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“So?”

“So you tell yourself that the fact that you and Cat had the relationship that you did is something you are not going to think about—that you’re going to forget it. And then you will.”

For a few moments Jamie said nothing. He was looking up at the ceiling now, thinking; or perhaps trying to forget.

“Maybe I don’t want to,” he muttered.

She gently withdrew her hand. “Then don’t.”

She felt a stab of disappointment, and she wished that she had not started to discuss the subject with him. Perhaps his instinct had been better: to say nothing, to leave it where it lay. The past was so powerful that sometimes when we chose to deny its potency it reminded us just who we were—its creatures.

She crossed the room and drew open the curtains, flooding the room with morning light. “Let me make you something special for breakfast,” she said.

He sat up in bed, reaching for the cup of tea she had brought him. “Mushrooms,” he said. “And scrambled eggs with some of that truffle oil in them—not a lot, just a few drops.”

“And?”

“And a piece of very thin toast.”

“And?”

“And a mug of Jamaican coffee with really hot milk. Not milk heated up in the microwave but scalded in a pan.”

She smiled, and watched him get out of bed, his limbs caught in the sunlight. I do not deserve somebody so beautiful, she thought, or so gentle; but none of us deserves good fortune, perhaps—it comes our way, dispensed at random, irrespective of what prayer flags we string across our mountain passes, what chants and imprecations we devise; it simply comes.

She stopped herself. Do I really believe that? I do not, and never have; in thinking it I have simply succumbed to a defeatist impulse. Even young children understand that often, if not always, we get what we deserve; Charlie, at his tender age, is beginning to learn that good behaviour is rewarded with a treat. And there was no reason why she should not have been given Jamie: she was attractive and she had looked after herself. Jamie himself had referred to what he called her Pre-Raphaelite beauty; “Holman Hunt might have painted you,” he had said. She had protested that she found this most unlikely, but she had been flattered, and she had filed the remark away in her memory, to be taken out and reflected upon, as such compliments should be, when one was feeling one’s worst, on a bad-hair day.

ISABEL HAD OPENED UP the delicatessen by the time Eddie arrived. Eddie always looked sleepy when he turned up for work. He was rarely late, but he still managed to look as if he had tumbled out of bed only a few minutes ago—which he might well have done. Isabel knew that Eddie did not eat breakfast. “I’m not hungry,” he had said when she asked him. “The thought of breakfast makes me ill.” But within half an hour or so she would see him pop a piece of cheese or a slice of Parma ham into his mouth.

“Breakfast?” she asked.

“It’s different,” said Eddie, slicing off another sliver of cheese.

“There’s nothing wrong with having a snack.”

When Eddie came in that morning Isabel noticed that he had a scratch on his face—a line of punctured red that ran down from the cheekbone and ended just above the edge of the jaw. Her eye went straight to it, and he noticed that, as he instinctively reached up to touch his cheek.

Isabel caught his eye. “Have you washed that?”

Eddie looked away. “Washed what?” he mumbled.

Isabel touched her own cheek, as if in sympathy. “That scratch. Let me take a look at it. Cat keeps some disinfectant in the cupboard.”

She took a step towards Eddie to get a better view of the scratch, but he withdrew sharply. “I only wanted to look at it,” said Isabel. “It won’t hurt to put something on it. It looks a bit angry to me.”

“You can’t just go round putting disinfectant on people,” said Eddie.

Isabel smiled. “I suppose you can’t. Or at least not on people you don’t know …” She imagined herself in the street, dabbing disinfectant on passers-by, as a religious proselyte might thrust a tract into a stranger’s hand;