“Oh, I see.” She caught the inference at once. “That’s the problem, is it? I’ve sinned. I’ve actually dared to go out and have a normal lunch and a normal conversation with another woman. Oh, sorry, Pascal. My mistake.”

“Not any other woman. Gini. And I know precisely what you said at your ‘normal’ lunch, so don’t bother denying it. You were making trouble, as usual.”

“As a matter of fact, that’s not true.” She turned and gave him a smile. “I took Gini out to lunch because I thought I could get to know her better. Since she’s going to be helping to look after my daughter when Marianne stays with you, I thought that was quite a reasonable course to take.”

“And that was necessary when you’d already met Gini twice? Don’t lie to me. I know you too well. I damn well know why you talked to Gini the way you did.”

“For heaven’s sake. I simply thought I’d try to get to know her better. And I may as well say it, Pascal—when I saw her I was shocked.”

“Shocked? Why? No doubt your female intuition went into overdrive. It usually does.”

“You don’t need intuition to see when a person’s ill—miserable, deeply distressed. I was appalled by the state she was in.” She turned angrily, to top up her drink, then rounded on him again, her face tight with indignation.

“As it happens, I was also touched by her loyalty to you, and her efforts to disguise how unhappy, how obviously unwell she was. So don’t bloody well preach at me, Pascal. You’re so blind. That hadn’t happened to her overnight. She’d obviously been that way for months. So why didn’t you notice when you were in Bosnia together? Why, in your usual way, didn’t you come home when you said you were coming? She thought you’d be back for Christmas. I damn near wept…”

“I don’t have to account to you for my movements. Gini agreed I should stay on. There were aspects of that war I still hadn’t covered. And Gini understood that a great deal better than you ever did.”

“Did she indeed?” Her mouth tightened. “Dear God, Pascal—you haven’t changed one bit. I begin to think you never will. Don’t you ever get sick of your everlasting wars? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you can’t spend your entire life sacrificing everyone, including yourself, to this obsession of yours? I thought you’d learned. I thought you’d begun to see that you can’t always put work first, second, and third, and everything else a poor fourth. Obviously not. I might have known it. The three years when you didn’t photograph wars taught you nothing. The second you got to Bosnia, you reverted.”

“Yes, well, you, of course, wouldn’t begin to understand that.” He slammed down his glass on the table. “To you, my work never mattered. All it did was pay the goddamned rent. It would have been so much nicer, of course, if you’d married an ordinary businessman who worked regular hours for a great deal of money and came running home to you at six o’clock every fucking night. To you my work was always an inconvenience—a tiresome irrelevance, some eccentricity on my part. We’ve been over that a million bloody times, and I don’t intend to go over it again.”