Tony Parsons is an English journalist, broadcaster, and novelist. He began as a music journalist for the New Musical Express and later became known for novels including Man and Boy and Man and Wife.
Tony Parsons
Man and Wife
HarperCollins, 2002.
I liked the lights on Primrose Hill. They were, and still are, those old kind of Victorian street-lamps. Tall and black with a chunky glass casing at the top. Those lamps look like throwbacks to some older, lost city, the London of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, peasouper fogs and tugs on the Thames. The lamps had not been illuminated when I arrived...but night was falling at last and they would be turned on soon. The crowds were thinning. It was becoming too dark for ball games, the pampered dogs of the neighbourhood were almost exhausted, and the young lovers were strolling off arm-in-arm...I decided to take a quick walk to the top, and then go home
Harry had arranged to meet Kazumi there hours earlier, but a family crisis had intervened; he's hoping against hope that she will return there. Surprisingly she does, but a week later, over dinner, he realizes that his dream of starting a new life with her would never work.
On Primrose Hill we said goodbye...It was still very early. There were dogs and joggers everywhere, people rushing to work with a cappuccino in their hand...I watched her walking down Primrose Hill, on one of those strange little paths that abruptly crisscross the park, pointing off in completely different directions, just like the impossible choices you are forced to make as you move through your life. I watched her until she was gone...And just as she walked from the park and I finally lost sight of her, something happened, although I might have imagined it. It felt like the lights went out all over Primrose Hill. I never saw her again