‘Well, after dinner, then?’

The drink mounted lightly to her head. All through dinner, she felt a detached, competent animation, as though she were behaving to music. Exactly on the beat, she said, ‘What horrible coffee! Don’t let’s waste time on it. I’d rather walk round Idenborough.’

The direction of the poplar trees was so perfectly established in her mind that she felt no impatience when Winter set off in the opposite direction, talking of a town hall. A lion and a unicorn decorated the town hall, plump and suave as though they were in sugar on a biscuit. They were just what Harry would have liked, and she almost wished that they had come this way instead of going by bus to that rather tiresome village with a wishing-well. Winter liked the lion and the unicorn, too, and agreed about the biscuit. They walked down several streets, pausing to admire doorways and converse with evening cats, and finding a chemist’s shop still open and lit up like an Elizabethan jewel with its coloured flasks and rosy patent tonics, they went in for the pleasure of buying something in Idenborough. The purchase of a 200small hot-water bottle led to a long conversation between Winter and the chemist that wound its way to leeches and local survivals of traditional remedies, such as stolen potatoes and fried mice.

When they left the shop, the twilight had changed to a blue dusk, and Amabel could hear doors being shut and bolted. But still she was not impatient, though it was apparent that Winter had something more up his sleeve, some special beauty that he was saving for the last. While she was waiting in the chemist’s shop, it occurred to her that if this evening were frittered away, there would still be to-morrow morning. It would be easy to make an excuse of wanting to shop by herself in order to buy him a surprise present, and then all she need do would be to find the railway station and from there retrace her way to the hotel and the poplar trees, and on the way back she could buy a mug. Idenborough was full of shops where mugs could be bought, and when you have taken the first step of deceiving a husband, nothing is easier than to go on.

Reposing on this, she accompanied Winter down a street so narrow that there was no inducement to stop and admire anything. At the foot of the hill, the street turned sharply. She received a sudden impression of light and space, and felt the air freshened, and heard the slap of water against stone. They were on a quay, and before them extended a narrow bridge of many arches. Half-way across it, he stopped.

‘Look, Amabel. That’s why I wanted to bring you here.’

Behind them the town, catching the revenant light of the eastern sky, was a muddle of brown and mulberry-coloured 201velvets. The tower and the high nave of the church rose above it, and the sky showed through the clerestory windows. But she only looked at it long enough to steady herself, and then returned her gaze to the wide, pale river, whose waters swirled with a kind of sleepwalking impetus from between the piers of the bridge. So wide a river … How could they not have known there was this river? She looked along its course and saw on the far bank a row of poplar trees, rising lugubriously tall from an unlit, unbroken flatness of water-meadows.