Things were calm and peaceful in the flat. Niall was somewhere playing music, but very softly. Liv’s door was shut but we guessed that she and Wim were on the other side of it. Glasses they had been drinking from stood on the table with an empty bottle of Bulgarian red and a carton of orange juice. Silver closed the windows. No one would come. It had begun to rain.

He had a bath, I wrote my diary. Niall’s music stopped. I’d never known it so quiet at the top of 15 Russia Road. No voices from the flat or the street, no unearthly cries some people seem impelled to make once midnight is past, no wind blowing, only the gentle regular patting of rain on the leads. I listened but could detect no traffic sound, sealike, from the Edgware Road. The silence was heavy, as if night itself slept.

Chapter 29

29

HE’S NOT IN ANY danger but I worry when I haven’t heard for a week. It was a double bonus when his letter came this morning and at eight he phoned. In just a bit less than two weeks he’ll be home. I don’t want him ever to go away again, but I know I lack the will or the nerve to stop him if he needs to go.

When I started writing this I said I didn’t know any poetry. I don’t, but he does. This is what he wrote to me, a quotation from I don’t know what, except that it’s by Browning and he used to live in Maida Vale.

So, I shall see her in three days And just one night, but nights are short, Then two long hours, and that is morn— See how I come, unchanged, unworn! Feel, where my life broke off from thine, How fresh the splinters keep and fine,— Only a touch and we combine!

I must finish before he comes home and I have quite a long way to go. And I have to come soon to the dreadful thing that I can never think of even now without a shudder and a twisting and turning inside me.