When David arrived things began to happen: he came running over, a crowd began to collect on the pavement and he and Wyndham and a man out of a baker’s van managed to heave that huge monster of a thing a couple of inches off the ground, so that I could finally move. I stepped out, or David pulled me out, I forget which, and then I fainted.

I came round a few moments later, lying on my bed, to the sound of Wyndham telephoning for the doctor. David was sitting on the bedside chair. I shut my eyes again quickly and said:

“Don’t ring for that doctor, send for someone different, please.”

“Don’t be silly,” said David, and there was nothing more that I could do.

It turned out that I had not done anything really terrible to my legs, though it was a long time before this consolation was offered to me, and there was sufficient mess for me to worry for a good few hours about amputation. I had injured one of my kneecaps in a very nasty and painful fashion, and my legs from the thigh downwards were covered in the most appalling bruises I have ever seen. I think that they wanted to take me to hospital, but I would not leave the children. It was the same doctor, and when he came I cried and cried and kept saying that I was sorry, as though he really had been my father, and as though a moral error had been committed, discovered and punished. Throughout the day I could hear Wyndham and David in the next room talking about me as though I were dead. Wyndham kept saying things like, “I could never have known she’d have moved like that, but I should have been watching more closely. I admit I wasn’t watching,” and David kept saying, “It’s not your fault, for God’s sake, don’t apologize, it’s not your fault. She should have realized. It’s not your fault.”

It was nobody’s fault but mine, it seemed: anyone else would have known how to avoid a backing car. I lay there sleepless, tossing and turning as much of me as I could turn, and remembering one of my nannies who used to say to me, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry for.” I had got it now, and it served me right. At midnight, when he got back from the theatre, David came in to see me. I was still awake, as I had not taken the sleeping pills which the doctor had provided. By the dim bedside light he looked haggard and worn, as though he, too, had been having a hard time. He sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand and started to stroke it, very gently, the fingers and the dry hollow of the palm and the thick tingling pad of the thumb bone. It was as though I had not felt him touch me for years. There seemed, on this occasion, no reason not to feel him, no need to hold myself back, no cause for flinching. After a while he said: