He’s testing the railing on the second-storey porch; he’s going to pull himself up by it.

“Don’t do that,” I say wearily.

“Why not?” he says. “I want to see the other side.”

“Because you’ll fall and I don’t want to have to scrape you off the rocks.”

“Don’t be like that,” he says.

How did she manage? I turn my head away, I don’t want to watch. It will be such an effort, the police, I’ll have to explain what I was doing here, why he was climbing and fell. He should be more considerate. But for once he thinks better of it.

There is another road, we discover it eventually, along the beach and up an asphalt walk beside a neat inhabited cottage. Did they see us coming, are they wondering who we are? The road above is paved, it has a railing and a sign with the poet’s name on it, wired to the fence.

“I’d like to steal that,” he says.

We pause to view the house from above. There’s an old lady in a garden-party hat and gloves, explaining things to an elderly couple. “He always kept to himself, he did,” she is saying. “No one here ever got to know him really.” She goes on to detail the prices that have been offered for the house: America wanted to buy it and ship it across the ocean, she says, but the town wouldn’t let them.

We start back towards our room. Halfway along we sit down on a bench to scrape the mud from our boots; it clings like melted marshmallow. I lean back; I’m not sure I can make it to the house, whatever reserves my body has been drawing on are almost gone. My hearing is blurred and it’s hard to breathe.

He bends over to kiss me. I don’t want him to, I’m not calm now, I’m irritated, my skin prickles, I think of case histories, devoted wives who turn kleptomaniac two days a month, the mother who threw her baby out into the snow, it was in Reader’s Digest, she had a hormone disturbance, love is all chemical. I want it to be over, this long abrasive competition for the role of victim; it used to matter that it should finish right, with grace, but not now. One of us should just get up from the bench, shake hands and leave, I don’t care who is last, it would sidestep the recriminations, the totalling up of scores, the reclaiming of possessions, your key, my book. But it won’t be that way, we’ll have to work through it, boring and foreordained though it is. What keeps me is a passive curiosity, it’s like an Elizabethan tragedy or a horror movie, I know which ones will be killed but not how. I take his hand and stroke the back of it gently, the fine hairs rasping my fingertips like sandpaper.

We’d been planning to change and have dinner, it’s almost six, but back in the room I have only strength enough to pull off my boots, Then with my clothes still on I crawl into the enormous, creaking bed, cold as porridge and hammock-saggy. I float for an instant in the open sky on the backs of my eyelids, free fall, until sleep rushes up to meet me like the earth.

I wake up suddenly in total darkness. I remember where I am. He’s beside me but he seems to be lying outside the blankets, furled in the bedspread. I get stealthily out of the bed, grope to the window and open one of the wooden shutters. It’s almost as dark outside, there are no streetlights, but by straining I can read my watch; two o’clock. I’ve had my eight hours and my body thinks it’s time for breakfast. I notice I still have my clothes on, take them off and get back in bed, but my stomach won’t let me sleep. I hesitate, then decide it won’t do him any harm and turn on the bedside lamp. On the dresser there’s a crumpled paper bag; inside it is a Welsh cake, a soft white biscuit with currants in it. I bought it yesterday near the train station, asking in bakeries crammed with English buns and French pastries, running through the streets in a crazed search for local colour that almost made us late for the bus. Actually I bought two of them. I ate mine yesterday, this one is his, but I don’t care; I take it out of the bag and devour it whole.

In the mirror I’m oddly swollen, as though I’ve been drowned, my eyes are purple-circled, my hair stands out from my head like a second-hand doll’s, there’s a diagonal scarlike mark across my cheek where I’ve been sleeping on my face. This is what it does to you. I estimate the weeks, months, it will take me to recuperate. Fresh air, good food and plenty of sun.

We have so little time and he just lies there, rolled up like a rug, not even twitching. I think of waking him, I want to make love, I want all there is because there’s not much left. I start to think what he will do after I’m over and I can’t stand that, maybe I should kill him, that’s a novel idea, how melodramatic; nevertheless I look around the room for a blunt instrument; there’s nothing but the bedside lamp, a grotesque woodland nymph with metal tits and a lightbulb coming out of her head. I could never kill anyone with that. Instead I brush my teeth, wondering if he’ll ever know how close he came to being murdered, resolving anyway never to plant flowers for him, never to come back, and slide in among the chilly furrows and craters of the bed. I intend to watch the sun rise but I fall asleep by accident and miss it.

Breakfast, when the time for it finally comes, is shabby, decorous, with mended linens and plentiful but dinted silver. We have it in an ornate, dilapidated room whose grandiose mantelpiece now supports only china spaniels and tinted family photos. We’re brushed and combed, thoroughly dressed; we speak in subdued voices.

The food is the usual: tea and toast, fried eggs and bacon and the inevitable grilled tomato. It’s served by a different woman, grey-haired also but with a corrugated perm and red lipstick. We unfold our map and plan the route back; it’s Sunday and there won’t be a bus to the nearest railway town till after one, we may have trouble getting out.

He doesn’t like fried eggs and he’s been given two of them. I eat one for him and tell him to hack the other one up so it will look nibbled at least, it’s only polite. He is grateful to me, he knows I’m taking care of him, he puts his hand for a moment over mine, the one not holding the fork. We tell each other our dreams: his of men with armbands, later of me in a cage made of frail slatlike bones, mine of escaping in winter through a field.

I eat his grilled tomato as an afterthought and we leave.

Upstairs in our room we pack; or rather I pack, he lies on the bed.

“What’re we going to do till the bus comes?” he says. Being up so early unsettles him.

“Go for a walk,” I say.

“We went for a walk yesterday,” he says.

I turn around and he’s holding out his arms, he wants me to come and lie down beside him. I do and he gives me a perfunctory initial kiss and starts to undo my buttons. He’s using only his left hand, the right one is underneath me. He’s having trouble. I stand up and take off, reluctantly, the clothes I’ve so recently put on. It’s time for sex; he missed out on it last night.

He reaches up and hauls me in among the tangled sheets. I tense; he throws himself on me with the utilitarian urgency of a man running to catch a train, but it’s more than that, it’s different, he’s biting down on my mouth, this time he’ll get blood if it kills him. I pull him into me, wanting him to be with me, but for the first time I feel it’s just flesh, a body, a beautiful machine, an animated corpse, he isn’t in it any more, I want him so much and he isn’t here. The bedsprings mourn beneath us.

“Sorry about that,” he says.

“It’s all right.”

“No, shit, I really am sorry. I don’t like it when that happens.”

“It’s all right,” I say. I smooth his back, distancing him: he’s back by the deserted house, back lying on the grass, back in the graveyard, standing in the sun looking down, thinking of his own death.