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:

“I’m sorry, Emma, it was very selfish of me, I didn’t realize how boring it would be for you here. Or if I did realize, I didn’t care.”

“Oh,” I said, “it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that.”

“It really was Wyndham then, was it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about Wyndham. He’s gone now anyway, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s gone. Emma, I’m sorry about Sophy.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Don’t bother about that. Fair’s fair. You had to have something, didn’t you?”

“It seems we both had to have something. It seems that’s how we are.”

“I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind at all, but my whole life seems to be so trivial, David, just one domestic accident after another, just one mistake after another. Why can’t I make things important any more, why couldn’t I manage to make Wyndham important?”

“Wasn’t he?”

“Well, not really, was he? He’ll just go off to London now and find some other girl and fall in love with her and take her out to dinner and tell her lovely stories and get upset. I feel sorry for most people, but not for him, he’s all right. And I don’t care. Not at all.”

“Yes. I daresay it’s just about the same with Sophy. She’s got her eye on Neville already, did you know?”

“Not really? I thought that Neville and Viola—”