The first time, I was in New York for a month. I can remember kissing Bernard in the car park at Heathrow in the first minutes of getting back, driven not by passion or sexual longing so much as by the independence of the act. On the way into town, I asked him all about the recent events of his life, and found that the details which had seemed so tedious and so hollow on the phone in New York were strangely engrossing in London. I was delighted that Liz was getting married, and distressed by the continuing situation with Norman. I longed to see how the window boxes were doing, and was very pleased about the northern Italian restaurant near where that funny antique shop had been. I quite saw that it was inconvenient about Patrick’s leaving, but suggested that in some ways one might do better than Patrick in the long run, and that this might later on seem a very good thing. We talked also about the concert I was to give later in the week. In New York, this had masqueraded as the primary reason for my trip, and I had invoked it almost as an excuse, but I had given the cold reality of it little thought. Now it glared at me. Bernard told me, in the car, how many of our friends were going to come, and I wished that they weren’t.

When we got to the flat, Bernard produced a magnificent cold supper, and a bottle of the Australian wine we had discovered in July. There were new candles in the candlesticks. There were late cornflowers in the vase I had given him two months earlier. I had been so busy fussing over my mother for more than a month; we had all been so busy making her favorite things that I had forgotten what my own favorite things were. I looked at that food and those flowers and the pretty glasses and when Bernard went to wash his hands, I found myself at the brink of tears. Helen used to say that all tears were memories; I seemed at that moment to be remembering myself, whole and entire. But I pulled myself up short before Bernard came back. And aside from a sad moment while Bernard was in the kitchen making toast, I stayed wreathed in smiles all evening.