Laura meets Marty Grane at a Yeats lecture on 4 May, after Tyler cancels their plan and Laura decides to attend alone. What begins as an unexpectedly absorbing literary talk becomes an intimate conversation over wine, where Marty’s attraction to engaged women and Laura’s response to him give the encounter its charge. Its significance lies in that shift: Laura arrives with an ordinary disappointment and leaves with a new, uneasy recognition of desire that she cannot simply dismiss.

A canceled plan and an unexpected lecture

At lunchtime, Laura waits outside the Georgian Library for Tyler. The weather is drizzly rather than a downpour, but wet enough to make smoking unpleasant; Laura keeps relighting her cigarette after knocking its lit end onto the glossy pavement. The city is rendered as a place sealed beneath cloud: tram windows bead with condensation, and students wait by the Sainsbury’s cashpoint with packet sandwiches. Laura has come straight from a night shift, has not anticipated the weather, and waits twenty-five minutes before calling Tyler at five to one.

Tyler says she has been blackout-drunk the night before and feels so ill that moving might make her vomit electricity. She asks to postpone. Laura looks down at her soaked shoes and accepts the cancellation. The scene establishes the circumstances of the meeting without making it seem planned: Laura has been stood up by her friend, is tired from work, and is already wet through. She nonetheless goes into the library for the lecture rather than abandoning the day altogether.

The lecture and the first approach

Laura takes a detour by the drinks table and chooses a seat at the end of a row, three rows from the back, in case the talk lasts too long. Instead, she finds it too short. The professor describes how Yeats drew him first to a thesis and later to his teaching, and dwells on the poems’ combination of personal feeling and evasion, desperation and defiance. Laura is struck by the account: she thinks of it as a fine ambush, and an hour passes without her noticing. The talk gives her a strong reason to approach the speaker afterward, beyond the social awkwardness of being a stranger in the room.

When the lecture ends, Laura sees that wine remains on the table and thinks about getting another glass. She then decides to thank the professor, both because he has reminded her of many things and because doing so will make her seem less like a freeloader. She drinks a glass standing by the table, takes another to the front, and waits conspicuously while the professor puts on his coat and lifts his bag. Laura says the talk was inspiring. Unsure whether he thinks she is drunk, she questions her own state, but the exchange continues: he says he is glad to have been of service.

The professor introduces himself by extending his hand and saying, “Marty.” Laura gives her name. He connects her praise of the talk to her own writing and asks whether she writes poetry. The encounter begins in a recognizably literary register, but the conversation soon moves away from the lecture and toward the two people at the table.

Wine, writing, and the disclosed engagement

Marty invites Laura to sit with him in the anteroom. It is furnished with heavy-legged tables and standing lamps with emerald, crimson, and gold shades; dishevelled bookshelves thicken the walls. The cosy, book-lined setting contrasts with the sodden pavement outside. Across a table for four, Marty talks about his life: he enjoys teaching well enough, lives in Islington, and published Widening Gyres ten years earlier to little effect. They drink two bottles of wine, and it is halfway through the second when he asks whether Laura is engaged.

Laura asks how he knows. Marty answers that she is not wearing a wedding ring and that he is only ever attracted to women who are irreversibly attached. His observation makes her engagement to Jim central to the encounter, not incidental background. Laura answers that Jim is a pianist. Marty asks why she wants to write, and she responds with a phrase about raging around the dark mansion. Marty says he will kiss her if she keeps talking that way, then returns to the subject of her fiancé. Laura recognizes that she should have objected to the remark or sat back, but instead she ignores it and admits, in the narration, that she does not care. The moment marks the conversation’s turn from literary connection to explicit sexual tension.

Recognition, refusal, and the call to Jim

When Marty says he has no regular girlfriend, Laura describes a tremor down her spine and a cold spot at the back of the courtyard. Her image shifts to a cat in shade repeatedly flicking a caught bird with its claw. The passage presents attraction not as uncomplicated pleasure but as a sensation edged with danger; she also feels that Marty recognizes her response. He drains his glass and says he should get to the station. Laura thanks him for the conversation, but Marty asks for her number. She shakes her head. He smiles, salutes, and leaves.

Laura’s refusal gives the scene an ending without undoing its intimacy. Marty has made his interest plain, and Laura has acknowledged her own reaction, yet she does not agree to further contact. After he has gone, an undrunk blob of wine remains in the hollow between the glass’s bowl and stem, described as staring at her like a glass eye. Laura feels the need to talk to Jim and calls him. He answers from a moving car and says he is in Dubai. The encounter therefore closes not with a new arrangement between Laura and Marty, but with Laura reaching toward her absent fiancé after a conversation that has made their engagement newly present.