“But you talked to her,” Judy said, catching him up as he ran down the stairs to the kitchen. “You helped her clear up the dishes after supper and she wouldn’t let anyone else into the kitchen. ‘I want a private word with Max,’ she said, and she sent us all away. So what was the great secret?”

“There wasn’t any secret,” he said. “ You know what she was like.”

“At one time you would have trusted me. Now you don’t share anything.” She gave him one of her hurt and vulnerable looks.

“There was no secret,” he said. “Really.”

I’m too soft, he thought. When she looks at me like that, I’d promise her anything. He wanted to make some gesture of affection, but before he could show her how much he cared for her, one of the twins cried for her attention and she turned away.

Throughout the morning the children irritated him. On the way to school Peter was listless and tired, reacting to the smallest provocation with tears or temper, and in the house the twins whined with a mechanical, metallic sound that grated on his nerves.

“Of course they’re demanding,” Alice had said on the evening of her death when they were alone in the kitchen at the Tower. “But you wouldn’t be without them, would you?”

And he had responded wholeheartedly: No, of course he wouldn’t be without them. He loved them.

Now it did not seem so simple, and he longed for the old times, when he was a tandem-riding student, before guilt and responsibility.

When the time came to go to the surgery, Judy seemed to sense his unhappiness. She was concerned about him, she said. She put on boots and a sweater to help him clear the ice from the windscreen of the car and told him to take care when he was driving.

“Drive slowly,” she said. “It’s still very slippery. Perhaps you should walk.”

“I’m only going into town,” he said, though he was pleased that she was worrying about him. “The roads will be clear by now.”

Before he drove off she stood close to him and kissed him. Her nose was cold and the unexpected gesture shocked and touched him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “ It’s been my fault. You will take care?”

He nodded and squeezed her arm, then got into the car.