‘Me? Leave this house? You must be joking.’

‘Indeed I’m not joking. That’s what a decent man would do.’

‘What, just walk out of a house I bought with my inheritance from my parents? Walk out on the furniture you bought with my life savings? You’re not only a hysterical bitch, you’re out of your mind. You can go. I’ll pay my maintenance, the law forces me to do that, though it’ll be the minimum I can get away with, I promise you.’

‘And you call yourself an officer and a gentleman!’ said Alice. ‘What am I supposed to do? Go back to nursing? Go back to a poky flat? I’d rather die. Certainly I’m staying in this house.’

They argued about it bitterly day after day. Rupert’s need overcame the hypnosis and he chain-smoked. Alice was now afraid to knit in his presence, for he was physically stronger than she, even if she had had the heart to start the blue pullover once again. And whom would she give it to? She would not get out of the house, her house which Rupert had given her for which, in exchange, she had given him the most important thing she had.

‘I gave up my knitting for you,’ she screamed at him, ‘and you can’t even give me a house and a few sticks of furniture.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Rupert. ‘You ought to be locked up.’

Alice rushed at him and smacked his face. He caught her hands and threw her into a chair and slammed out of the room. He went down to the pub on the sea front and had two double whiskies and smoked a packet of cigarettes. When he got back Alice was in bed in the spare room. Just as he refused to leave the house, so Rupert had refused to get out of his own bedroom. He took two sleeping tablets and went to bed.

In the morning Alice went into the room where Rupert was and washed his scalp and combed his beautiful thick white hair. She changed the pillowcases, wiped a spot off Rupert’s pyjama jacket and then she phoned the doctor to say Rupert was dead. He must have passed away in his sleep. She had awakened to find him dead beside her.

‘His heart, of course,’ said the doctor, and because Alice had been a nurse, ‘a massive myocardial infarction.’

She nodded. ‘I suppose I should have expected it.’

‘Well, in these cases . . .’

‘You never know, do you? I must be grateful for the few happy months we had together.’

The doctor signed the death certificate. There was no question of an autopsy. Pamela and Guy came to the cremation and took Alice back home with them for four weeks. When Alice left to return to the house that was now entirely hers they promised to take her at her word and come to stay once again in the summer. Alice was very comfortably off, for by no means all Rupert’s savings had been spent on the furniture, his life assurance had been considerable, and there was his army pension, reduced but still generous.