Finally we got back to New Year’s Day and Stadler closed the date book and picked up my address book. We went through every blessed name. I took Stadler through the old neglected dusty attic of my social life. So many who had moved away or died. Couples who had separated. And those friends I had just lost touch with-or who had lost touch with me. It made me think about how much of a social asset I’d been over the last few years. Could this person really be one of those names?

As if that wasn’t enough, he produced Clive’s accounts for the house. I tried to tell him that I didn’t deal with any of that, it was all up to Clive, that I have no head for figures. But he didn’t seem to hear. £2,300 for the living room curtains, which we hadn’t hung yet. £900 for the tree surgeon. £3,000 for the chandelier. £66 for the front door knocker that I fell in love with in Portobello Market. The numbers started to blur. I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I certainly couldn’t remember the quarry tiles being that expensive. Dreadful how it all adds up.

When we’d finished, he looked at me and I thought, This man knows more about me than anyone in the world except Clive.

“Is this all relevant?” I asked.

“That’s the problem, Mrs. Hintlesham. We don’t know. For the moment we just need information. Lots of it.”

Then he told me to be careful, just like Links had said. “We don’t want anything else happening, do we?”

He sounded reasonably cheerful about it.

Outside, the leaves on the trees had turned dark, dirty green. They hung limply from the branches, hardly stirring in the sluggish warm breeze. The garden looked like a desert, the earth was baked hard and was run through with cracks, like an old piece of china; some of the plants that Francis had recently planted were beginning to droop. The new little magnolia tree would never survive. Everything was parched.

I rang Clive again. His secretary said he’d popped out. Sorry, she said, though she didn’t sound sorry at all.

Dr. Schilling was different. She didn’t march into the room with a pile of names to check and bark questions at me. She looked at my hand, unrolling the bandage and holding my fingers in her slim, cool ones. She said she was very sorry, as if she was personally apologizing for it. To my horror, I suddenly wanted to cry, but I certainly wasn’t going to do that in front of her. There was nothing she would like better.

“I want to ask you some questions, Jenny.”

“What about?”

“Can we talk about you and Clive?”

“I thought we’d done that already.”

“There are some more details. Is that all right?”

“I suppose so, but look…” I shifted uncomfortably. “This doesn’t feel quite right. I just want to be sure that your questions are just about catching the person doing this. You probably think I’m completely mad and have an awful life, but I’m happy with it. Is that clear? I don’t need your help. Or if I do need it, I don’t want it.”

Dr. Schilling gave an embarrassed smile.

“I don’t think any of that,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “I just wanted to be clear.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Schilling. She looked at a notebook that was open on her lap.

“You wanted to ask about Clive and me.”

“Do you mind that he’s away so much?”

“No.” She waited, but I didn’t say anything else. I knew her tricks by now.

“Do you think that he’s faithful to you?”

“You asked me that before.”

“But you didn’t answer.”

I gave a huffy sigh.

“Since Detective-whatever-he-is Stadler now knows when my next period is due, I suppose I may as well tell you about my sex life as well. If you really want to know, just after Harry was born he had a-a thing.”

“A thing?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Yes.”

“How long for?”

“I’m not exactly sure. A year, maybe. Eighteen months.”

“So it wasn’t just a thing, was it? It was rather more serious than that.”

“He was never going to leave me. She was just extra. Men are such clichés, aren’t they? I was tired, I had put on some weight.” I touched the skin beneath my eyes. “I was getting older.”

“Jenny,” she said gently, “you were only, let’s see, in your late twenties when Harry was born.”

“Whatever.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Don’t want to talk about that. Sorry.”

“All right. Have there been others?”

I shrugged.

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t want to know, thank you very much. If he has some stupid fling, I’d prefer he kept it to himself.”

“You think he does have affairs?”

“I’ve just said: maybe, maybe not.” The unbidden image of Clive looking down at Gloria entered my mind. I pushed it away.

“And you don’t?”

“As I told you last time you asked: no.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Not close to it?”

“Oh, stop it, for goodness’ sake.”

“Do you and your husband have a satisfactory sex life?”

I shook my head at her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

“All right.” Once again, she was unexpectedly gentle. “Do you think that your husband loves you?”

I blinked.

“Loves me?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a big word.” She didn’t reply. I took a breath. “No.”

“Likes you?”

I stood up.

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “You’re going to walk away from this conversation and write it up in concise notes, but I’m going to live with it, and I don’t want to. Clive isn’t sending me razor blades, is he, so why do you want to know all this?” I stood at the door. “Has it ever occurred to you that what you do is rather cruel? Now, I’m rather busy, so if you’ll excuse me.”

Dr. Schilling left and I stood alone in the sitting room. I felt as if I had been turned upside down and emptied all over the floor.

NINE

I could hear the wind rippling in the trees outside. I wanted to open the windows, let the night breeze blow through all the rooms, but I couldn’t. I mustn’t. Everything had to be closed and locked. I had to be secure. The air inside was stale, secondhand. Heavy, hot, dead air. I was shut up in this house, and the world was shut out of it, and I could feel it all returning to chaos and to ugliness: wallpaper hanging off the walls, plasterwork abruptly stopping, floorboards torn up so you could see the dark, grimy holes beneath. The dust and bits and pieces of years and years working their way back onto the surface. All the unfinished work, all my dreams of perfect spaces: cool white, lemon yellow, slate gray, pea green, the stippled hallway, a fire in the grate throwing shadows across the smooth cream carpet, the grand piano with gladioli on top, the round tables for drinks in cut-glass tumblers, my prints hanging under picture lights, long views through the windows of green lawns and graceful shrubs.

I was sweating. I turned my pillow over, to find a cooler patch. Outside the trees rustled. It wasn’t quite dark; the street lamps cast a dirty orange stain across the room. I could see the shapes of my surroundings, my dressing table, the chair, the tall block of the wardrobe, the paler squares of the two windows. And I could see that Clive still wasn’t here. What time was it? I sat up in bed and squinted across at the luminous numbers on the alarm clock. I watched a seven grow into an eight and then shrink into a nine.

Half past two and he hadn’t come home. Lena was out till tomorrow morning, staying with her boyfriend, so it was just me in the house, me and Chris, and all those empty disintegrating rooms, and outside a police car. My finger throbbed, my throat hurt, my eyes stung. It was quite impossible to sleep anymore.

I stood up and saw myself dimly reflected in the long mirror, like a ghost in my white cotton nightdress. I padded across to Chris’s room. He was sleeping with one foot tucked under the other knee and with his arms thrown up like a ballet dancer. The duvet was in a heap on the floor beside him. His hair was sticking to his forehead. His mouth was slightly open. Maybe, I thought, I should take him to Mummy and Daddy’s house down in Hassocks. Maybe I should go there myself, get away from all this ghastliness. I could just leave, get in the car and drive away. Why not? What on earth was there to stop me and why hadn’t I thought of that before?