book, or parts therof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission.