She and Edward had already painted the walls throughout the flat in a warm cream colour in the first week of owning the property, along with scrubbing the floorboards and varnishing them in the sitting room and bedroom. The kitchen and bathroom had new linoleum on the floor. Now, with the drop-leaf table that had been her workstation and had occupied the centre of the room folded away against the wall, its two hard-backed chairs standing either side, she’d found she had room for a small comfortable sofa with chintz upholstery for the sitting room, along with a small bookcase and a coffee table. A couple of brightly coloured shop-bought rugs added to the general air of cosiness, and in the winter evenings when the fire in the hearth glowed and flickered, and the thick curtains at the window shut out the darkness, Ruby was conscious of a sense of peace. Not happiness – happiness was something else and intrinsically tied up with Edward, which made it impossible to achieve.

This last reflection pierced the numbness and she hurried out of the main shop and through the fitting room into the tiny square of hall beyond. This now boasted a door to the flat. Edward had insisted the builders make this modification on the grounds of privacy and safety when they had carried out the other work, and although she wouldn’t have thought of it herself, she had been pleased with the end result. It kept the shop and her home independent of each other and it was nice to have a separate key to her living quarters. She was thinking of employing an assistant in the near future – her workload was already too much for one person and she needed to delegate where she could – and although she might think about giving a key to the shop to someone in the future, her home was a different matter. As Edward had said, an Englishman’s home – or Englishwoman’s – was his or her castle.

Oh, Edward. Edward.

By the time she had climbed the stairs the anaesthetizing numbness had melted away and the full reality of what had just occurred had flooded over her. He had gone. Gone for good. She would never see him again and she only had herself to blame. She collapsed in one of the armchairs and gave vent to a paroxysm of weeping, and much later, as a quiet winter dawn broke and the street below the flat emerged slowly into life, she was still asking herself if she had done the right thing – or whether she had made the biggest mistake of her life.

Chapter Twenty-Two