I put out my hand and picked up the lists. Chairs and the sofa to him. Mirrors and the blue chair to me. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll see.’ I looked up at Nathan. ‘I’m not ready yet.’

He shifted on the stool. ‘You must take your time, of course.’

‘Thank you.’ This small courtesy was comforting, a tiny straw at which to grasp, and I glimpsed a time in the future when it might be possible to face each other peacefully.

Then I spoilt it. The state of Nathan’s shirt had been puzzling me – it was not properly ironed. I leant over and fingered the crumpled collar. ‘Don’t you have an iron at Minty’s flat?’

Nathan pulled irritably at it. ‘Minty is not one of nature’s ironers. It was her turn… and I tried to show her… you know, about shirts.’

‘Did you? And what did Minty say?’

Nathan seemed baffled. ‘When I explained that the trick is to iron from the yoke outwards, she threw it back at me.’

‘Well I never. The free spirit.’

He jerked the lock of his briefcase shut. ‘One minute women are saying one thing, then they’re demanding the opposite. They want to be noticed, they demand homage. Then we provide it, and find ourselves accused of rape or of some fearful transgression against their rights. They say they want us to be free, and they want to be free, and, saps that we are, we believe them.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘It didn’t take long.’

Angry and hostile, we slid down from our precarious perches on the stools and went our separate ways.

Chapter Eighteen

I knew Nathan would deny it. I knew he would fight against a feeling he would consider wrong and beneath him but, looking back, my job introduced an irritant into our marriage. It was to do with timing, for later on Nathan was fine about it.

I think he felt we had lost an innocence, that an illusion had changed.

Six months after I began work as the assistant in the books department, Sam fell ill. It began with a high fever. ‘It’s just a bug,’ I assured Nancy, the bright New Zealander who helped out in the afternoons and whom I had had to bribe to stay for the whole day. I grabbed my book bag and headed out of the front door.

On the third day, Sam began to vomit and his temperature was still worryingly high. Nancy rang in at eight o’clock to say she was sorry but she could not miss any more of her college course. I cornered Nathan in his study. Could he take time off? I asked. Being new to my job I did not like to risk cutting corners. Nathan dropped a pile of envelopes into a basket marked ‘Bills’ and looked thoughtful. ‘Not really,’ he replied, and I had the impression that he had been waiting for a moment such as this. ‘I can’t take a day off at such short notice.’

I squared up to him. ‘Please.’ If Nathan was in the slightest danger of saying, ‘I told you so,’ I knew I would lose my temper.

‘I told you so,’ said Nathan, but in such a way that my anger was stillborn. This was a serious disagreement.

There was an icy silence. ‘I don’t believe you said that.’

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘Sorry. But you know what I feel about you working. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. I asked you to wait until the children were older.’ He turned his back and stapled a couple of documents together. ‘Do you realize how fortunate you are, Rose, in not having to work?’

‘I’ll overlook the moral blackmail, Nathan. What’s happened to “I help you, you help me”? Where’s that gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

I grasped the nettle. ‘You helped me get the job.’

‘You were set on it.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember that next time you need support.’

I rang Ianthe and begged for help. Delighted to be of use, she arrived bearing an old jigsaw puzzle of the battle of Marathon that I had played with, plus a copy of The Little House on the Prairie. I had doubts that Sam would respond to a girl’s account of pioneering in the American west, but when I returned in the evening, Poppy was perched on his bed, playing nurses and feeding Sam sips of freshly squeezed orange juice, while he read aloud in a feeble voice from The Little House. He looked up as I entered the room. ‘Mum, such a wicked story.’

It was a soothing, textbook sight.

Ianthe was hemming a skirt. ‘I think he’s a bit better.’ She bit off the thread, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The needle dived in and out of the flowered material. ‘Supper’s done,’ she said, ‘and the washing.’ She reached for her scissors and a machine bobbin fell out of her basket on to the floor, unravelling white cotton as it rolled. ‘All under control.’

Ianthe had been over-optimistic, and that night Sam was worse. I kept vigil in a room that smelt of sickness and disinfectant. Nathan tiptoed in and out, ignoring me. ‘Poor old fellow,’ he told Sam, who was trying to be brave. At one o’clock, Nathan went to bed, leaving our differences to grow colder.

