Angela

Angela is Futh’s wife and later estranged partner, but the novel presents her chiefly through Futh’s memories and attempts to interpret her. She enters his life as a driver who offers him a lift in winter rain; years later, she is the person who decides their marriage should end. Between those moments, her candid disclosures, unsettled working life, and recurrent pregnancy losses expose a life that Futh shares but does not fully comprehend.

Meeting and Early Relationship

Angela first meets Futh at a motorway service station after he has visited his father and been dropped off to hitchhike home. In the rain and gathering darkness, she stops her car and offers to take him the remaining distance. Futh notices the cigarette smoke in the car, a smell he finds compelling despite not smoking himself. The encounter begins with an act of practical kindness, but Angela soon reveals that she has driven to the service station to meet a boyfriend who is married. They meet at a point between their homes because he cannot bring her to his and she lives with her mother, who disapproves of the relationship.

After telling Futh this, Angela pulls onto the hard shoulder and cries. He does not know when she began crying or what to do; he offers her a damp towel from the car, which she takes. The scene establishes her willingness to speak openly to a stranger, while also showing the limits of their first connection: Futh can offer small assistance, but he cannot understand what she says through her tears. The service station is not merely where they meet; it is already a midpoint chosen to accommodate a relationship constrained by other people’s homes and commitments.

The evidence later identifies Futh and Angela as married and shows that their life together lasts for many years. By the time they decide to separate, Futh has not been with anyone else for more than fifteen years. Their Friday evenings have often followed the same pattern of sitting on the sofa and watching television. The routine offers a contrast to the secrecy of Angela’s earlier relationship, but it does not mean Futh knows what she wants or that their shared habits satisfy her.

Work, Dissatisfaction, and Uncertainty

Angela’s education and career do not follow a settled course. She considers science at a local university, studies English for one term at another institution, and then returns to biology. She eventually works in the editorial office of a scientific journal, a job that, in Futh’s view, has never suited her. She complains about it, sometimes describing specific grievances and sometimes expressing a more general dissatisfaction.

She also watches for other work, marking vacancies in the newspaper, sometimes apparently at random. Futh sees this pattern but admits that he has never really known what she wants. The detail matters because Angela’s dissatisfaction is not simply reported as an explanation for the marriage’s end: it is a continuing part of her life that Futh observes without being able to translate into a clear ambition. The jobs she circles suggest possibilities, but the evidence does not say which, if any, she pursues.

Marriage, Pregnancy, and Kenny

The marriage is marked by repeated pregnancy loss. Near the end of it, Angela is pregnant again, and Futh initially assumes that her remaining at home means she feels unwell. The assumption is quickly unsettled when he returns and sees Kenny leaving the house. Futh watches Kenny walk away and later enters to find Angela dressing; the bedroom is untidy, and cigarette smoke is present. Angela says she has only just got up and attributes her condition to morning sickness. Futh notices the smoke and asks her not to smoke, but the encounter gives him no direct explanation of Kenny’s visit.

The scene connects Angela’s marriage to a relationship Futh can see but does not openly confront. He first encounters Kenny’s presence through the departing figure and the cigarette stub left at the doorstep, then finds Angela in the bedroom. The evidence places this visit while Angela is pregnant again, but does not establish what happens to that pregnancy at that moment. When Futh’s father and Gloria later ask about the baby, Futh says they have lost it. The loss joins an already painful pattern without making Angela’s private experience fully available to the reader.

Cigarette smoke also links Angela to Futh’s earlier memories of his mother. When Angela comes to bed smelling of smoke, Futh thinks of his mother; he supposes that Angela, in turn, is thinking of Kenny, whose cigarettes she smells and tastes of. This is Futh’s interpretation rather than a conversation between them. The parallel makes the smell a carrier of associations between relationships, while emphasizing how each person’s thoughts remain inaccessible to the other.

Separation and Its Aftermath

Not long after Kenny’s visit, in the run-up to Christmas, Angela tells Futh that she thinks they should separate. He is astonished. Only later does he reconsider familiar signs, remembering her eye-rolling and sighing and wondering whether he should have anticipated her decision. The change from surprise to retrospective recognition belongs to Futh: Angela makes the decision, while he reconstructs the preceding marriage from gestures he had not understood in time.

They agree that Futh will move out, but he does nothing for months. Angela eventually finds him a flat, packs his belongings into self-assembly cardboard boxes, and arranges for a removal firm. During the intervening period, Futh avoids her by visiting parks, galleries, museums, an aviary, and cafés. He experiences those outings as a way of delaying the moment when he must leave. Meanwhile, the boxes accumulate in the spare room where he has been sleeping. Angela’s practical preparations give the separation a physical form that his indecision postpones but cannot undo.

The marriage’s end also shapes Futh’s recollection of their honeymoon. When their hire car breaks down in pouring rain, Angela says that she had wanted to go somewhere hot. Futh answers that she had told him she would be happy with anything. The exchange reveals a difference between what Angela wanted and what Futh understood her to have agreed to. It anticipates his later recognition that her preferences and dissatisfaction were not as legible to him as he assumed.

Narrative Significance

Angela is characterized through a tension between directness and opacity. At the service station she plainly describes the constraints surrounding her boyfriend; at work she repeatedly voices dissatisfaction and looks through job vacancies. Yet Futh remains unsure what she wants, and her decision to separate catches him by surprise. Her actions are concrete, but the account often withholds her interior perspective, leaving readers to distinguish what she says from what Futh infers.

That imbalance becomes especially clear in the final associations between Angela, Futh’s mother, and Kenny. Futh connects Angela’s cigarette smoke to his mother, while imagining Angela’s connection to Kenny. These associations reveal Futh’s own habits of memory more securely than they reveal Angela’s thoughts. She is therefore both a person who makes consequential choices—entering relationships, pursuing work, and ending the marriage—and a figure filtered through a husband who recognizes the meaning of her signals only belatedly.