‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to wake the house.’ She was in a dressing-gown; the divan had become a bed, the kind of tumbled bed that showed how sleepless the occupant had been.

‘Now,’ she said, while he stood there, fumbling for words, ‘what is it? I thought you were going to keep away. Are the police after you?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t really kill that man, did you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

‘I am a bit,’ he said sulkily. The meeting seemed to be going on the wrong lines. He said angrily, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why? I would like a drink myself.’

He said, ‘I’ve been with the British police. They are satisfied I didn’t do it. But I’ve learned everything from them. Harry was in a racket – a bad racket.’ He said hopelessly, ‘He was no good at all. We were both wrong.’

‘You’d better tell me,’ Anna said. She sat down on the bed and he told her, swaying slightly beside the table where her typescript part still lay open at the first page. I imagine he told it to her pretty confusedly, dwelling chiefly on what had stuck most in his mind, the children dead with meningitis, and the children in the mental ward. He stopped and they were silent. She said, ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were sober when they told you? They really proved it?’

‘Yes.’ He added drearily, ‘So that, you see, was Harry.’

‘I’m glad he’s dead now,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to rot for years in prison.’

‘But can you understand how Harry – your Harry, my Harry – could have got mixed up …?’ He said hopelessly, ‘I feel as though he had never really existed, that we’d dreamed him. Was he laughing at fools like us all the time?’

‘He may have been. What does it matter?’ she said. ‘Sit down. Don’t worry.’ He had pictured himself comforting her – not this other way about. She said, ‘If he was alive now, he might be able to explain, but we’ve got to remember him as he was to us. There are always so many things one doesn’t know about a person, even a person one loves – good things, bad things. We have to leave plenty of room for them.’

‘Those children –’

She said angrily, ‘For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.’

He said, ‘Don’t talk such bloody wisdom. Don’t you see that I love you?’

She looked at him in astonishment. ‘You?’