She felt her throat go dry. Please God in heaven, don’t let George tell me . . . I don’t want to know. I just don’t want to know.

‘I’ve been made redundant, Elaine.’

He watched her eyes screw up into tiny slits. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’ve . . . I’ve been made redundant. They told me a while ago. There’s five of us going in all. Streamlining, they call it. I just couldn’t tell you, dear. I felt as if I had failed you again. I’ve been walking the streets in a daze. I’d look at you, my love, watching television, and I just couldn’t tell you.’

Elaine was stunned.

‘I see.’

George could hardly suppress the laughter. He was a sly old fox. He was as clever as a bag of monkeys. He could talk his way out of anything. He was the man.

‘I’m so sorry, dear. I know you’ll think it’s another failure on my part. I always wanted to give you the best, you know I did. Things just never worked out right, no matter how hard I tried.’

Elaine sat very still. Her face was closed to George through years of habit. One tiny part of her felt that she should go to him, put her arms around him and commiserate with him. But she could not. Years of avoiding physical contact with him had made such a simple act impossible.

Poor George had received the ultimate insult. At fifty-one he was on the scrap heap. He would never work again and she, his wife, was relieved that that was all that was wrong. That he was not a murderer. That he was not a rapist. She knew she shouldn’t have thought such terrible things about him, but after what had happened before . . .

She pushed the thought from her mind. She would not think about that now. She had a duty to George if nothing else.

‘I’m sorry, but we’ll get by somehow. I expect the redundancy money will be quite a bit. The house is paid for. I’m working. We’ll get by.’

He smiled at her sadly.

‘That’s why I said at Christmas that we would go to see Edith in Florida. I knew I would have the redundancy money and I wanted you to have something to look forward to, you see. I wanted at least to have given you that. A trip to America with no expense spared. The trip of a lifetime.’