The tears. Jomier remembers them now with shame but then . . . A certain triumph? Easton the analyst had suggested that in incidents such as these Jomier had been driven by unconscious resentment to punish Tilly for the failings of his mother. Perhaps. Jomier does not want to think about his mother. He is still preoccupied with Tilly. He watches her as she talks to Humphrey. He wonders why, if this Tilly 5 is a wholly different person to the Tilly 3 who went off with Max, she still provokes feelings of resentment. Can he in all justice hold Tilly 3 to blame for shifting her affections from a man who bullied her about the blocked nozzle of the Miele to a man to whom Miele was, if anything, Miele Gesellschaft mbH, a company in which he might like to own shares? And Tilly 5 is not even Tilly 3. The svelte woman of a certain age who has now moved away from Tony to readjust the glittering plastic tiara that has gone askew on Samantha’s head bears a certain resemblance to the harassed, downtrodden but still sexy young wife he knew in the 1980s, but she is not the same woman. Her responsibility for cheating on Jomier is less direct, even, than her responsibility in her former incarnation as Tilly 3 for the blocked nozzle of the Miele.

Jomier sums up. The woman who loved him turned into the woman who did not love him either because new configurations were made in replacement synapses or because he himself had changed. For neither of these developments could she be held to blame. She was not the same person she had been seven years before – neither in herself nor in Jomier’s psyche. In his psyche, once she had children, she had become his mother and he reacted with the fury of a three-year-old to her perceived failings in that role. Just as there is justifiable homicide, so there is justifiable adultery and it is unreasonable for Jomier to continue to resent her understandable response to his punishment of her for the crimes of his mother.

Tilly turns and catches his eye. Something in his expression leads her to smile. Should she cross the room to talk to him? As she takes her first step, Jomier notices her pretty long legs. Do they still part to please Max? Do they still have sex? After all those years? The thought is enough. The defence case collapses. Jomier rises from his armchair and, avoiding Tilly, crosses the room to find Henry and Sandra and say goodbye.

Chapter 11

Chapter 11