Watched by a single mirror, we made love through the afternoon. As I lay deep within her, I was certain that this act of sex would endure far beyond these summer hours. Time had refused to yield to Dick Sutherland, a Janus locked within his own relentless self-regard. Cleo had been right to seal away those silver screens. With every glance in the mirror a small part of us died. Images of ourselves formed the real walls of our lives. The tyranny of the lens shored its fragments against us, an infinity of recorded selves that shut out the world beyond. I held Cleo tightly, trying to fuse the scent of her body into my skin. One day we would find the key to the mirror and enter it together.

*   *   *

At the end of September, Cleo telephoned me from her office to say that the documentary on Dick’s death would be shown on television.

“I thought they’d scrapped it,” she said, sounding unsettled. “Are you going to watch?”

“No.” I knew that she had always disapproved of the film, suspecting that Dick had invited me to take part as a means of binding me to him forever. “We’ll remember Dick when he was alive.”

“Good. I feel a lot better. Let’s take a boat for the weekend and sail up to Henley. You haven’t been out of Shepperton for months.”

This was literally true. Cleo had been happy to leave London at the weekends, cook in my Third World kitchen, and drink double gins in the gardens of the riverside pubs. Sitting with her at the water’s edge, as she tore up her sandwiches and threw pieces to the aggressive swans, I felt more contented than I had for twenty years. Sally had given birth to her second child, a healthy daughter, and bombarded us with invitations. Peggy Gardner’s surprise marriage to an architect young enough to be her son (a fourteen-year gap, Cleo noted, Peggy’s age when I had left the children’s hut in Lunghua), and the orphaned Malaccan boy whom David and his Belgian wife had adopted, together convinced me that the past had been laid to rest.

Before we collected the rented cabin cruiser Cleo asked the marina operator to remove the miniature TV set in the saloon. Filled with riverside gin, we would be sleeping soundly when the late-night documentary was transmitted. As we moved through Shepperton lock, Cleo at the helm, I stood beside her with my arm around her waist.

“Cleo, we’ve never done this before. Why?”

“Why, indeed? You’ve been a prisoner in Shepperton.”

“We’ll stop at Cookham and see if it’s changed.”

“Not Cookham—and it won’t have changed.”

“Why not?” I was surprised, knowing that she admired Spencer’s visionary paintings. “You always liked Cookham.”

“Too many angels dancing in the trees. Be honest, do you really want to hear Christ preaching again at the regatta?”