They set off for the city. The mist had turned to a fine, soft rain. Phoebe thought she could hear the tiny drops whispering against the window beside her. She was biting her lip. Nothing of significance had happened between her and Paul just now, nothing she could point to or identify, yet she was afraid she might be about to cry. It was as if a door had flown open suddenly and a gust of cold air had blown straight into her face. Was he planning to leave her, as others had done? If so, there had been no warning, no inkling.

Or had there been, and she hadn’t noticed? Maybe he hadn’t known before he went away. Maybe he had met someone, in Zurich, at the conference, someone bright and serious, like himself.

She tightened her grip on the strap of her handbag. She mustn’t cry. Paul would be shocked if she did, shocked first, and then annoyed. A woman weeping, he had once assured her, made him feel only impatience. Women when they cry are crying only for themselves, that was what he had said. He seemed to have forgotten, when he was saying it, that she was a woman. Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten. Maybe he knew exactly what he was saying and to whom he was saying it.

‘Quirke telephoned last night,’ she said, and heard herself give an unsteady, brittle laugh. When she spoke of her father, she always used his name. It was left over from the days when she didn’t yet know he was her father.

Paul was looking out of the window on his side, stroking his chin with a finger and thumb, as he did when he was lost in thought. And what was it, she wondered, that he was thinking about?

‘Your father?’ he said then, vaguely. ‘He’s in Spain, isn’t he, with Tante Evelyn?’

‘With? – oh, yes.’ She often forgot that the woman Quirke was married to was Paul’s aunt. In fact, she often forgot her father was married at all, and had been for years, so unlikely a thing it seemed to her, even yet. It also slipped her mind on occasion that she had once worked for Paul’s Tante Evelyn, as a receptionist at her consulting rooms in Fitzwilliam Square. How things changed, in the run of time. ‘They’re in San Sebastián,’ she said.

‘Are they enjoying it?’

‘Yes, I think so. Hard to tell.’

‘Your father was drunk, I take it?’

How could he say it like that, in that coldly impersonal way? He might have been asking how the weather was, down there in Spain. He knew Quirke’s history of self-destructive drinking, and knew also how much Phoebe worried that he would fall again, at any moment, into that terrible spiral, which each time drew him deeper, and in which one day he might finally lose himself.