Daniel’s reunion with Alicia at the Ducks is a brief, painful meeting in which a supposedly chance encounter makes the past feel present again. In a crowded Leytonstone lounge, drinking and seeing double, Daniel recognizes Alicia as she approaches; she kisses his cheek, but the warmth of that greeting cannot undo the fact that their three-month relationship ended with her taking his heart. She leaves for an outing in Essex, while Daniel turns to the barman to confirm that he has not imagined the encounter. The scene closes not with renewed partnership but with a sober recognition that what they shared cannot be taken away.

Setting and Encounter

Daniel is alone at the Ducks on a Saturday night. The lounge fills with young people preparing to take a bus to a nightclub in Essex, while he drinks Magners and becomes increasingly intoxicated. After several bottles, he sees double: the shaven heads and pool balls multiply, and the mirrors behind the bar compound the confusion. He shuts one eye to halve the crowd. It is through this blurred field of vision that Alicia appears.

At first, Daniel experiences her approach as an illusion that ought to last only a moment. Instead, she continues through his myopia until she is beside him in his chair. Her arrival is emphatically grounded in place—the lounge of the Ducks in Leytonstone—yet the scene’s doubling makes perception uncertain. Alicia says his name; Daniel opens his closed eye, relieved that the world does not split in two again, and answers with an attempt at casualness. The encounter therefore begins between recognition and doubt: he sees her clearly enough to respond, but not clearly enough to trust his own senses without later asking for confirmation.

Alicia laughs, leans close, and kisses Daniel’s cheek. She says she knew he was somewhere east, expressing surprise at finding him there. The greeting is intimate and familiar, but it does not establish that they have resumed their relationship. Daniel says he is on his own, and Alicia reacts to the prospect of his spending a Saturday night alone. Their exchange brings ease and discomfort together: she can approach him affectionately, while his solitude and her presence expose how much remains unsettled.

The Past Between Them

The scene gives their past a sharp, compressed shape: Daniel and Alicia were together for three months, and then, in Daniel’s account, she took the heart out of him. That memory explains why seeing her carries more force than the casual setting might suggest. Her cheek kiss is a gesture of closeness, but against the history of the breakup it also marks the limit of what the present encounter can promise. The reunion revives the emotional wound without repairing it.

Daniel’s remark that he is seeing Alicia every day is not literal evidence that they have resumed contact. He describes seeing her come towards him in the street, below him at Stratford station, and in offices. The repeated sightings belong to his experience of absence: although Alicia is physically present in the Ducks, he has been encountering her image in ordinary places, so that the actual meeting seems at once familiar and uncanny. He remains drunk when he says this, and his perception of the room has already been unstable. The scene holds together a concrete reunion and the persistence of a heartbreak that has made her seem continually present.

Departure and Aftermath

Alicia tells Daniel that she has to go because she is joining the party bus to a disco somewhere in Essex. Daniel points out the painful contrast between the night out and the uncle who is still warm in the ground. Alicia calls him funny, moves in, and kisses his cheek again. Daniel closes his eyes as she does so. The repeated kiss extends the tenderness of their greeting, but her departure remains the decisive action: she says they will see each other around home and warns him to be careful, then leaves for her own plans.

After she has gone, the barman’s response sharpens Daniel’s uncertainty. As Daniel approaches, the barman asks whether he is sure; Daniel asks him plainly whether he has just been talking to a girl. The barman describes the black-haired woman as striking and wonders whether she works in community outreach. Daniel does not take up the question or explain their history. Instead, when the barman proposes half a lager as a better plan than another Magners, Daniel agrees. The exchange establishes that another person saw a woman there, even as Daniel’s need to ask reveals how fragile his confidence in the encounter has become.

Daniel walks home later. The clear sky has clouded over, and the weather is unseasonably mild, but the scene’s final emphasis is not on the weather: there is no denying the past. Daniel recognizes that, whatever else has happened, he once held Alicia, and that experience cannot be taken away. This ending neither restores the relationship nor erases the loss. It gives Daniel a modest certainty—the reality of what they shared—after a meeting that has left the present itself momentarily in doubt.

Narrative Significance

The reunion works through a reversal between expectation and outcome. Daniel’s blurred vision makes Alicia’s approach resemble an illusion; her face-to-face arrival briefly turns the remembered woman into a present companion. Yet the reunion does not lead to renewed intimacy on equal terms. Alicia offers two cheek kisses and a promise to see him around home, then goes to the disco. Daniel receives contact, not reconciliation.

The scene also makes uncertainty part of the event rather than a problem it resolves completely. Daniel sees Alicia amid doubling, tests his perception by opening his eye, and later asks the barman whether a girl was really there. The barman’s answer supports the reality of the encounter, but Daniel’s questioning reflects how deeply heartbreak has unsettled his sense of her presence. What remains firm is the past: he held Alicia, and that cannot be undone. The ending preserves both sides of the reunion—its brief physical warmth and the continuing separation that gives that warmth its ache.