“Men have never been given a chance. Every social convention you can think of is against them, believe me.”

“I do—but conventions are hard to change.”

“Women don’t want them changed. It takes only one hand to rock a cradle, and they want that hand to be theirs.”

“The women I see are making a run for the nursery door.”

“Are they? Most women think it’s wrong of me to look after the kids myself. They feel it’s unnatural. Even you do.”

“It is unusual.”

“Look at men on a beach, where they’re allowed to play with their children. You’ll see all the care and affection in the world, while the women are busy fussing over their damn mascara.”

“I’ll think of you here as on the beach.” Peggy sipped her wine, surveying the posters on the wall, wild drawings of aircraft on fire, dropping their nuclear bombs. “How’s Henry doing?”

“He’s getting better. He’s much happier. We read and play a lot together. I try not to go out too often.”

“You must get out sometimes.”

“I’ve been out. It looks pretty much the same old scene. Every day here is a new adventure.”

“Even so, you can’t spend all your time mothering the children.”

I sat down on the sofa and took Peggy’s hand. “Peggy, I’m not ‘mothering’ the children. I can’t take Miriam’s place, and I won’t try to.”

“You still miss her—I can see that.”

“Of course … there are so many things I wish I’d done for her. In many ways I was a lousy husband.”

“At least you loved her. You should think about her as much as you want.”

“I do. Take it from me, the death of a wife is all about sex. I keep dreaming about her in a weird way—walking around the bedroom in Rosas, or in the bullring at Barcelona. Dreams full of blood and dead bulls. I even saw her in Lunghua, strolling along the railway line to that little station. In some peculiar way she was involved with that. All those meaningless deaths that mean everything.”

“Do you think you’ll marry again?”

“Not many women would marry a man with three children. Whenever I see a couple together in their car I really resent them. Almost as if they were to blame.”

Peggy put her hand on my arm. I looked at her capable fingers, unchanged since the days at Lunghua. During my fevers in the children’s hut she had talked to me in her sensible schoolgirl’s voice, trying to explain away the eerie visions of delirium. I felt the enlarged knuckle of her wrist, the condyle chipped when I darted into the hut and drove the door against her hand.