Dean Bostock always felt a lift of the heart when Mr. Chandler-Powell phoned to say that he would be arriving unexpectedly early in the week and would be at the Manor in time for dinner. This was a meal Dean enjoyed cooking, particularly when the boss had time and peace to enjoy and praise. Mr. Chandler-Powell brought with him something of the energy and excitement of the capital, its smells, its lights, the sense of being at the heart of things. Arriving, he would almost bound through the great hall, strip off his jacket and toss the London evening paper onto a library chair as if released from a temporary bondage. But even the paper, which Dean would later retrieve to read at leisure, was for him a reminder of where essentially he, Dean, belonged. He had been born and brought up in Balham. London was his place. Kim was country-born, coming to the capital from Sussex to begin her training at the cookery school where he had been a second-year student. And within two weeks of their first meeting he had known that he loved her. That was how he had always thought of it: he hadn’t fallen in love, he wasn’t in love, he loved. This was for life, his life and hers. And now, for the first time since their marriage, he knew that she was happy, happier than she’d ever been. How could he miss London while Kim rejoiced in her Dorset life? She who was so nervous of new people and new places, felt no fear in the dark winter nights. The total blackness of starless nights disorientated and frightened him, nights made more terrifying by the half-human shrieks of animals in the jaws of their predators. This beautiful and apparently peaceful countryside was full of pain. He missed the lights, the night sky bruised by the grey, purple and blues of the city’s ceaseless life, the changing pattern of traffic lights, light spilling from pubs and shops over glittering rain-washed pavements. Life, movement, noise, London.

He liked his job at the Manor, but it didn’t satisfy him. It made so few demands on his skill. Mr. Chandler-Powell was discriminating about food, but on his operating days meals were never lingered over. Dean knew he would have complained soon enough had the meal been below standard, but he took its excellence for granted, ate it quickly and was gone. The Westhalls usually took meals in their cottage, where Miss Westhall had been caring for their elderly father until his death in February, and Miss Cressett usually ate in her own apartment. But she was the only one who spent time in the kitchen talking to Kim and him, discussing menus, thanking him for special efforts made. The visitors were fussy but usually not hungry, and the non-resident staff who ate the midday meal at the Manor praised him perfunctorily, ate quickly and returned to work. It was all so different from his dream of his own restaurant, his menus, his customers, the ambiance which he and Kim would create. Occasionally, lying beside her wakeful, he would horrify himself with half-expressed hopes that somehow the clinic would fail, that Mr. Chandler-Powell would find it too exhausting and not lucrative enough to work in both London and Dorset, that he and Kim would have to look for another job. And perhaps Mr. Chandler-Powell or Miss Cressett would help them to gain a footing. But they couldn’t return to work in the hectic kitchen of a London restaurant. Kim would never be suited to that life. He remembered still with horror that awful day on which she had been sacked.