Laying her hand on the parapet and finding it quite real, she asked, ‘What river is this?’

‘The Thames.’

Another strong swirl of water emerged from under the bridge and spread itself onward, as though in calm assent and confirmation.

‘What did you say this place was called?’

‘Idenborough.’

A small black dazzle flashed in front of her and disappeared under the bridge.

‘A bat,’ she said, fastening on a certainty.

Not hearing her, he went on, ‘Idenborough Regis, to give it its full name. There’s another Idenborough, in Bedfordshire. A dull place—though now I suppose it glitters with cinemas and garages, for there’s an aerodrome near by.’

After a while, still looking down on the river, Amabel said, ‘Is there anywhere you haven’t been?’

There was such rancour in her voice that he was nearly stampeded into asking her if she felt tired. Taking his cue 202from an oncoming yawn, he replied, ‘Bed, perhaps. Judging from my present sensations, I have never been to bed.’

The yawn achieved itself, and on its close he took her by the arm and began walking back to the hotel.

‘I expect it’s driving that old-fashioned car that tires you,’ she said.

His car, his dearest possession (since one does not number a wife among possessions), which throughout their holiday of by-roads and hysterical contours had behaved like a duchess—not satisfied with attacking him, Amabel must needs turn against the Rover, too. This time, he asserted himself. ‘With a good car, it’s mileage that counts, Amabel, not years. The same with wives.’

‘Yes, but it is an old car, Winter. One’s only got to look at it to see that. And though it’s very chivalrous of you to feel affection for your old dowdy …’

All the way back to the hotel she talked in this strain, flagellating herself under the guise of depreciating the car, condoling with him on his faithfulness to an old car and an ageing wife. It rent his heart to hear her. It appalled his heart to admit an identity between his gentle, modest, complying Amabel and this provincial harridan at his side.

She saw his grief and his dismay, but she dared not weaken to them. If she were to change her harsh tune, if for one moment between now and when she heard him grunt and fall from her into the solitude of sleep she were to let him be kind to her, she would be done for; she would give way and tell him about Harry and the other Idenborough, and how, merely by her own despicable shilly-shallying and 203playing for safety, there had been no more to tell. To Winter, unjudging, unblaming, possibly even approving, it would seem next to nothing, and by length of time diminished to nothing at all. Indeed, there was not much of it: two nights and a day, a rapture so inattentively, unbelievingly entertained that she did not even know what county Idenborough was in. Unbelievingly entertained, weakly lost, negligently remembered (for months at a time she did not give it a thought), yet it was all she had. Thinking this, she reversed the thought. She was all it had. It existed by her secrecy; to speak of it would be to dismiss it, like the small crystal world of a bubble, into common air. Any infidelity but that.