Sam muttered and tossed. Every hour I took his temperature, and at one point I went down to the kitchen and heated water, which I carried back upstairs through the white-tinged darkness and silence. Bit by bit, I washed Sam, his thin white boyish legs, then his arms, his fingers, the white, exhausted face. Please get better, I kept saying to myself. Please, please, let there be nothing wrong.

At five thirty, I managed to get a couple of teaspoons of boiled water down him, and he dozed. I plummeted into sleep.

I was woken by the sound of pitiful, desperate retching and Sam’s sobbing. I panicked. ‘Nathan,’ I called. ‘Nathan.’ He shambled sleepily into the room. ‘We’ve got to get him to hospital.’ Without a second’s hesitation, he swung into action.

Together we wrapped Sam in Nathan’s old green dressing-gown for extra warmth, got him into the car and drove at top speed to St Thomas’s casualty department. There we huddled on chairs for an hour and took it in turns to hold our drooping son upright.

Nathan whispered reassuringly to Sam and kissed the top of his matted hair. He spoke to me only when necessary.

So we sat amid the blood, the noise, the stale air, and battled with our separate thoughts. Sam slid down on to my shoulder. So tired that my eyes burned, I held him close. ‘Nathan,’ I whispered. ‘Please.’

He turned and looked at me – at the wreckage of me. ‘Oh, Rosie,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you some coffee.’ He returned with it, and manhandled my free hand around the polystyrene cup. ‘Go on, drink it.’ He stroked my cheek – his way of saying sorry. Gratefully, I looked up into his face, and he smiled down at me. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Drink up.’

Sam was admitted to hospital for observation, and improved rapidly. The paediatrician was not sure what was wrong, but was equally sure it was nothing serious. ‘He may have had some sort of shock, or an allergic reaction, and his system has rebelled. He needs rest, quiet, and no upset’

At nine thirty I rang work and told them I would not be in for a couple of days. I told Sam I would stay with him while he was in hospital. White and frightened, but still trying hard to be brave, he whispered, ‘I’m glad you’re here, Mum.’

I slipped my arm around his shoulders. I had been in danger of forgetting the wonder and terror of being a mother.

‘Just a bug,’ I told Hal, after throwing up in the plane to Brazil and then in the hot, noisy hotel by the airport. I lay down on the bed with a handkerchief rinsed in cold water over my eyes.

The sun slatted through my half-closed lids, its light and heat intrusive in a way I had never experienced before. This was the continent of lush harshness, damp, drilling heat, and a magisterial river.

It was Hal’s surprise trip, his secret expedition. I had hoped we would be going to Morocco and the desert: I longed for somewhere fierce, dry and unequivocal, but Hal was gripped by his passion for ecology. This was a new science, the way forward, etc., etc. Someone had to do it, he said, but I thought it was the romance of the subject that had got to him. Good versus evil. The little guy fighting the big ones. For the past six months, he had been working to acquire financial backing for an expedition to monitor the effects of tree-felling on the Yanomami, a people whose territory extended from the Orinoco forests in Venezuela to the northernmost reaches of the Brazilian Amazon basin.

‘No wonder you didn’t tell me,’ I said, when he sprang this surprise destination on me. I was packing up my things to leave Oxford for the last time. ‘I don’t want to go there. You should have asked me.’

He took from me the pile of clothes I was holding, dumped them on the bed and pulled me into his arms. ‘You had finals, remember. Listen, these people are under threat. They’re down to between ten and fifteen thousand and decreasing rapidly. Logging is destroying their home, and the big companies don’t care a toss.’ He buried his lips in my neck. ‘We have to take a look and alert the agencies who can do something.’

Leaving Oxford was going to be a wrench and I felt weepy and irritable, not like myself. I shook him off and stuffed a pair of socks into my suitcase. ‘You can’t just rely on me dropping everything.’

‘That’s fine,’ Hal said easily, lightly, in a take-it-or-leave-it voice. ‘I can find someone else.’ I whipped round. He lifted his shoulders dismissively. ‘Not to worry, Rose. I thought you’d like the surprise. Someone else can hop on board. Couldn’t be easier.’

It was a threat, and I panicked. ‘No, Hal!’ I cried. ‘It’s fine. Of course I’ll come. Forget what I said.’

Hal was good in triumph: unlike me, he never crowed. ‘I don’t think you’ll regret it.’ He bent over and gave me one of the kisses that reverberated through every nerve. ‘Next one the desert, OK?’ His lips moved on down and, as usual with Hal, I yielded.