On Saturday morning, exhausted by my own desire, I took Ellen for a drive, a relatively sedate mosey across the Cotswolds through all her favourite villages, the Slaughters, Chipping Camden, Stow and Woodstock — a looping, rambling journey through a warm late-autumn day. Houses and spires glowed in sunlight, stone mushrooms listed and drystone walls ran on for ever through ghostly brown fields. Pheasants lumbered unexpectedly out into the road, peacock breasts flashing. Ellen remarked that the beauty of the landscape of this part of England lay entirely in its lack of drama, and when I looked over at her I knew that she was committing it to memory, just as I had committed her face to mine. I knew also that she had always felt displaced, a member of the rich American diaspora that settled here, all escaping from something. She had never lost her accent, although it had softened enough to ensure that when she went back to the States to visit, people mistook her for English, while when she was here she was known as the American woman with the big house. She told me that she felt she had lost her citizenship somewhere over the Atlantic, that she belonged to neither place. I think that suited her, for I know that after her husband and child died she wanted nothing but to disappear and that was one way of doing it.

We had a late lunch in Bledington, an agony for me as I watched a table of businessmen ordering and drinking botdes of wine and shots of whisky. Again Ellen had to sleep when we arrived home, irritated with herself and, I know, jealous that I was to take the dogs out for a walk. We spent the evening listening to music and reading. Last night was worse, my sweating more pronounced, a distinct tremble appearing in my fingers as the hours passed. But I wouldn’t give in, not if Ellen was there.

This morning we read the Sunday papers by the fire in the library and a rainstorm moved in, dousing the sun and thickening the glass of the windows. I kept looking up to see Ellen scanning the book-stacked shelves, the rows of bound New Yorkers, shelf after shelf of poetry and drama, hundreds of hardback works of fiction, some rare, some first editions, many out of print. Or I would glance over to find her staring at the rolling, oak-studded valley with its herd of stark black-and-white cattle, staring at it for hours on end. I find it hard to say nothing, to ignore this long-drawn-out goodbye. But I must — it’s her prerogative.

Driving cautiously back into Oxford, to return her to the hospital, easing through the lakes of water across the roads caused by the storm-burst, I thought of what I had said to the doctor and suddenly panicked, thinking Ellen would never again sit in the library, look out over the fields, stroke the dogs’ fur the wrong way. I turned to her.