They had had their little talk about the return of the capsule (‘our secret’), though he had spoken to her more in gratitude than reproach. He was grateful to Alec too. Evidently his conversation with her had been more effective than they had realized. The thing was gone now; Alec had sent it the same way as the others (extraordinary what gets flushed down people’s toilets!), so that particular crisis was over. He had been unexpectedly reprieved, and the escape had invigorated him, so that for the first time in months he felt that better things might be possible. If he could rein back on the booze, the powder, the tablets, the mood swings, the lying, this time perhaps he would defy the lengthening odds and make the world right again. But the change would have to be convincing. It would have to show on his skin like a light, for there were only so many times a person could promise reform before the words ‘I’ll change’ began to sound like ‘I want to change but I can’t’. It might, of course, be too late; he was so cut off from Kirsty’s private thinking now, the tendency of her thinking. For all he knew she had already instructed someone in the States, some lawyer, and he’d go home to find the paperwork waiting for him. She’d had a week on her own over there, and that Khan bitch might have talked her into something. But it was his instinct that he still had one last chance, and he intended to reach for it.

With his left arm laid along the top of the seat – his hand behind the nape of his wife’s neck so that she would only have to lean back a little for them to be touching—he gazed through the side window of the car and saw a half-dozen rabbits scattering across a field. Sheep grazed; lion-coloured cows stood by troughs in the shade of trees, swishing their tails. There was corn growing and oilseed rape, and red tractors raising a dust in the hayfields. In spite of everything – motorways, pesticide, a million new homes – here at least the country had retained its riches, its mannerly beauty. In his hurry to put England behind him he had underprized this. Now he felt the tug of it, as though this landscape – the first he had opened his eyes to – had some authoritative claim on him, something at the level of blood, which he was finally ready to acknowledge.