‘No, I should go to bed,’ she said. She yawned again, and stood up.

‘You have everything you need?’ I asked.

‘Everything,’ she said.

You couldn’t kiss someone goodbye who was staying in your house, but it felt cold just to let her leave, so I stood up and gave her a hug.

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

She went up and I followed up soon after. I left my bedroom door open and got into bed where I lay thinking about how the night had gone and imagining what might have happened if I had lain down next to her on the sand. They had installed a new street light just outside the window to illuminate the activities of youths hanging out in the alley. It was very bright, and I kept thinking that it was still daylight outside, long after it had gone dark. I lay awake for a while, listening out in case she made a noise, in case she called out for me.

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‌Fourteen

The leaves on the tree outside your window have gone bright yellow. I tell you again about the wedding and what I did afterwards.

‘I wonder if you can explain to me what it was that was so attractive to you about Emily,’ you say. ‘She doesn’t sound like she was particularly nice to you.’

‘No, no, that’s a drab interpretation. She was wonderful to me.’

‘In what way?’

‘She spoke to me. She was interested in me.’

‘But you should expect that, shouldn’t you, from everyone?’

‘In what utopia? We were on the same side. We had the same enemies. She was funny. She was perceptive. I think you and I might disagree about what friendship is. For me it has to be more than an exchange of kindnesses. That’s just barter, just commerce. I liked her because she was scathing, because she was brilliant. And beautiful. God, she was beautiful, in such a… Hardly anyone is beautiful now.’

I take a tissue from the box and wipe my glasses clean. You watch me for a while and then ask, ‘So you don’t consider her to have betrayed you?’

‘Not in the way you mean. Not like that.’

‘So why were you so angry with her?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you have any books in here?’

‘Because I don’t read in this room. Why were you so angry with her?’

*

The Lancashire countryside alternated with neat redbrick workers’ terraces as we moved through the towns of nineteenth-century industry, Burnley, Accrington and Todmorden, the landscape getting wilder as we headed into the Moors and over into Yorkshire.

We were both still sleepy. There is always something wholesomely exhausting in the change of air; I had slept through the hysterical yearning of the seagulls better than Emily, who knocked on my door at eight and asked if I wanted a cup of tea.