“I try, David. I want to. I’m sorry if I don’t.” Oh…and I didn’t want to, I tried to stop and felt very ashamed of myself, but I could feel myself starting to cry. Not much, just small drops off the sides of my cheeks.

“Camille? Camille, don’t. It’s not your fault; it isn’t, any of it, your fault.” He reached out his hand to me under the covers and held my arm. And I turned toward him and he put his arms around me and kissed my eyes.

“David, I wish I could help you. I wish I could do something, but I’m not…I’m so…stupid.” He kissed me again and I could feel his body and mine start to want each other and I held him to me as tight as I could and he reached down and started to pull up the hem of my nightgown. Then he stopped kissing me and I tried to pull him closer to me because making love was the only thing I could do really well, and all at once I felt on my cheek what at first I thought were my own tears, but they were his. He rolled away from me. “It’s no use. I don’t even feel human any more.”

That was the last time we were ever really romantic; after that things never got any better between us; after that we moved to Sutton, and David started working with his father on the family businesses. His family was very nice to us, but I knew David hated being there; I knew it was the last thing he ever wanted to do because he hated the idea of people making money just because they happened to own land that other, poorer people needed to live on. He hated the idea of collecting rents and all the other things landlords do. Because he was so unhappy, we had less and less to say to each other and we never went into New Marsails to the people on the Northside. Sometimes I’d ask him about it and he’d say that we had to grow up; we couldn’t do those childish things any more. We made love, from time to time, and I got pregnant again, with Dymphna, and David seemed very happy about it, but I think mainly he was happy because he didn’t have to make love any more.