But what only he could know was that he had failed a kind of child. Naked, Faye showed round white hips and thighs, though she was lean and bony above the waist, with a face her features seemed to be struggling to escape. She was experienced, sexually, more than he, but adultery had left her innocent. Sex with her was straightforward, with none of the elaborations others were to demonstrate. The grip of her vagina had something infantile about it, something heartbreaking, like a child’s shy, hopeful question. She persuaded him he had the answer. During the months of the affair his lovemaking with Phyllis became more confident and insistent. He spoke more loudly and warmly to his children, when they materialized to him through his mists of being mentally elsewhere. Photographs from that time show him as mussed and manicky-looking. He felt fonder of the world at large—the old mill town with its services and cheerfully laborious local characters and the winter weather with its scrape of plowing and their cozy circle of friends. He felt especially fond of Jock; he wanted to hug the man, red-faced Jock with his baked-on alcoholic grin, for feeding and sheltering such a marvel of beauty and concupiscence. He could hardly contain the wonder of it—this well-cared-for woman, in such expensive and amusing clothes, taking such risks to perform for him acts that Phyllis performed reluctantly, ironically, looking to one side, in her own safe home, with all society’s sanctions backing his thrusts.

Why Faye would behave in such a reckless and adorable way—why any woman would—was still not clear to Owen. He assumed that she had wanted something in return, him as husband, and that he had failed to give it to her; the heat of his failure annealed her image to him. He would show loyalty where he could, in his inner theatre. He would always remember how she looked at certain moments, wistful moments, her generic female beauty married to something specific and complicated happening in her face, an awareness of cross-currents and half-lies and underlying sadness. “Well, I’m glad it was you,” she said at the end, trying to make a life-stage of it, a lesson learned.