Danny bolted the doors and Mary said to her, "Come and have another gin. You've bloody earned it."

But Danny gave her a brandy.

Linda downed it. And then she found herself in a chair with Danny saying, "I've never moved so fast in me life." And she guessed he must have caught her as she went over.

After that she thought of Iain and she began to cry.

How the tears hurt, gushing past Richard's gift of bruises, and when they touched her lip, they stung. When she blew her nose, that hurt too. He must have hit her there as well. Her ear buzzed. Perhaps it would never get better.

At midnight, when she was sitting with Mary, Iain appeared, hammering on the back door. Someone had told him about Linda's face.

He stood over her, wet from rain—there had been a storm—white and scowling, his own eyes full of tears, and fire. It was Richard's face, but it was not Richard at all.

"You're not going back to him. I won't let you."

At the flat, he held her so gently, not to exacerbate her wounds, but pain and mad joy kept her awake.

She lay and breathed the frowsty wonderful smell of love.

She thought, / don't want anything of Richard's.

There was nothing to take from the fudge house. Everything in it was his, or things he had bought her that he believed she should have, things she did not like. She loathed it all, even to the plain underclothes he made her buy and the flat, uncomfortable shoes, and the medicinal toilet waters, and set of brushes with fat Victorian maidens.

But I do have to go back. Just once. Iain will go with me. And that bastard, that bloody stinker won't touch him.

For Richard, confronted by Iain's male, six-foot, twenty-two-year-old fitness, would quail.

I'm thirty-four. I'm too old for him.

In his sleep, Iain turned a little and kissed her hair.

I can make this flat smashing. Iain won't mind. He'll enjoy it.

But I have to go to Richard, just once. To tell him I'm leaving him for good.

Her ear had stopped buzzing.

At one in the morning, Richard Reeves was sitting on the big sofa in the main room, finishing a whisky.

Linda should have been home an hour and a half ago, and she was never later than midnight.

Richard knew where she was. She had gone with a man. But the man would chuck her out presently, and then she would have to come back.

He could not call the pub, the phone was broken. It had been knocked over last week. Her fault.

He had been sorry after she left, sorry he had slapped her. She made him angry. She did it purposely. But he must try to control his irritation. He would say he was sorry, give her a cuddle when she came in.