Now she was inside, the plane looked small and crowded. She went far up to the front, and sank into the chair, so deep that she felt she would never be able to move, get out again. There seemed to be no air, nothing but a steady vibration though they were still not moving. She looked out of the window, but Henry had gone—yes, he would have to hurry to get to his operation while she sat in this shaking cocoon and waited, waited for what seemed like hours, so tense her hands were clenched tight round the safety belt. Then there was a jolt and they were bumping out onto the field. But just as she began to relax, they stopped again, while the whole cabin vibrated and she felt wildly claustrophobic. Was it too late to plead illness, get out somehow, get back to Henry and safety? But now they were jolting along again, faster and faster until quite suddenly the jolting stopped. “Airborne,” she said to herself, looking down as some trees whizzed past below them, as they circled back over the airport and then everything tilted away, the whole world tilted away sideways, fields shot out from under them, houses disappeared, the cars on the roads looked like beetles. It was a still humming emptiness, rather like ether just before you go under, and she was going under now, down the long tunnel of air alone. There had been so many words, so many images floating behind her eyes, and now there was nothingness. She had become a vacuum. “Edward, where are you?” she said silently to the sky. She tried very hard to cry so that no one would see, wiping the tears away surreptitiously with her handkerchief, leaning her head back against the chair, her eyes closed.

She would never be able to tell Henry, this is why she was crying, she reminded herself. All her life she had wanted safety, peace, to be accepted. But even Henry could not accept that part of her which was, in spite of everything, Edward’s. These last years when she and Edward hardly wrote to each other, when she imagined she was through with him, when she imagined she had made a choice once and for all, and his unreasonable anguish, his continual war, had been firmly labeled in her mind childish and neurotic, she had really borne him inside her like a child, had never been able to bury the anguish, had lived with it always just under the surface of life. You can’t break off from family, she thought, the tears squeezing their way down through her lids, even if you try. And now it was too late. She couldn’t hide; she was caught here—was that how Edward had felt when he—when he—Edward, where are you? The tears flowed down behind her fingers.