She came out into the hall and embraced him. Her embraces at parting and greeting (though these occasions were no longer frequent) were as passionate now as when they first got engaged. He anticipated a small difficulty in that she wouldn’t much want to leave her home, but that could be got over. She would go, as she had often said, anywhere with him.

He walked into their huge living room. It was as immaculate as ever, but something was different, something had undergone a great change. Their red carpet had been replaced by a new one of a delicate creamy velvety pile.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I bought it and had it laid secretly as a surprise for you. Oh, darling, you don’t like it?’

‘I like it,’ he said, and then, ‘How much did it cost?’

This was a question he hardly ever asked, but now he had cause to. She named a sum, much about the figure her trip to Australia would have cost.

‘We said we were saving it to get something for the house,’ she said, putting her arm round him. ‘It’s not really an extravagance. It’ll last for ever. And what else have we got to spend the money on but our own home?’

He kissed her and said it didn’t matter. It wasn’t really an extravagance and it would last for ever, for ever . . . They dined off Copenhagen china and Georgian silver and Waterford glass. On the table flowers were arranged, wasting their sweetness on the desert air. He must go to Australia, but she couldn’t come with him. He was afraid to tell her, gripped by a craven fear.

For weeks he put off telling her, and treacherously the idea came to him – why tell her at all? He longed to go, he must go. Couldn’t he simply escape, phone from the aircraft’s first stop, somewhere in Europe, and say he had been sent without notice, urgently? He had tried to phone her before but he couldn’t get through. She wouldn’t attempt suicide, he was sure, if she knew he was too far away to save her. And she’d forgive him, she loved him. But there were too many practical difficulties in the way of that, clothes, for instance, luggage. He must have been losing his mind even to think of it. Do that to Lydia? He wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy, still less to his beloved wife.

As it turned out, he didn’t get the chance. She was his secretary from whom a man, however many he keeps from his wife, can have no secrets. The airline phoned with a query and she found out.

‘How long,’ she asked dully, ‘will you be gone?’

‘Three months.’

She paled. She fell back as if physically ill.

‘I’ll write every day. I’ll phone.’

‘Three months,’ she said.

‘I was scared stiff of telling you. I have to go. Darling, don’t you see I have to? It would cost hundreds and hundreds to take you with me, and we don’t have the money.’