‘Terry I got better a long time ago, in a way. Some of the medicines made me calm and after a while I never thought about the past at all. I think there were a lot of patients like me, not exactly ill any more but – but protected from the past by our medicines. It was – perhaps as if we were in a private hotel somewhere, away from the world. But favoured. Because someone was paying.’ She stared for a moment out of the small window of the huge state hospital, at other buildings, at snow falling past barred windows. ‘But – I wasn’t unhappy Terry.’

A long silence in the small room.

‘Did you know I learnt Russian?’

Terence shook his head numbly.

‘I read Chekhov in Russian, and Tolstoy. They were wonderful.’

‘Nicky...’ Terence’s voice was almost inaudible, as if the hope that had sustained him through everything that had happened was draining away. ‘Why did you come to the reunion?’

And then Nicky breathed in very sharply and her voice suddenly became agitated. ‘Because they sent me back to Brighton, to the same house in Brighton – it made me remember things I’d forgotten – Terry it was still the same cover on the bed, even though it was old and faded and my –’ she looked up at him ‘– did you know my cream wedding dress was still on the top of the wardrobe, in a brown paper bag?’

Terence Blue gave a kind of groan though he did not know that he did.

‘And after I’d stabbed you, when they took you away in the ambulance like my mother I realised –’ she gave a small unsteady sigh but did not take her eyes away from his face ‘– that after my mother died you were the only person I ever knew how to love. By putting away my memories I had forgotten that.’

‘When you held me,’ said Nicola Abbott at last, ‘I stabbed you because I remembered.’

‘I know,’ said Terence Blue.

His face was so pale the nurse thought he would faint. But at last he spoke again.

‘Nicky,’ he said ‘I’ve got something else very very important to tell you. About the death of your mother.’

‘I know,’ she said.

Silence again, in the small room, as they looked at each other. ‘I know, they told me. I remember that day, and the doctor. But – I couldn’t – accept it properly. Because I felt that I did kill someone I loved, only it was you.’

And then she said again, like an echo, ‘When you held me like that I stabbed you because I remembered.’

She looked at him and he saw such pain in her eyes that he could not bear it.

And then she saw the pain in his.