He threw his Woodbine to the kerb. The fact was, he and Florence had their normal weekend planned but, for the past few days, he’d been auditioning his reasons not to travel out to Ockham at the final hour – variants of sickness, tiredness, poverty, emergency, all of which were hollow and pathetic. There was an eight fifteen from Waterloo tomorrow morning she expected him to board, and then he’d have to walk two miles from the station to her family’s farm in what the wireless forecast said would be a gale. And he knew, deep down, that he would do it, just to see that smile blooming on her face when she pulled back the door. She’d draw him forward, as she always did, by the loose knot of his tie and kiss him softly on the mouth, and say, ‘Dear Lord, I’ve missed you, Arthur.’ But, as soon as they were past the threshold, everything would start to feel uncomfortable again. She’d be agitated by his company, her mind still on her father in the room upstairs.

Every time he was in Ockham now, he loathed himself, because their circumstances caused him to behave contemptibly. He’d started to resent the diligence with which she cared for Mr Greaves. She bathed the man, spoon-fed him every meal, escorted him to the commode and back, wheeled him up and down the road, exercised his idle limbs, put him to bed; it was an infinite routine, and there was something marvellous about it all in the beginning. But lately Arthur had been huffing when she got up from the sofa to attend to duties on her list. Clumsily, he’d once attempted – after three too many brandies, bored – to persuade her into bed, half-grasping at her hips, when she was clearly too depleted to stand upright in the doorway and still had to prepare her father’s supper. ‘Leave it, eh?’ he’d said. ‘Who’s going to notice if it’s late?’ As these words had slipped out of his mouth, he’d felt revolted with himself, and so had she. ‘Go and sleep it off, Arthur – this isn’t like you,’ was how she’d put it, ‘and I’m hiding that decanter from now on.’ But she’d barely spoken to him the next morning and he could tell that he’d sunk fathoms in her estimation.

If things carried on this way, he feared that she would see his selfishness emerge so often that she’d stop forgiving him. What if this ugly side of him was really all there was? It seemed he was incapable of courtship from a distance – it made him shameless and irrational. But he simply didn’t know how he could spend so little time with Florence and remain content. He couldn’t manage London life without her – all the loneliness he had to bear just to maintain a stable distance from his colleagues – not unless he could reset himself with Florence at the end of every day. Seeing her in Ockham on the weekends wasn’t going to be enough. It was torment, having her beside him but not really there. ‘In actual fact,’ he told Cort now, ‘I’m seeing her tomorrow. Early train and all that, so –’ He made a drama out of looking at his watch. ‘I’d best be going.’