With a huge effort, I turned on my side and blotted out the sight of her.

‘You’re very thin.’ She bent over and smoothed the damp sheets with a proprietorial gesture. ‘You should take more care of yourself.’

I was almost choked by fever and hatred. ‘If you have any shred of compassion, go.’

Her heels clip-clopped down the passage, leaving me to reflect tiredly on the objectives that Minty had once professed to despise. Years of marriage – the sporadic wars, ententes and a deep, protective peace. Nathan had married a girl in jeans who turned into a mother, who turned into a career woman who wore trouser suits, carried a book bag and read office memos. From time to time, this woman had congratulated herself on juggling these various states and emerging sane and optimistic.

Quite soon after our marriage, Nathan had abandoned the safari jacket for double-breasted office suits, the trouser buttons gradually let out. Some days he arrived home whistling under his breath, a sign that he felt happy and confident in his decisions. On others, I caught him staring out of his study window as he puzzled over problems. Sometimes he worried about money and we made lists of how to economize. A few of those were still stuck up on the fridge with magnets, turning yellow. In the summer, he sat in a chair in the garden and watched me at work. In winter, he begged me to make shepherd’s pie and chocolate pudding. To keep me going, Rosie. (More letting out of waistbands.) We ate at the table in the kitchen, discussed our children, discussed our ambitions. As the children grew up, we had more energy, talked less of domestic matters and more of politics, newspapers and the troubled state of the world – a regular airing of each other’s mental geography, which had seemed right, natural and happy.

‘Here we are. I’ve made some toast, and got you some aspirins.’ Nathan set down a jug on the bedside table. ‘Should I feed Parsley?’

The mention of her name brought instant tears. Nathan knelt down beside the bed. ‘Rosie, what is it? Are you in pain?’

I told him and he said, ‘Poor old Parsley,’ and stroked my cheek.

‘Will you do something for me?’

‘If I can.’

‘Brush my hair. It feels dreadful.’

Nathan reached for the hairbrush, propped me up and settled me back against his shoulder. The bristles scraped through hair as lank as tow. ‘She had a good innings, Rosie.’

I wiped my face with the sheet. ‘That makes it worse. I assumed she’d be around for ever.’

‘Do you remember when she went missing and I found her in that strange house, the one with the creeper growing over the windows?’

‘I found her,’ I murmured. ‘You were at work.’

‘No, it was me.’ He paused. ‘You’re pinching my memories.’

I twisted my head to look up at him. ‘So I am. But you pinch mine.’

He bent over and his cheek rested against mine. ‘So I do.’

‘Nathan?’ Minty called from downstairs. Nathan stopping brushing but I allowed myself to relax against his shoulder.

‘Nathan…’ Minty materialized at the door, and the dark eyes narrowed angrily. Perhaps she was looking through a tunnel to the light at the end, which shone on the past, against which she must compete. ‘Nathan, we’ll be late for Timon.’ As she turned to go, the blue jumper rode up over the taut stomach.

Instantly Nathan disengaged himself and stood up, my tall, driven, ambitious husband, who knew what he wanted, who until this point had been sane and predictable. I turned away my face because I could not bear to see the change in him.

‘Coming,’ he said.

Chapter Fourteen

It took me a little time to get back on my feet. Not only was I weak but, without the routines of work and play, the days felt soft-set, like underdone eggs. I was used to them being quite different, all neatly stacked up and filed.

The garden told me that summer was here: a languid seraglio, swooning with scent and covered in foaming, lacy white. When I felt up to it, I pushed open the french windows and stepped outside. I knew it so well. Each brick in the wall. The hole in the lawn dug by the squirrel. The intersection where the fence had rotted. When the children were small they had demanded grass to play football and French cricket on, but as they grew older, like the Dutchman claiming the polders, I snatched back my flowerbeds.

The olive in its pot was sway-backed and grey-green. It meant peace. It meant home. It meant green oil smelling of thyme and marjoram into which to dip a crust of bread. It meant good things.

