The room was faintly illuminated by the yellow light from the street lamp in the alley. She crouched down in front of the gas fire and noticed she hadn’t turned the tap off after her match had failed to ignite the jets. It wouldn’t do to feed that meter now with the tap turned on full and have five pence worth of gas flood the room. Not with the window tight shut and not a crack round that heavy old door. Slowly she put her hand out to turn off the tap.

Her fingers touched it. Her hand remained still, poised. She heard her heart begin to thud softly in the silence as the idea in all its brilliant awfulness took hold of her. Wouldn’t do . . .? Was she mad? It wouldn’t do to feed that meter now with the tap turned on? What would do as well, as efficiently, as finally? She withdrew her hand and clasped it in the other to steady it. Rising to her feet, she contemplated her sleeping husband. The sweat was standing on his pale forehead now. He snored as rhythmically, as stertorously, as her own heart beat. A widow, she thought, alone and free in her own unshared house. Not divorced, despised, disowned, laughed at by judges and solicitors for her crippling frigidity, not mocked by that Frances and her successors, but a widow whom all the world would pity and respect. Comfortably-off too, if not rich, with an income from James’s life assurance and very likely a pension from Sir William Tarrant.

James wouldn’t wake up till midnight. No, that was wrong. He wouldn’t have wakened up till midnight. What she meant was he wouldn’t wake up at all.

The gas tap was still on, full on. She took the five pence coin and tip-toed over to the meter. Nothing would wake him, but still she tip-toed. The window was tight shut with nothing beyond it but that alley, that glistening lamp and the towering wall of the cathedral. She studied the meter, kneeling down. It was the first time in her sheltered, cosseted, snug life that she had ever actually seen a coin-in-the-slot gas meter. But if morons like hotel servants and the sort of people who would stay in a place like this could work it, she could. It wouldn’t matter that she hadn’t attended closely to the manageress’s instructions. What had she said? Turn the handle to the left, insert the coin, turn it to the right. Nina hesitated for a moment, just long enough for brief fractured memories to cross her mind, James when they were first married, James patient and kind and self-denying on their honeymoon, James promising that her coldness didn’t matter, that with time and love . . . James confessing with a defiant smirk, throwing Frances’s name at her, James going on a three-day bender because she couldn’t pretend the wound he’d given her was just a surface scratch, James drunk night after night after night . . . She didn’t hesitate for long. She got her coat, put the car keys in her handbag. Then she knelt down again, turned the handle to the left, inserted the five pence coin, turned it to the right and, without looking back, walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.