‘I don’t think so. What kind of thing is this kind of thing?’

‘Sex, I suppose.’

‘Not often.’

‘Are you still in love with Mary?’

He didn’t move or reply for several moments, just lay staring up at the shiny blue sky.

‘Probably,’ he said at last. ‘It doesn’t matter any more though.’ He sat up and looked around for his clothes and she watched him: how the sun gleamed off his pale stomach and his tanned legs; how a line of hair ran down his stomach. Grit and dead leaves stuck to his sweaty back.

He didn’t ask about Adrian, but she squinted up at the brightness and considered. If Adrian had died, instead of leaving her, then she would certainly be in love with him still. Their story would have had a beginning, middle and end; a clear shape and an obvious meaning. She would fill her memory bank to the brim with all their happy and intense moments, replay the times he’d told her he loved her, allow herself to picture them making love to each other, let his tender face lodge in her mind, remember anniversaries, speak to him though he was no longer there, feel understood by his looked-for ghost. She would forget the squabbles and the irritations, the way he crushed her and the way she resented him; the way they both pushed each other into narrower lives. Sorrow would be noble and fulfilling, and death would give their marriage a splendid afterglow; her mourning would be official and respected. It would give her life a kind of resonance. She would bring up the girls with vivid stories about their beloved, lost father and support herself with the knowledge that she had been his chosen one, his best-beloved.

But he had left her and she wasn’t his best-beloved, she wasn’t anyone’s best-beloved, and their shared story was ragged and partial and unglamorous, full of nasty loose ends that flapped about in her mind. Not an unimpeachable tragedy, but a kind of ordinary, everyday failure; not a sealing up of the past perfect, but a horrible, frantic untying of it so that everything she’d taken for granted flew out from it and tumbled around her.

‘Lunch then,’ she said.

In the early evening, they stopped at a narrow, gloomy hotel set back from the busy road, with a tall, sculpted hedge around its garden and a small fountain in the courtyard. Their room, at the top of the building, was bare, cool and dim, and overlooked the red-tiled roofs of the town and, beyond that, the station where Luke would take his train at 11.05 the next morning. Steam from the kitchen curled through the open window; they could smell garlic and ginger and hear the muted gabble of voices rising, falling. There was a large fan in the ceiling which, when they turned it on, clicked lazily round, its blades blurring.