‘But I’ve told you the end of the long story before the beginning and the middle,’ he went on.

‘I’m still listening.’

‘Something happened to me in New York, Marianne, and it set me thinking along with feeling sorry for myself. I began seeing everything differently from how I had before. Looking beneath the surface is one way of putting it, and that includes my own surface, the veneer I’d worn for years though I didn’t know it.’

Part of which was the mocking smile Marianne had quickly realized was self-deprecation, and not the one on his face now.

She said frostily, ‘So you decided to take yourself off and have another go at writing a novel? Leave our affair hanging in limbo except for the brief communication I received from you.’

She added when Simon got up to gaze through the window, ‘I hope you’re noticing the roses in the garden opposite. It was winter when you left for New York—’

‘And mild for the time of year, I recall.’

‘I was referring to how long you’ve been away and taken for granted I’d still want you when you returned.’

‘Do you?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. But I’m old and wise enough to know that what I want isn’t always what’s best for me. There’s going to have to be a good reason for your behaving towards me the way you have.’

Simon turned from the window to look at her. ‘I took nothing for granted. On the contrary. I stayed away until I’d proved something to myself, or I wouldn’t be worthy of you. You’d told me on the phone I wasn’t the man for you—’

‘What I said wasn’t attached to how you earn your bread.’

‘But it seems to’ve served as shock treatment in more ways than one. I’d given up on myself, hadn’t I? Done what some would call prostituting my art, though I knew it was in me to be what I’d set out to be. Taken the easy way out.

‘Once I began work, though, it was as if I was driven,’ Simon went on reflectively. ‘There was no way I’d have given up and come back to you empty-handed, so to speak. My not calling, or writing you, was part of the state of suspended animation I was in—’

A state familiar to Marianne. A harsh word from someone you cared about and bang went the creative high you were on.

‘If you’d hung up on me—’ said Simon.

‘I understand. But you could have explained by letter.’