Adam Winterton missed Louisa intolerably. During the years they’d lived together he’d often wondered how he would cope if the moment came when she fell for someone else – something which he’d secretly regarded as inevitable. Now he didn’t know whether it was worse or better that it hadn’t been – as far as he knew – for another man that she had left him.

In one way, he told himself, it was a comfort that she hadn’t succumbed to a grand passion against which he would have felt helpless, but on the other hand the fact that she’d decided to end their relationship because the love he gave her clearly wasn’t enough for her (or rather, as she put it, because it was becoming too much) could hardly be regarded as reassuring. He had known for a long time that she was restless and unsatisfied and would have given anything to make her happy but had no idea how to change himself sufficiently to do it. His doggedness, his reliability, his kindness, all good qualities in themselves, added up to a sum total that read ‘boring’ when Louisa was doing the arithmetic. What he had to offer was simply not stimulating enough. There were plenty of other women who had made it plain that they would calculate the sum differently, but it wasn’t other women that Adam wanted. He was also aware that having loved and supported her all through her illness, he had become associated in her mind with the part of her life she most wished to forget.

Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he could count the many different ways he loved her and knew that for him one of them would always be ‘to the level of every day’s most quiet need’. But he knew also that his ways of loving did not measure up to the thrills and passion she longed for. She had once told him, in a temper, that he must have been born middle-aged and though she had apologised later, and said she hadn’t meant it, Adam knew that however sorry she was to have said it – and it was part of Louisa’s charm that she was always genuinely sorry for her sharp tongue – she certainly had meant it at the time. Her words had stuck in his memory like flies to a scroll of sticky paper. ‘And before you were born, I bet you just sat there in the womb like a lump of lard, longing to have a good old wriggle but too bloody considerate to give your mother a kick,’ she had said, goading him, irked by his gentle forbearance.