He refilled his glass. He wouldn’t subject himself to it either. He had never felt the slightest urge before now to couple his life with another person. He enjoyed women, but he had always managed to keep them in a separate compartment of his life. Petra had crept up on him. Insidiously she had made herself necessary to his happiness. He wanted her part of his life, he wanted to hear her laughter every day, to feel her presence in the air around him, to enjoy her radiance, bask in her sunny insouciance. Even when she exasperated him with her stubbornness, her self-determination, her refusal to compromise, he loved her for it. As a man who had little interest in making close friends, who was accustomed to consulting only his own wishes and needs and confided in no one without reservations, he wondered at Petra’s ease and intimacy with her friends, at her deep-seated affection for her brother, at the openness of her manner, her ready assumption that people meant well, and that no one would deliberately set out to hurt someone else.

It inspired in him the desire to protect her from the world’s unkindness, the careless cruelties and the deliberate ones. The image of Clothilde rose in his mind’s eye. There was a woman capable of manifest cruelties. Beside Petra, she was a monster of selfish carelessness. And he would not allow a single barb from her malicious tongue to touch Petra. She would try to hurt her, he was under no illusions there. Clothilde did not relinquish what she considered hers without a fight, and if she could see a way to cast doubt on the integrity of this marriage, she wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

It was imperative he marry Petra with all the extravagance, all the public spectacle, all the conviction of a man certain of the rightness of what he was doing. Somehow he had to make Petra understand that.

He drained his whisky glass and set it down decisively. This couldn’t be left to fester, God knew what knots Petra was tying left to her own thoughts. No one would be back from the races for several hours yet, there was time to put this right before the world and his wife barged in with their opinions.