'No, I woke earlier and couldn't get off again. Holding dinner for Lessingham made it too late for comfortable digestion. Is this fresh?'

'About ready to pour.'

He took down a second mug from the dresser and poured tea for them both. She seated herself in a wicker chair and took her mug without speaking.

He said: 'The wind's rising.'

'Yes, it has been for the last hour.'

He went over to the door and unbolted the top wooden panel, pushing it open. There was a sensation of rushing white coldness, scentless, but obliterating the faint tang of the tea and she heard the low growling roar of the sea. As she listened it seemed to rise in intensity so that she could imagine, with an agreeable frisson of simulated terror, that the low friable cliffs had finally crumbled and that the white foaming turbulence was rolling towards them across the headland, would crash against the door and throw its spume on Alex's face. Looking at him as he stared into the night, she felt a surge of affection as pure and as uncomplicated as the flow of cold air against her face. Its fleeting intensity surprised her. He was so much a part of her that she never needed nor wanted to examine too closely the nature of her feeling for him. She knew that she was always quietly satisfied to have him in the cottage, to hear his footfalls on the floor above, to share with him the meal she had cooked for herself at the end of the day. And yet neither made demands of the other. Even his marriage had made no difference. She had been unsurprised at the marriage since she had rather liked Elizabeth, but equally unsurprised when it ended. She thought it unlikely that he would marry again, but nothing between them would change, however many wives entered, or attempted to enter, his life. Sometimes as now she would smile wryly, knowing how outsiders saw their relationship. Those who assumed that the cottage was owned by him, not her, saw her as the unmarried sister, dependent on him for house-room, companionship, a purpose in life. Others, more perceptive but still nowhere near the truth, were intrigued by their apparent independence of each other, their casual comings and goings, their non-involvement. She remembered Elizabeth saying in the first weeks of her engagement to Alex, 'Do you know, you're a rather intimidating couple?' and she had been tempted to reply, 'Oh, we are, we are.'

She had bought Martyr's Cottage before his appointment as Director of the power station and he had moved in by an unspoken agreement that this was a temporary expedient while he decided what to do, keep on the Barbican flat as his main home or sell the flat and buy a house in Norwich and a smaller pied-a-terre in London. He was essentially an urban creature; she didn't see him settling permanently other than in a city. If, with the new job, he moved back to London she wouldn't follow him, and nor, she knew, would he expect her to. Here on this sea-scoured coast she had at last found a place which she was content to call home. That he could walk in and out of it unannounced never made it less than her own.

It must, she thought sipping her tea, have been after one o'clock when he returned from seeing Hilary Robarts home. She wondered what had kept him. Sleeping lightly as always in the early hours, she had heard his key in the lock, his foot on the stairs, before drifting again into sleep. Now it was getting on for five o'clock. He couldn't have had more than a few hours' sleep. Now, as if suddenly aware of the morning chill, he closed the top half of the door, drove home the bolt, then came and stretched himself out in the armchair opposite her. Leaning back, he cradled his mug in his hands.

He said: 'It's a nuisance that Caroline Amphlett doesn't want to leave Larksoken. I don't relish beginning a new job, particularly this job, with an unknown PA. Caroline knows the way I work. I'd rather taken it for granted that she'd come to London with me. It's inconvenient.'

And it was, she suspected, rather more than inconvenient. Pride, even personal prestige, were also at stake. Other senior men took their personal assistants with them when changing jobs. The reluctance of a secretary to be parted from her boss was a flattering affirmation of personal dedication. She could sympathize with his chagrin but it was hardly enough to keep him awake at night.

He added: 'Personal reasons, or so she says. That means Jonathan Reeves, presumably. God knows what she sees in him. The man isn't even a good technician.'

Alice Mair controlled her smile. She said: 'I doubt whether her interest in him is technical.'

'Well, if it's sexual she has less discrimination than I gave her credit for.'

He wasn't, she told herself, a poor judge of men or women. He rarely made fundamental mistakes and never, she suspected, about a man's scientific ability. But he had no understanding of the extraordinary complexities and irrationalities of human motives, human behaviour. He knew that the universe was complex but that it obeyed certain rules, although, she supposed, he wouldn't have used the word 'obey' with its implication of conscious choice. This, he would say, is how the physical world behaves. It is open to human reason and, to a limited extent, to human control. People disconcerted him because they could surprise him. Most disconcerting of all was the fact that he occasionally surprised himself. He would have been at home as a sixteenth-century Elizabethan, categorizing people according to their essential natures; choleric, melancholic, mercurial, saturnine, qualities mirroring the planets that governed their birth. That basic fact established, then you knew where you were. And yet it could still surprise him that a man could be a sensible and reliable scientist in his work and a fool with women, could show judgement in one area of his life and act like an irrational child in another. Now he was peeved because his secretary, whom he had categorized as intelligent, sensible, dedicated, preferred to stay in Norfolk with her lover, a man he despised, rather than follow him to London.

She said: 'I thought you said once that you found Caroline sexually cold.'

'Did I? Surely not. That would suggest a degree of personal experience. I think I said I couldn't imagine ever finding her physically attractive. A PA who is personable and highly efficient but not sexually tempting is the ideal.'

She said drily: 'I imagine that a man's idea of the ideal secretary is a woman who manages to imply that she would like to go to bed with her boss but nobly restrains herself in the interests of office efficiency. What will happen to her?'

'Oh, her job's secure. If she wants to stay at Larksoken there will be plenty of competition to get her. She's intelligent as well as tactful and efficient.'

'But presumably not ambitious, else why should she be content to remain at Larksoken?' She added: 'Caroline may have another reason for wanting to stay in the area. I saw her in Norwich Cathedral about three weeks ago. She met a man in the Lady Chapel. They were very discreet but it looked to me like an assignation.'

He asked, but without real curiosity: 'What kind of man?'

'Middle-aged. Nondescript. Difficult to describe. But he was too old to be Jonathan Reeves.'

She said no more, knowing that he wasn't particularly interested, that his mind had moved elsewhere. And yet, looking back, it had been an odd encounter. Caroline's blonde hair had been bundled under a large beret and she was wearing spectacles. But the disguise, if it were meant as a disguise, had been ineffective. She herself had moved on swiftly, anxious not to be recognized or to seem a spy. A minute later she had seen the girl slowly walking along the aisle, guidebook in hand, the man strolling behind her carefully distanced. They had moved together and had stood in front of a monument, seemingly absorbed. And when, ten minutes later, Alice was leaving the cathedral she had glimpsed him again. This time it was he who was carrying the guidebook.