They’d reached the crest of the headland, emerging in the rough beyond a green. The wind had been even stronger up there, tugging madly at their clothes. They’d paused to look at the view, or pretended to, at least: he’d had the feeling that they were both trying to drum up some kind of response to the glittering expanses of sea before them, though Claire would never have admitted it, standing there with her hair flattened against one side of her head and ballooning out on the other. He wouldn’t have admitted it either. He would have stayed as long as she wanted to, gazing out towards where Kristiansand would be, if you sailed far enough. He’d wondered whether she was doing this on purpose: making him stand there feeling nothing as a way of answering the question he had asked. But that was crazy. She didn’t know he was feeling nothing.

She’d turned to face him then. The clarity with which he’d seen her, in the unflinching spring light, was extraordinary – the reddened tip of her nose, the little gleam of wetness on the rim of her nostril, the bluish line at her temple, the glint of down on the curve of her upper lip, not quite a moustache, but not insignificant either – and he became conscious that he, too, must be just as clearly illuminated, all his pores and crevices and hairs revealed, all the incipient decrepitudes of middle age. They were both at the point, physically, where their twenties were finally behind them for ever; the point from which there was no turning back. He saw it in the coarsened texture of Claire’s pale chin.

Then the idea had come to him that Claire was about to say that she knew he had read her notebook, had known all along, had after all been writing it for him, for him to find, setting down the things she could not bring herself to say. It seemed impossible, suddenly, that this was not the case. How could two people face each other as closely, as candidly, as this, in the floodlights of March, and not know all there was to know about one another? She must see him already; she must have worked him out and found him wanting, but sat on the knowledge until her monograph was complete, until she had no use for him, could free herself at last …

‘How’s your book going?’ she asked.

In a blink – one blink of hers: he saw her take it – the fancy had left him. Of course she didn’t know. She didn’t even know how she felt about her own first significant scholarly achievement. He’d felt relief at this, but it possessed a deflated quality, as if it had come at the expense of a buoyancy that might have lifted them up and off the cliff together, floating out over the mouth of the river, over the sandbars, the basking seals.