Friends: there were some, I suppose. I got to know vaguely the women in neighbouring houses, well enough to ask small favours and return them, not well enough to care or be cared for. And in a similar way I knew the mothers of Elliott’s and Katie’s friends, well enough to talk about the children, not well enough to talk about ourselves apart from them. Occasionally, too, we would hold dinner parties for people Stephen worked with; we took these things for granted, as part of his job, and mine as his wife. We invited Stephen’s bosses and their wives, a couple of tactical underlings and their wives, and the business of seating them all properly, steering the conversations to different interests and abilities, making sure that awkwardnesses were turned aside, fell largely onto me. I think I did it well.

Those dinners were the only demands Stephen’s career put on me, and I was grateful for that. I never drank too much or talked too much, or said things that were impolitic or unkind or cut too close. And in a curious way, although they were unnatural and required me to look and be a different person, as they required everyone there to look and be unnatural, I must confess that I enjoyed the dinners, even looked forward to them. They gave me a role I could play with, took me out of myself, as they said in those days, and as long as I didn’t bungle it, I could consider it a game.

(Those snapshots flash before me, and I try to see what kind of person all that made me, as I came close to the last years of that life. Loving, worried, caring, and given to play-acting? Happy with a family that was secure because each member knew I would always be there, always have time, for each of them? A woman with a fine home and a fine husband and fine children, of whom nothing better could be expected, and it was I, Abra, mother, wife, who kept them all together, all secure, all loved?

(I feel nothing of that person now. But from the pictures, I can say that I was not unhappy then. I was relatively comfortable and, I thought, a success at what I had set out to do, which was to raise my family and attempt to have a happy marriage. But all that was in one compartment, an objective one, and in another, where I could not reach it, a vague uneasiness was growing. How could I have guessed then what it meant? How could I have changed what happened?