‘I’m sure your husband’s letters tell you all he wants you to know,’ he muttered stonily.

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Patronise me. Use him as a barrier. Aubrey doesn’t decide what I should or should not know and understand. He can’t now.’

Howard looked pained, embarrassed. ‘I’m not trying to do that. I just think we both need to remember that he exists.’

‘How could I forget?’ asked Vivian. She knew her situation. Understood it with horrifying clarity. Never forgot it for a moment.

‘I do.’

‘Do you?’ She was surprised. She couldn’t imagine him so engrossed, so absorbed and thoughtless. She was delighted that he might be riveted and enthralled to the point of forgetfulness.

‘Yes, and I mustn’t.’

‘Tell me now,’ she whispered.

40

SO HE TOLD her. It was not because he wanted her to see him as a hero or because he wanted her pity or even understanding of his situation. It was not about him at all. It was obvious that she didn’t respect her husband. It was painfully complex that he could think, or hope, or want that she might. He wouldn’t have her if she did, and he had to have her. More than anything, that. He spoke in a perverse and not thoroughly thought-out attempt to help her reclaim some admiration for Aubrey – a man Howard didn’t even particularly like, but a man who was up to his thighs in blood and mud and shit and hate, so a man he had to venerate. He felt guilty as hell for making the officer into a cuckold, but he was incapable of doing anything other. He loved Vivian as he’d never loved anyone before, with an intensity that bordered on obsession.

He loved how she was. Just that. The delicate exactness of her nose, her ankles. He adored the mellow swell of her hips and the strength hidden in her calves. There was something indefinable about her skin and her collarbone that clouted his being, knocked him senseless. He studied her in minute detail. Fascinated by the ridge of the blue-green veins that ran the length of her pale hands, the rise of the goose bumps on her arms and thighs when she was caught in a breeze, the soft pink of the blushes that might appear high in her cheekbones or low in the centre of her throat, depending on whether the colour was induced by embarrassment or exertion. It all made him breathless. She had reminded him that bodies were staggeringly, beautifully fragile rather than macabrely so. She smelt of soap and perfume. She smelt gentle. An incredible thing. Yet despite all this placid tenderness, he knew the improbable truth of her, he knew it. She was keen, alert, acute, eager. She was sex. The heart of it. The heat of it. He had found a staggering intimacy with her that no other woman had ever offered; she opened her legs and it unlocked things deep in his soul that he had no vocabulary for. She unlocked life itself. She made him feel unlicensed, excluded from obligation, restraint or regularity. Weariness shifted from his shoulders in her presence.