‘I’m sorry.’ She tried, unsuccessfully, to stop smiling. ‘It’s just you sound like a bad Victorian novel. Doing the far, far better thing, setting me free to love, while you die a miserable death, all alone.’ She knew she should shut up, stop making fun of feelings that seemed to have been genuinely expressed, but it had felt like just another of his theatrical moments of self-pity. It was hard to take him seriously.

Michael gave her a wounded smile and said quietly, ‘You certainly know how to deflate a man.’

For a while they sat in silence. Romy heard Michael’s phone buzz with the arrival of an email; the fridge wheezed and clunked; a door slammed somewhere in the block.

‘Let’s give it a go, then, if you’re serious,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you for the weekend and see how you get on, OK?’

Michael’s face stiffened. ‘Bring it on,’ he said, through clenched teeth.

So Romy went home.

45

The cottage seemed small and strange to her, after the high-ceilinged London flat, and somehow blank, as if it had lost her essence, finally given up on her. She felt like standing in the middle of each room and waving her hands, like a conductor, encouraging the place to life.

Later that afternoon she curled up on the bed. The clean sheets and her favourite pillow, the cool breeze blowing in from the harbour – just being home and in her own space, by herself for once – made the previous weeks’ confusion melt temporarily away and she felt her body gradually relaxing, giving in to sleep. There was nothing she had to do, nowhere she had to be, no one waiting for her.

When she woke it was after six. She had slept for nearly three hours. In a panic, she jumped off the bed, dizzy and disoriented, then realized there was no reason why she shouldn’t snooze all day if she wanted to.

The evening was too beautiful to stay inside, though. She pulled on her trainers and sunglasses, a peaked cap to keep the setting sun from her eyes, then walked purposefully down onto the sea road. There were families out in force, it being a Saturday, kids jumping off the jetty, or swinging from the tyre suspended over the small stream that ran into the sea, weekend sailors tinkering with their dinghies, students from the nearby college sitting in heaps in the meadow outside the church, barbecuing sausages in foil trays, their bikes thrown to the grass in a circle, like wagons in the Wild West.