20 October 1979

When that long-gone summer was over, when Miles had returned from France with his family and John had gone back to school, I slipped back into my life at the university like a seal slipping through an ice-hole, with barely a splash, in search of something. Even now I remember walking into the department office and there was Miles — even more tanned than usual, his hair bleached by salt and sun. We smiled at each other and said nothing. Within hours we were in Noss Mayo, lying on my bed, tracing for each other the weeks we had been apart. Our talk was oddly stilted, the sense of silences louder than anything we said. Soon we lay there, unspeaking, tracing each other’s bodies rather than our histories.

‘I missed you,’ Miles said. I missed you too much.’

I turned away from him because I didn’t want him to see my small smile of victory. He had said it first — he had conceded defeat of a sort. The predator unarmed.

‘I missed you too.’

‘Too much?’

‘Im not sure what that means.’ But I was sure and I had.

As Miles turned my face towards him and began to kiss me, the hundredth victim of the Troubles was shot dead on the streets of Ulster.

A month later I broke the promise I had made to myself when I opened the parcel Dai Davies sent back to me: I arranged to go away with Miles — to steal him from his wife for a weekend in Amsterdam in December. My carapace of uninterest had cracked and I’d been revealed for what I was — a lonely woman. I’d been alone for a long time: it was twelve years since Dai Davies had left me for an unknown woman. I was thirty-six and aware that my … charms shall we say? were beginning to fade.

Miles phoned me when I was packing the suitcase for the trip to London for John’s birthday and I remember laying out John’s clothes for the next day on my bed as I talked to Miles, his voice soft so he wouldn’t wake his wife, asking if he could come with John and me. I laughed and said, ‘No.’ I didn’t know then that it was the last time John would wear those clothes. Neither did I know that it was the last time I would speak to Miles.

21 October 1979

Ellen reopened the wounds I have carried about Miles’ silence by asking me whether I ever considered marrying again. Then again, I have so many wounds that I don’t suppose that these amount, really, to very much. But they hurt. I remember lying in my hospital bed, unnerved by pain and unable to go to John, waiting for Miles to come. He never did. No doubt he was back out on the loose, preying. My eyes were wrapped in bandages and I was blind for weeks as the skin of my eyelids fused. In the darkness I played the memories of lying in my room with the water shadows running across the ceiling, holding Miles. I wanted to hear his voice; I wanted to feel his hand take mine and tell me that I would be all right, even if I knew he’d be lying. I’ve often wondered what he thought when he was told about the bomb. Did he remember that he’d asked if he could come with us? Perhaps he saw our pictures on the news, in the papers. Wherever. What would he have said? That the English got what they deserved? That it was a political war and the IRA terrorists in the prisons were political prisoners? Would he have railed against the British troops while the emergency services walked among the glass and rubble in the car park on Gloucester Road, trying to stop the dripping of buildings? What would Miles have said? I think now that, like Dai Davies, he was beautiful and weak, handsome and empty. Perhaps he was all I thought I deserved because, to be honest, I had thought of marrying him, should he ask.