One doesn’t get second chances all that often. Cross out the pages, turn them, start again under a new heading. I had three years ahead at Jericho, perhaps more, who could tell? I suddenly felt twenty, not forty-seven. I knew perfectly well that what had been done had been done and would remain for good, for the rest of my life. Annie and Giles, Helen, I would not be able to quite escape them. I was responsible after all. Even if unloved. I would behave absolutely honourably. Do all in my power to help them. Apart from living their lives with them. That was out.

It is, I admit, quite difficult to burn down your bridges with one box of matches; but no harm in trying. Burnt fingers for sure, but take the risk anyway.

What I did not tell Florence was that at L’Hermitage I did, indeed, see a rather odd lady with an eye-patch, an American lady. The accent was chop-able, not cut-able. And she called through the locked gates, ‘Bugger off. Mr Millar never sees his fans. Would you please go.’

I got back into the car and, just as I did so, a half-naked young man, wearing Wellingtons and a pair of indecently short shorts, came round the side of the little lodge. He had a mass of dark curly hair, a rake over his shoulder. The woman said something to him and he turned to me, legs apart, thighs like tree trunks, and waved the rake in anger.

I waved back; the woman stopped, picked up a handful of gravel, threw it with force through the gate. The dark boy laughed, shook the rake again.

I knew that he was Daniel.

Chapter 7

The dining-room was busier that evening. The Season, so it would seem, was upon us. There were two hefty Dutch people at one table, blond, fat, in sensible clothes, gobbling – not so much the food as words, poring at a map. Beside them a solitary man, probably a traveller in agricultural products, reading a paper slanted against his Evian bottle, wearily crumbling bread crumbs. And the couple from Paris were back again, silently eating, slowly, precisely, looking towards each other now and again for approbation, rather as if they were making a mosaic or laying out a jigsaw puzzle. Their intense concentration on a fairly tough guinea-fowl in a thick red wine sauce irritated me. Quite unreasonably. But I was, I remember very well, in an unreasonable frame of mind.

I felt odd. Jagged, fragmented, restless. Strange for me. I don’t lose my marbles easily. Rather too tame sometimes. Reasonable usually. Dull. Helen said. Probably rightly.

Eugène had suggested what I should eat and I had agreed and asked him to bring me a suitable wine. He did. I drank half, more than half actually, of the bottle but still felt grotty.