‘He didn’t have much choice.’

‘Well, let’s put it this way, he would have chosen you anyway. And now look at him — he can speak and lip-read, he can walk without a limp, he’s got a job, he’s huge and he’s handsome. And he’s married. So what are you going to do?’

I looked unseeing at the people in the bar, burned by the sun, red-faced and laughing. John was with his wife, he had a tiny flat in Battersea and a life to go to when he returned from Paris. I had my deck and my whisky botdes. I knew Harry had to leave soon — our conversation for ever unfinished. There was not time to tell him how I was and that, despite everything, it was all right, it was enough.

‘Y’know, I think I’ll buy myself a Porsche,’ I said, and Harry roared with laughter, not realising that I meant it.

17 December 1999

The days and weeks have fallen into a pattern now. I’m woken early by the dogs, who whimper and paw at my blankets once their bladders are full and they need to be let out into the gardens. I make myself tea while they pee and then feed them. It’s always too early for me. I breakfast on Nurofen, juice and coffee, then drive into Oxford to the hospital and read to Ellen as long as she can bear it. Then she falls asleep and I wander the streets of Oxford for a couple of hours. It’s a terrible city now, dirty and over-built, the colleges and whispering bridges lost in crowds of tourists, the covered market dying. If Ellen’s awake when I return, I sit with her and she says nothing. I think she’s playing old home movies in her head — of her childhood in Boston and Beverley, her days at Harvard, her married life in Connecticut. They must be short films; perhaps she plays them again and again.

This afternoon I was dozing in the chair when the doctor came in and tapped my arm and I followed him outside, suddenly wide awake. He looked at my scars as intendy as he had the last time we spoke and I wasn’t sure if he was appraising them professionally or gauging how much more 1 could take.

I’d like Ellen to go home for Christmas and the New Year,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I think she’d benefit from being there. You will be there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like her to go home next Wednesday. We’ll be getting her ready in the interim.’ His face was drawn, the lines deeper than the last time I spoke to him.

‘Getting her ready for what?’ But he was staring into the distance, fiddling with a pen in his breast pocket. ‘Getting her ready for what?’

‘Um, well, ready to come home. There’ll be some drugs she’ll have to take with her but nothing too difficult.’

‘That’s it?’

‘For now, yes.’

So now I have to plan a Christmas, not something I’ve ever been very good at.