She came level with the gates of the National Gallery. Suddenly she faltered, thinking, What have I done? Spain, April Lati mer, the scene with Paul – the whole thing overwhelmed her.

She and Paul had exchanged hardly a cross word in the years they were together. Maybe they should have. Maybe a few small fights would have helped them cope better with the big one they’d just had. She shouldn’t have walked out like that, out of the flat. It would have been different if it was Paul’s home too, but it wasn’t – it was hers. She should have stayed, she should have stood her ground and fought him to a standstill. She hated when things ended inconclusively, hated the untidiness. Paul would come round that evening and they would both pretend nothing had happened. She despised that kind of polite dissembling. Words spoken could not be unspoken, things done could not be undone. To pretend otherwise was self-betrayal.

She could abandon the trip to Spain and peace would be restored. She could do that. But if she did, a trace of her capitulation would linger, like the phantom pain of a severed limb.

She walked on, and turned left into Clare Street.

It was over between her and Paul. She saw that clearly. Oh, there would be no dramatic parting, no tears and shouted recriminations and the furious slamming of doors. Paul simply wouldn’t have that kind of thing. Everything would resume, and seem the same, except that they would both know it wasn’t. And in the weeks and months that followed the strain between them would slowly intensify, until one day they would separate, like an iceberg breaking in two in the silence of a frozen sea.

Was that what she wanted? Was that the chance she had grabbed without hesitation when her father called her in the night and asked her to come to Spain? Was that the open doorway she had stepped through, no, had leaped through, when Superintendent Hackett summoned Strafford, Strafford the Protestant, the son of the Ascendancy, and she had tacitly accepted him as her travelling companion, fob watch and all?

It wasn’t often that she actively disliked herself, but just now she did. All the same, she wasn’t prepared to go back on what had been done.

On Nassau Street, she spied again the young man in the fawn overcoat whom she had seen earlier looking into the window of the bookshop. He really was a sorry runt of a thing. He was going along at a rapid sort of strut, shoulders back and pelvis thrust forward, his hands in his coat pockets and his elbows pressed tight against his ribs. It was as if he were bearing himself along, clasped in his own arms, like a not quite life-sized and in some way damaged manikin.