The living room was chilly and he turned on the gas fire. It had fake logs, around which the pale flames flickered and sputtered. It didn’t look anything like a real fire. Marguerite had installed it, to ‘cheer up the room’, as she said, giving him a look that dared him to dissent. He was depressed by the thing, by its kitschiness, its commonness. His wife had a bourgeois streak that, when she let it show, always took him by surprise. She went in for plastic flowers and lace doilies and painted fire screens. There was even a fake-fur cover on the lavatory lid.

My God, what a snob I am, he thought.

Yet Marguerite’s family was rather grand, in a down-at-heel sort of way, like his own. The ancestral home was an early eighteenth-century manor house just across the county border from Lismore. It was to there that she had taken herself off at the beginning of the previous summer, which meant that he had been on his own for the best part of a year. Supposedly she had gone to look after her ailing mother, but the weeks had passed, and then months, her mother hadn’t died, and still there was no talk of her returning.

He was not as put out by her absence as he should have been, which made him feel something of a scoundrel. At first, Marguerite had written regularly, three or four letters a week, but gradually the correspondence had fallen away and at last she had gone silent. She had telephoned once, but only to ask after some knick-knack she wished him to send on to her, as she was missing it.

If he were a gentleman he would plead with her to come home, but every time he thought of it he was overcome by a disabling apathy. Anyway, what good would pleading do? Marguerite was a wilful woman, one not to be swayed by gentle words. What he should do was descend on Perrott House brandishing a horsewhip, like a squire out of Castle Rackrent, and drag her home by the hair, if necessary – that was what was expected of true gentlemen, at least in the old days. He thought that might be what she was waiting for him to do. Well, she could wait. On one of her early return visits she had said something that irritated him, he couldn’t remember what, and it had driven him to enquire, in his usual diffident fashion, if she didn’t think it rather, well, rather middle-class of her to have done something so banal as ‘going home to mother’. She had made no reply, had only gone very red in the face and flounced out of the room. At least she hadn’t thrown something, as she would have done in the past.