Hal had given me the olive after our second expedition together, walking through the Mani peninsula. Thin, dirty, dusty, happy, we were on our way home. In Kieros we sat under a clump of olive trees and waited for the bus to take us north to Athens, and ate bread and feta cheese. The sun blazed and dry harvest dust drifted in the hot air. Up in the valley, laden donkeys toiled up the slope and poppies bloomed at the edges of the fields and by the road. I leant back on my rucksack and thought that I had never seen anywhere so harshly beautiful: grey-green olives, stony scrub, scarlet poppies and the blue of the sky. He chose that beautiful, wonderful, hot moment to tell me that he planned to stay in England for the time being. Why? I asked. He got out his penknife and scrambled to his feet. You know why, he said, with his back turned.

He excised a twig with a wedge of bark at the end and presented it to me. Cosseted in dampened tissue, it lay hidden in my rucksack until we got home. I mixed earth and compost in one of Ianthe’s pots, but not too rich for a tree that likes heat and dust, and planted it. Olive trees didn’t grow in this climate – Ianthe was suspicious and unhelpful – hadn’t I noticed?

But I persevered and, one day, two buds were pushing through.

Now I pinched a leaf between my fingers. A breeze had sprung up and, depleted by illness, it made me shiver.

As I paced the garden, depression settled over me like a cold fog. In the absence of my care, the Iceberg had grown thin and attenuated. The Buff Beauty was half buried by the Solanum and I had failed to go to its rescue. My roses were unused to neglect and poured over their stems, feeding on the infant buds, was an undulating sheath of greenfly. I stopped, seized a branch of ‘Ispahan’ and, not caring that the thorns drove into me, ran my finger and thumb down it. That was the way to kill green-fly.

A yellow and green stain flared over my fingers. I bent down and wiped them on the grass. Then I went indoors, closed and locked the french windows behind me.

I did not want to go back into the garden. I cannot explain, but I felt it had let me down.

Ianthe made her weekly call. ‘Have you talked to Nathan? Have you?’

Robert Dodd rang (calls charged at twenty pounds). Nathan had asked him to discuss the separation details with me, the settlement of which was going to be expensive.

Poppy rang from God knew where to report that she was alive.

Mazarine rang from Paris. ‘You must come.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’ I looked out of the window at the street, which appeared unimaginably wide, and felt my knees tremble. The more time went by, the less I felt capable of negotiating the outside. ‘I’m finding it difficult to leave the house.’

‘Listen to me. You can. It will help you to forget the terrible Nathan and your little job.’

‘It was not a little job.’

‘If you say so, chère?’.

Curator of a left-bank art gallery, Mazarine still cherished her high intellectual standards and the tussle between her exacting vision and my populist leanings had given us much pleasure over the years. According to the flyer she sent over, the current show was a deconstruction of the mythology of underwear.

I made a huge effort and pulled myself together. ‘How are the knickers?’

‘Stop it,’ she hissed down the phone. ‘I will expect you next Thursday’


*

Nathan did not like Mazarine. At least, not in the days before I went to work when Mazarine and I spoke so often and were so close. ‘Not my type,’ he said, which was nonsense, for Mazarine had brains, looks and the kind of outlook Nathan relished in women. His dislike was because Mazarine was associated with Oxford and Hal, the bit of my life he had had nothing to do with.

Nathan’s dislike did not stop us making regular trips to Paris to stay with her. (After Nathan was promoted, we opted to stay in hotels, which steadily became more luxurious.) In the Mazarine days, we piled the children into the back of the car. They punctuated the journey with cries of Are we there yet?’ When the questions turned to wails, which they always did, I executed a precarious manoeuvre into the back and sat between them in a rubble of toys and biscuits, holding them close and shouting to Nathan above their noise and that of the engine.

One particular trip we left the children – Sam, thirteen, Poppy, eleven – with Ianthe. The car sped south down the autoroute from Calais and, in the adult peace, I brought up the subject of returning to work.

The effect on Nathan was instant. He frowned, hunched over the wheel, did his disappearing act into himself. ‘Why? Aren’t you happy?’ He glared ahead. ‘You wanted the children so badly. Why not look after them? We’re managing.’

‘You wanted them too.’

I sensed his struggle, against what I was not sure. ‘My mother looked after me,’ he said at last.

My mother-in-law was not a subject I wished – ever – to pursue. ‘And mine did too, just as well, only she combined it with work.’

He transferred his attention to overtaking a lorry loaded with livestock. ‘An alternative would to be work from home. Would you consider that?’