I sank my face into my hands and let it rest there for a minute. Out in the corridor I heard a fire door swing, and the voices of people swallowed up as a door was unlocked and closed behind them.

Patrick slid his hand slowly backwards and forwards along the edge of the kitchen cabinets. A little muscle worked in his jaw. ‘You know how this feels, Lou? It feels like I might be running, but I feel like I’m permanently just a little bit behind the rest of the field. I feel like … ’ He took a deep breath, as if he were trying to compose himself. ‘I feel like there’s something bad on the bend around the corner, and everyone else seems to know what it is except me.’

He lifted his eyes to mine. ‘I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. But I don’t want you to go. I don’t care if you don’t want to do the Viking, but I don’t want you to go on this … this holiday. With him.’

‘But I –’

‘Nearly seven years, we’ve been together. And you’ve known this man, had this job, for five months. Five months. If you go with him now, you’re telling me something about our relationship. About how you feel about us.’

‘That’s not fair. It doesn’t have to say anything about us,’ I protested.

‘It does if I can say all this and you’re still going to go.’

The little flat seemed so still around us. He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen before.

When my voice emerged, it did so as a whisper. ‘But he needs me.’

I realized almost as soon as I said it, heard the words and how they twisted and regrouped in the air, knew already how I would have felt if he had said the same to me.

He swallowed, shook his head a little as if he were having trouble taking in what I said. His hand came to rest on the side of the worktop, and then he looked up at me.

‘Whatever I say isn’t going to make a difference, is it?’

That was the thing about Patrick. He always was smarter than I gave him credit for.

‘Patrick, I –’

He closed his eyes, just for a moment, and then he turned and walked out of the living room, leaving the last of the empty dishes on the sideboard.

21

Steven

The girl moved in at the weekend. Will didn’t say anything to Camilla or me, but I walked into the annexe on Saturday morning still in my pyjamas to see if Will needed any help, as Nathan was delayed, and there she was, walking up the hallway with a bowlful of cereal in one hand and the newspaper in the other. She blushed when she saw me. I don’t know why – I was wearing my dressing gown, all perfectly decent. I remember thinking afterwards that there had been a time when it had been perfectly normal to find pretty young things creeping out of Will’s bedroom in the morning.

‘Just bringing Will his post,’ I said, waving it.

‘He’s not up yet. Do you want me to give him a shout?’ Her hand went to her chest, shielding herself with the newspaper. She was wearing a Minnie Mouse T-shirt and the kind of embroidered trousers you used to see Chinese women wearing in Hong Kong.

‘No, no. Not if he’s sleeping. Let him rest.’

When I told Camilla, I thought she’d be pleased. She had been so wretchedly cross about the girl moving in with her boyfriend, after all. But she just looked a bit surprised, and then adopted that tense expression which meant she was already imagining all sorts of possible and undesirable consequences. She didn’t say as much, but I was pretty sure she was not keen on Louisa Clark. That said, I didn’t know who it was Camilla approved of these days. Her default setting seemed to be stuck on Disapprove.

We never got to the bottom of what had prompted Louisa to stay – Will just said ‘family issues’ – but she was a busy little thing. When she wasn’t looking after Will, she was dashing around, cleaning and washing, whizzing backwards and forwards to the travel agent’s and to the library. I would have known her anywhere in town because she was so conspicuous. She wore the brightest-coloured clothing of anyone I’d seen outside the tropics – little jewel-hued dresses and strange-looking shoes.