Helen came to the french doors. ‘Let’s drop it for now. We need to ring the hospital,’ she said. ‘Find out about Gumbo. I want to come, too, and time’s getting on. Ring and—’

‘In a minute.’

‘Now. It’s nearly seven.’

She continued to stand there, watching him, then she came and sat beside him, turning the chair noisily on the concrete so that the sun wasn’t in her eyes. ‘I think I know why Deidre wanted you to tell me,’ she said.

‘So that I wouldn’t get away with it entirely. So that someone close to me would know.’

‘More than that,’ Helen said. ‘She sees a sort of parallel between our marriages, I suppose.’ For a moment he held the thought that Helen had also been a visitor to libidinous Nigel in Montgomery Street — half the wives of the town taking their brief turn for satisfaction — but he knew that was absurd.

‘What parallel?’ he said.

‘With me and Alison.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ said Pearly. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Deidre told me once she wished she had a really close friend as I have Alison. She was lonely, I suppose, despite all the committees and causes. You can be lonely in a marriage just as you can be lonely by yourself.’

‘So now I’m hopeless as a husband as well as everything else.’

‘I’m just saying maybe she isn’t as lucky as me. She hasn’t got an Alison. Maybe this guy in Montgomery Street was a lover, maybe he was more than that. We don’t know anything about it really, do we?’

‘I wish to God I’d never been to bloody Montgomery Street.’

‘Anyway,’ said Helen, ‘what’s important now is to find out how Gumbo is and go and see him.’

‘I’m onto it.’ As Pearly went in to make the call, he thought about her comment on the Montgomery Street man. He could think of no closer bond than lover: more than a lover was someone surely only women could imagine. Lover was the superlative term for Pearly. Nothing ranked above it.