I jerked upright, furious. "Yes! Yes, really! My whole life — or a lot of it." I stared wide-eyed across the sea. A lie. Longing for a man who wasn't there. Didn't exist. I struggled to explain. "I wouldn't have found it so impossible to get over him. Wouldn't have always yearned, put my life on hold. Which I did. Ask Celia, I did."

"But I didn't know that, Flora. I lived in the States. Or, if I did know, or at least guessed, from what I gleaned from Peter — I . . . yeah, OK, I dodged it. I'm a man, for pity’s sake. It's what we do. I mean — OK, maybe I should have come across when he left you and married Christina, told you then. But I had all these strange loyalties to Hugo, too. He didn't know I knew — how could I tell you without his say-so? He should have told you. Told you then. Should have set you free. He should have actually told everyone. I mean, no one knows."

"No one?"

"Least, not so far as I can tell. I mean, sure, his gay friends will, obviously, but it seems to me, for Hugo, it's like something out of the nineteen fifties. Still is, for some poor people. Young folks, though, mostly, with soccer-mad brothers, fathers, in tough neighborhoods, secretly liking guys. And yet Hugo, who is all grown up, is still one of them. And, Flora, I guess I also thought — darn it. She was married to him for two years. She must have had an inkling, surely?"

He looked at me imploringly. I met his incredulous bright blue eyes in his sculpted, narrow face.

"Not a clue," I told him, equally incredulously, as I considered this. "Not one single iota." I looked away and stared blankly back down at the water. "And I agree, you would think, wouldn't you . . . ?"

I recalled our early days together: at schools miles apart, then universities at either ends of the country. Talking a lot, meeting occasionally. Later in London, in the apartment; happy if tense times. The bedroom. Hugo turning the light out, saying sorry, he was tired.

"I mean — he wasn't highly sexed, sure, but I was pregnant for a lot of our marriage. Then after a baby . . .” I swallowed. "I just thought he'd stopped fancying me. After Peter. I'd read about it. And it had been . . . a difficult birth. Peter didn't exactly slip out. I wasn't gagging for it myself, for a while. Later I was. Then he left."

I tried to imagine what I'd have felt like if I'd known he was gay. Fluid, as Tommy put it. I turned to him. “Do you think they had an arrangement? Hugo and Christina? D’you think they discussed it?"

He shrugged. "No idea."