She gathered him into her, her thick coat wrapped around him, her scarf against his neck, his cold, sore flesh against her warm, soft body, her clothes opening up layer after layer, until it was just the silk of her skin and the satin of her hair coming loose and falling over his face, his tears drying on her breast, her arms holding him and her fingers feeling for him, finding out all the places where he hurt and healing him.

Seven

When did she know? It was a question that friends sometimes asked her later and that she often asked herself, and it always gave her a feeling of vertiginous disquiet – like looking into a slimy-sided well and not knowing how far down it went. You picked up a pebble, leant over the well’s dark mouth, silent bats and dank air, and let it drop; waited for the echoing sound as it hit the water. But Irene, looking back over the plunge of months, couldn’t work out at what point she had started to understand that something was happening; couldn’t tell when it was that she had suspected without acknowledging her suspicions, or when she had known without properly knowing that she knew. Like a ghost in her own life, she thought: believing she was in control but actually being helpless; feeling she was doing all right, in the circumstances, when all the time she was heading for disaster; reading everything the wrong way. She could hardly bear to think of it, that time of not-knowing.