‘Ring her back and say we’d rather go together on another night. She can have a tête-à-tête with Adam,’ suggested Christopher when she told him about Louisa’s request, but Marnie, intent on practising trust, and unwilling to backtrack to Louisa, protested that she didn’t want to do that.

‘I really don’t want to go without you,’ said Christopher, but Marnie perversely insisted he should. I have to be grown up about this, she told herself. It seemed like a test of her own faith in Christopher, an attempt to overcome her jealousies and suspicions.

Christopher went to Heathrow with Marnie to see her off, wishing he could have driven her there, counting the weeks till he would get his licence back. The flat seemed intolerably empty without her. He had never felt this sense that a vital part of him was missing on the numerous occasions when he and Nicola had been apart. He telephoned Jess and asked himself round to supper with her and her GP husband, promising to get there early enough to see the children.

Marnie sounded full of excitement when she rang from New York to say she’d arrived safely. She was having a brilliant time with her father, and they were off to Canada tomorrow. She wasn’t sure whether they’d stay the night at a hotel in Toronto or fly back the same day. It depended on her father’s business.

‘I wish you were here,’ she said. ‘I miss you so much.’

‘I wish I was too. By the way, I still love you. When did I last tell you?’

‘Not for ages – not since yesterday. I love you too.’

Chapter Thirty-one

The invitation from Louisa had originally been for ‘oh, half past eightish, but turn up any old time that suits’. Christopher arrived at her little house in Wandsworth to find Adam Winterton had got there first. Louisa, looking pretty and casual in a clingy top and a floral skirt made of some floaty material, led the way through the kitchen to a little paved garden at the back. Her long legs were bare and very brown and she had on a pair of kitten-heeled mules that click-clacked sexily on the tiled floor as she walked.

Adam was sitting on a swing seat, a tall glass in his hand, but got to his feet as they came through the kitchen door.

‘Christopher – how very good to see you again. Louisa’s been telling me you’re about to abandon City life to become a best-selling author! That’s wonderful.’

He was a thick-set man of medium height, and Christopher thought that if he hadn’t known what a formidable intellect lay behind his pleasant open face and slightly ruddy complexion, he would have put him down as an outdoor type, a farmer perhaps or a soldier.