‘No,’ she answered straight away. ‘My job is my escape. It’s when I’m at home that I’m miserable. At times, I dread coming home on Thursday evenings, even though I am desperate to see Sassy.’

That doesn’t say much for me, I thought.

‘What is it that makes you so miserable?’ I asked. ‘Is it me?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t know if it’s you or not, Sid. It’s just that I feel trapped somehow—trapped as if in a river backwater that goes nowhere. I need more from my life.’

‘More than me, you mean?’

‘Yes … No … Oh, I don’t know. I worship you, Sid—I always have—but there are occasions when you irritate me, even make me angry. Like when you’ve had too much whisky with Charles, and then you ignore me when we go to bed, just rolling over and going to sleep without as much as a “good night”. You become a different person when you’ve drunk too much.

‘And I don’t say anything to you at the time because it would make you angry, and we would row, and I hate that even more. And I know you hate it too. Both of us are confrontation-averse when it comes to things between us, so we always keep quiet about each other’s gripes—you know we do—but it means they just fester and get worse, when we should be talking them through and resolving the problem.’

Wow! That was quite a thing to put on a chap before seven o’clock in the morning.

‘Why didn’t you speak to me?’ I said. ‘Rather than packing your bags and leaving?’

‘I couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t. Sam and I had talked it through and, at the time, leaving seemed the only way out.’

‘Sam?’

‘Samantha, the colleague I lodge with in London. We seemed to have talked about nothing else for weeks.’

But still she hadn’t spoken to me about it.

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘Now I’m more confused than ever. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been trying to sort everything out in my head. The truth is, I think that leaving you has made me even more miserable.’

‘You think?’

‘My emotions are so mixed up here at the moment, what with Pa dying, I don’t know anything for certain, except I do know that I’m missing you.’

She was crying.

‘I need you,’ she sniffed. ‘I need you to hold me and tell me that everything will be all right—except it won’t be, because Pa will still die.’

I was now almost in tears too.

‘Marina, my darling, I’ll come over there today.’

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t do that. I’ll be home on Friday and we’ll talk over the weekend.’

‘Are you sure? I could easily be there by this afternoon.’