Douglas’ club informed her that he’d be there on Monday evening and suggested she send a note to his office, so Enid took a room in a hotel in Mayfair for the weekend. She didn’t want to stay at Bryanston Square, anyway; it stank of smoke and judgement. On Monday she went to the bank with her decree nisi and explained it would soon be absolute; she needed to change the names on the account. She would be Miss Enid Campbell again. It was, after all, her money. The bank manager told her his hands were tied until the complete paperwork could be shown and offered her a loan instead. She spent the day shopping at Selfridges, and by the time she descended the stairs to the Ladies Side of Boodles, her sackcloth and ashes were crumpled in her hotel bin, along with her long brown skirt and hand-dyed shirt.

How odd to see him, she thought, as she was led in, as she saw him, waiting in an armchair in the hushed quiet of the gentleman’s club that kept visiting ladies safely in the basement, that kept the lighting bright and the carpets thick – this man who was once her husband, who’d found someone else long before she’d let him go. It was funny that it didn’t touch her, that she didn’t mind. All those evenings alone when he must have been with this other woman; all those stilted suppers when he’d talked about trains, his face betraying nothing. His Miss Wormald had been filling in since Fagus was five – she’d worked that out while packing her suitcase at Didlington. Romping with him, in some vile hotel.

The image revolted her. How could anyone want that? Her sexual episodes with Douglas had been a duty she’d performed with eyes shut. Her body was a disconnected vehicle, a means of travel and manipulation, a thing, once of beauty, once used to seduce – it had given an aura of plenty and class, but it had never defined her, had only disguised the unconfined soul of her. Lined in the silk of her untouched childhood, it had torn in small places to let him in and her children out; in the spaces between birth and conception, she’d pushed him off. It had never occurred to her that anyone would do it for fun. He’d snapped, more than once, that she should have told him that before they were married, but then he’d stopped complaining or knocking on her door and now she knew why.

He looked different. He was tanned, and he’d filled out a bit. He stood up, didn’t know what to do with his hands, and sat down again. From an attaché case he brought out a file, and from his breast pocket, a pen. He held it out to her.

“How are the children?” She ignored the pen.