To spare her or himself he had gone to stand at the window, and with his back still turned he spoke, gently. "Nobody can," he said. "But you can't turn back, my dear. Nobody can do that either."

"I'm not trying to turn back. Truly I'm not. I'm just trying to meet you, now, here, don't you see? Here where we are now. Because you're the only person I ever have met. All the others are on different roads, they live in other houses. Didn't you ever think I'd have to come back to you?"

"I never once thought it."

"But I never left you, Pier! I only ran away because I knew I belonged to you, and I thought the only way I'd ever be myself was to get free of you. Myself, myself, a lot of good myself was. All I did was run like a stupid bitch till I got to the end of my leash."

"Well, leashes have two ends," he said, leaning forward as if to gaze through the glass at a rooftop, a cloud, a remote grey mountain-peak. "I let go."

She tried to smooth her hair, which escaped in fierce tendrils from the knotted braids, red-blonde. Her voice was still shaky, but she said with dignity, "I wasn't talking about love, Pier."

"Then I don't understand."

"I meant loyalty. Taking somebody in as part of your own life. Either you do or you don't. We did. I was disloyal. You let me go, but you aren't capable of disloyalty."

He came back to the chair facing her and sat down.

Now she had the courage to look at him, and made sure that his face had not in fact changed; it had been eroded, erased, by sickness or hard times: not change, only loss.

"Look, my dear" – that word was most comfortable to Mariya, though she knew it was only the expression of his general kindliness – "look, my dear, no matter how you put it, you're trying to go back. There's nothing left to go back to. In any sense." And he looked at her with that kindness, as if he wished he could soften the facts.

"What happened? Will you tell me? Not now if you don't want. Sometime. I talked to Moshe, but I didn't want to ask questions about you. I came here thinking you still lived in the house in Reyn Street and … all the rest."

"Well, during the Pentor Government we published some works that got the House into trouble when the R.E.P. came back into force. Bernoy, if you remember him, Bernoy and I were tried that fall. We were in prison up north. They let me out two years ago. But of course I can't work for the state now in a responsible position, and that cuts out working for the House." He still called it "the House," the publishing firm Korre and Sons, which his family had owned and run from 1813 to 1946. When the firm was nationalised he had been kept on as manager. That had been his position when Mariya met him and married him and when she left him, and she had never imagined the chance of his losing it.

He took the cigarette end out of his shirt pocket, took up a matchbox from a table, then hesitated. "Well, what it amounts to is that where I am now isn't where I was during our marriage. I'm nowhere in particular, you see. And we're well out of it. Loyalty really isn't relevant, at this point." He lit the cigarette and very cautiously got a mouthful of smoke.

The table-lamp had a purple, ball-fringed shade to it, something left over from another world. Mariya fiddled with this, tugging at the dusty purple balls as if counting them around the shade. Her face was knotted in a frown. "Well, but where does loyalty count except in a tight place? You sound as if you'd given up, Pier!"

Silence gave assent.

"I haven't been in trouble or in jail, and I have a job, and a room to myself. I'm much better off. But look at me. Like a lost dog. You can at least respect yourself, no matter what they've taken from you, but what I've lost is just that – self-respect."

"You," he said, suddenly white with anger, "you took away my self-respect eight years ago!"

This was not true, but she did not blame him for believing it. She persisted: "All right, then neither of us has any, there's nothing to prevent our meeting."

Silence gave no assent.

Mariya counted off nine cotton balls, then another nine. "What I mean, I ought to say it, Pier, is that I want to see if we can meet again; if I can come to you. Not come back, just come. I could be some help to you, as things are. I was just coming begging, but I didn't know – I can get transferred to a school here. At least we might find a couple of rooms, and when you're ill it's a help to have somebody to look after things. It would be a better arrangement than this, for both of us. It would be more sensible." Her face began to contract with tears again. She could not keep from crying, and got up to go. Her sleeve caught in the ball-fringed shade and pulled the lamp down with a smash. "Oh I'm sorry I came! I'm sorry!" she cried, picking up the lamp, struggling to refit the shade. He took it from her. "The bulb broke, see, the shade clamps onto the bulb. Don't cry, Mariya. We'll have to get a new bulb for it. Please, my dear. It's all right."

"I'll go get the new bulb. Then I'll go."

"I didn't say go." He moved back from her. "I didn't say come, either. I don't know what to say. You go off with that bastard Givan Pelle, divorce me, and then come back to tell me loyalty's the only thing that counts. Does it? Did mine? You told me then that fidelity is a bourgeois pretense invented by married people who haven't the courage to live free."

"I didn't say that, I repeated it, couldn't you tell I learned it from Givan!"

"I don't care where you learned it, you said it, to me!" He gasped for breath. He looked down at the lampshade askew over the socket, and after a minute said, "All right. Wait." He sat down, and neither spoke. A golden beam slid imperceptibly up through the air of the room as the sun's end of it slid down towards the quiet plowlands west of Aisnar. She saw his face through a dust of gold. He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.

That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.

A gilt-framed mirror hung over the clothes-chest, and she went to it to repair her braids. It reflected the brown air of a parlour long ago dispersed, the walls torn down: but in the mirror the blinds were still drawn. Her face was there only as a blur among many silvery plaques of blindness. She looked behind the curtain and saw a kerosene stove, a cot, a couple of packing-boxes serving as pantry and bureau. She looked at the cot and thought of the oaken bedstead in the house in Reyn Street, white sheets open and the white coverlet thrown back, on hot mornings of summer waking to the sound of fountains through windows left open to moonlight and now radiant with sunlight, the white curtains blowing a little; summers of marriage.

"Ouf," she sighed, squeezed so flat between past and present that she could not breathe. "There should be some place to go, some direction to things, shouldn't there. . . . Pier, what happened to Bernoy?" "Typhus. In jail."

"I remember him with that girl, the one who dropped her pearls in the wine, but they were imitation pearls." "Nina Farbey." "Did they ever marry?"

"No, he married the eldest Akoste girl. She lives over on the east side now, I see her now and then. They had two boys." He stood up, rubbing his face, and now came past her to get a necktie and comb from the box by his bed. He made himself neat, peering into the mirror that refused to see him.

"Listen, Pier, I want to tell you something. A while after we married, Givan told me that one reason he'd wanted to marry me was he knew I couldn't have children. I don't know, he said a lot of things like that, they didn't mean much. But it made me think, it made me see that perhaps that's really what made me leave you. When I found out I couldn't have children, after the miscarriage, you know, it didn't seem so bad. But I kept on feeling lighter and lighter, as if there was nothing to me, I didn't weigh anything, and it didn't matter what I did. But you were real, what you did still mattered. Only I didn't matter at all."