Abruptly, David swallowed his drink and said, "I must turn in. My back's playing up." Faber got to his feet. "I'm sorry I've been keeping you up." David waved him down. "Not at all. You've been asleep all day-you won't want to go back to bed right away. Besides, Lucy would like to chat, I'm sure. It's just that I mistreat my back-backs were designed to share the load with the legs, you know."

Lucy said, "You'd better take two pills tonight then." She took a bottle from the top shelf of the bookcase, shook out two tablets and gave them to her husband.

He swallowed them dry. "I'll say good night." He wheeled himself out.

"Good night, David."

"Good night, Mr Rose."

After a moment Faber heard David dragging himself up the stairs, and wondered just how he did it.

Lucy spoke, as if to cover the sound of David. "Where do you live, Mr Baker?"

"Please call me Henry. I live in London."

"I haven't been to London for years. There's probably not much of it left."

"It's changed, but not as much as you might think. When were you last there?"

"Nineteen-forty." She poured herself another brandy. "Since we came here, I've only been off the island once, and that was to have the baby. One can't travel much these days, can one?"

"What made you come here?"

"Um." She sat down, sipped her drink, and looked into the fire.

"Perhaps I shouldn't-"

"It's all right. We had an accident the day we got married. That's how David lost his legs. He'd been training as a fighter pilot… we both wanted to run away, I think. I believe it was a mistake, but, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It's a reason for a healthy man to feel resentment."

She gave him a sharp look. "You're a perceptive man."

"It's obvious." He spoke very quietly. "So is your unhappiness."

She blinked nervously. "You see too much."

"It's not difficult. Why do you continue, if it's not working?"

"I don't know quite what to tell you."-or herself, for talking so openly to him. "Do you want clichés? The way he was before… the vows of marriage… the child… the war… If there's another answer, I can't find good words for it."

"Maybe guilt," Faber said. "But you're thinking of leaving him, aren't you?"

She stared at him, slowly shaking her head. "How do you know so much?"

"You've lost the art of dissembling in four years on this island. Besides, these things are so much simpler from the outside."

"Have you ever been married?"

"No. That's what I mean."

"Why not?… I think you ought to be."

It was Faber's turn to look away, into the fire. Why not, indeed? His stock answer to himself was his profession. But of course he could not tell her that, and anyway it was too glib. "I don't trust myself to love anyone that much." The words had come out without forethought-he was astonished to note-and he wondered whether they were true. A moment later he wondered how Lucy had got past his guard, when he had thought he was disarming her.

Neither of them spoke for a while. The fire was dying. A few stray raindrops found their way down the chimney and hissed in the cooling coals. The storm showed no sign of letting up. Faber found himself thinking of the last woman he had had. What was her name? Gertrud. It was seven years ago, but he could picture her now in the flickering fire: a round German face, fair hair, green eyes, beautiful breasts, much-too-wide hips, fat legs, bad feet; the conversational style of an express train; a wild, inexhaustible enthusiasm for sex… She had flattered him, admiring his mind (she said) and adoring his body (she had no need to tell him). She wrote lyrics for popular songs, and read them to him in a poor basement flat in Berlin; it was not a lucrative profession. He visualised her now in that untidy bedroom, lying naked, urging him to do more bizarre and erotic things with her; to hurt her, to touch himself, to lie completely still while she made love to him… He shook his head slightly to brush away the memories. He had not thought like that in all the years he had been celibate. Such visions were disturbing. He looked at Lucy.

"You were far away," she said with a smile.

"Memories," he said. "This talk of love…"

"I shouldn't burden you."

"You're not."

"Good memories?"

"Very good. And yours? You were thinking too."

She smiled again. "I was in the future, not the past."

"What do you see there?"

She seemed about to answer, then changed her mind. It happened twice. There were signs of tension about her eyes.

"I see you finding another man," Faber said. As he spoke he was thinking, Why am I doing this? "He is a weaker man than David, and less handsome, but it's at least partly for his weakness that you love him. He's clever, but not rich; compassionate without being sentimental; tender, loving." The brandy glass in her hand shattered under the pressure of her grip. The fragments fell into her lap and onto the carpet, and she ignored them. Faber crossed to her chair and knelt in front of her. Her thumb was bleeding. He took her hand. "You've hurt yourself." She looked at him. She was crying. "I'm sorry," he said.

The cut was superficial. She took a handkerchief from her trousers pocket and staunched the blood. Faber released her hand and began to pick up the pieces of broken glass, wishing he had kissed her when he'd had the chance. He put the shards on the mantel. "I didn't mean to upset you," he said. (Didn't he?)

She took away the handkerchief and looked at her thumb. It was still bleeding. (Yes, you did. And, God knows, you have.) "A bandage," he suggested. "In the kitchen."

He found a roll of bandage, a pair of scissors, and a safety pin. He filled a small bowl with hot water and returned to the living room.

In his absence she had somehow obliterated the evidence of tears on her face. She sat passively, limp, while he bathed her thumb in the hot water, dried it, and put a small strip of bandage over the cut. She looked all the time at his face, not at his hands; but her expression was unreadable.

He finished the job and stood back abruptly. This was silly: he had taken the thing too far. Time to disengage. "I think I'd better go to bed," he said.

She nodded.

"I'm sorry."

"Stop apologising," she told him. "It doesn't suit you."

Her tone was harsh. He guessed that she, too, felt the thing had got out of hand.

"Are you staying up?" he asked. She shook her head.

"Well…" He followed her through the hall and up the stairs, and he watched her climb, her hips moving gently.

At the top of the stairs, on the tiny landing, she turned and said in a low voice, "Good night."

"Good night, Lucy."

She looked at him for a moment. He reached for her hand, but she turned quickly away, entering her bedroom and closing the door without a backward look, leaving him standing there, wondering what was in her mind and-more to the point-what was really in his.

Bloggs drove dangerously fast through the night in a commandeered Sunbeam Talbot with a souped-up engine. The hilly, winding Scottish roads were slick with rain and, in a few low places, two or three inches deep in water. The rain drove across the windscreen in sheets. On the more exposed hilltops the gale-force winds threatened to blow the car off the road and into the soggy turf alongside. For mile after mile, Bloggs sat forward in the seat, peering through the small area of glass that was cleared by the wiper, straining his eyes to make out the shape of the road in front as the headlights battled with the obscuring rain. Just north of Edinburgh he ran over three rabbits, feeling the sickening bump as the tyres squashed their small bodies. He did not slow the car, but for a while afterward he wondered whether rabbits normally came out at night.