Adrian's Wall

By Richard Herley

Eleven years on from a bitter divorce, Adrian Stowell is becoming not only a hermit but a misanthrope. He has vowed never to get caught again, to concede to another woman influence over himself and his property, and has surrounded himself with a wall of cynicism and mistrust.

One June morning he is working in his front garden. An attractive neighbour, not long arrived in the Hampshire village where Adrian lives, comes through the gate. He has never seen her before and might never have met her but for the fact that her cat has gone missing.

He accepts the flyer she offers him and promises to search his outhouses. Her eyes are kind; she smiles at him, and from then on Adrian can’t stop thinking about her.

This is a story about the alienation wrought by the increasing fragmentation of modern society and the difficulty one modern man has in adjusting to it. He struggles besides with the sort of masculine mindset which was once critical to the rise of civilisation, but whose value is becoming more and more derided, even despised.

It is also an unsentimental love story touching upon loneliness and bereavement and, above all, the magical power of forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Herley
• Release date: Aug 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370753215

Richard Herley

I was born in England in 1950 and educated at Watford Boys' Grammar School and Sussex University, where my interest in natural history led me to read biology.My first successful novel was "The Stone Arrow", which was published to critical acclaim in 1978. It subsequently won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, administered by the Royal Society of Literature in London, and was the first in a trilogy. This was followed by "The Penal Colony" (1987), a futuristic thriller that formed the basis of the 1994 movie "No Escape", starring Ray Liotta.The main difficulty for the author is making his voice heard in the roar of self-promotion. I believe that the work I am producing now is of higher quality than my prize-winning first, and ask you, the reader, to help spread the word by telling your friends if you have enjoyed one of my books.

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ADRIAN’S WALL

Richard Herley

Copyright Richard Herley 2017

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

—————

… it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, one’s self.

— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

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Table of contents

PART ONE

1 The ginger cat

2 The flyer

3 Modern women

4 Searching for Tolly

5 Fran at the doorstep

6 Basingstoke

7 The Bar Gimelli

8 Valerie on the phone

9 Nearing Uckleton

10 At Uckleton

11 Iris

12 The Medlar Tree

PART TWO

1 A June dawn

2 Breakfast

3 Saturday morning

4 Adrian at his computer

5 Another blackbird

6 Mr Wadsworth

7 Heath Pond

8 Selborne Common

9 Valerie’s advice

10 The village fête

11 Lalehampton Common

12 The bee-sting

PART THREE

1 In the conservatory

2 Forgiving Nicola

3 Winchester

4 Cutting through the tangle

5 Cobnor I

6 Cobnor II

7 Jim Christmas

8 Blakeney

9 Marius

10 Fran heads south

11 ‘Dover Beach’

12 A letter from Jarvis

PART FOUR

1 Frieda’s party

2 Martine and Jarvis to lunch

3 Fran’s emails

4 Remembrance Sunday

5 Kensal Green

6 Simon

7 The funeral

8 New Year’s Eve

9 Marti stays on

10 Househunting

11 The beech tree

12 Old Winchester Hill

Other novels by Richard Herley

PART ONE

1

A commotion outside made him get up and put his face to the window. The ginger cat was tormenting something at the edge of the lawn. Cries of alarm were coming from the parent blackbirds: the sodding thing had got hold of one of their chicks.

As ever, the sound of the back door opening scared it away. It dashed into the shrubbery and escaped through one of its usual holes in the hedge.

His slippers wet with dew, Adrian reached the fledgling and saw that it was beyond hope. The cat had not only opened its breast but hooked out one of the eyes. As gently as he could, he picked up the young bird and crossed to the rockery.

The chick remained motionless, stunned, panting, its pulsing heat spreading into his palm. Despite the plumage it had acquired, it still bore much of the reptilian look of the sparsely fluffed nestling, wobble-headed and straining upward, instinctively gaping for food. Even so, it had begun to leave all that behind. It had begun to lead its own little life.

He laid it down and, taking a grapefruit-sized rock, ended its suffering.

Yesterday there had been two fledglings clucking and chuckling in the shrubbery or on the lawn, begging to be fed. Four had left the nest. The other two must have fallen prey before this morning, to a magpie or hawk, or a rat, or, more likely, a cat. The same one, probably. There was no sign of the remaining fledgling, nor, except for the calls, of the parents.

When, having washed his hands, Adrian got back to his breakfast table, his porridge was cold and his tea barely warm. In any case he didn’t feel like finishing the meal.

There were three cats he had come to recognise as living in the vicinity, but the ginger one, in particular, treated his garden as its own. He normally drove it away when it appeared. It had learned that it was unwelcome and could now be made to scoot if he merely rapped on the window.

On occasion he had not expelled this cat but waited to see what it would do. For long periods it would sit on the lawn and watch the same spot in the shrubbery. He had investigated but found nothing special there, no reason for surveillance. Or the cat would venture to the place where he kept a broad, shallow, china bowl as a birdbath, and then it might drink. This had struck him as odd, because cats were supposed to be fastidious. He had seen it eating blades of untrimmed grass, and prowling along the edge of his lawn, and lifting its tail to piss on his flowers. He had found his border plants crushed where the cat had been lying, and he had often found its smelly droppings and been obliged to clear them up.

He blamed the ginger cat for these crimes because that was the one he usually saw. The second of the three trespassers, a shapeless tabby, he had seen on his property only once or twice. The third was an exceptionally ugly, off-white Persian – at least, he thought it was a Persian. Its face looked as if it had been pushed in, giving it a most disagreeable expression. One lunchtime it had encountered the ginger cat. The two had circled one another suspiciously before the Persian had retreated under the garden bench, from which place of safety it had glared out until its rival had wandered away.

The law was such that one could do little about cats in one’s garden. Adrian had tried to be an upright citizen and explore what the market offered in the way of legal repellents, with no effect. He had hurled harmless missiles, and missiles that would leave no mark, but had only once managed to connect, again with no effect. He had considered an air rifle, but its noise might pinpoint him as the culprit. And he had noted with interest such stories as appeared in the press about ‘cat killers’, who usually, disturbingly, sounded rather like him: middle-aged men living alone who took pride in their gardens and had little contact with their neighbours.

* * *

Towards dusk he unlocked the personal door to the garage. Though he had not used the car today and the boiler was only heating the water, the garage felt warmer than the air outside, retaining as it was some heat from the June sun.

Some months earlier, on collecting his car after its first service, he had found in the passenger footwell a small carrier bag marked with the dealership’s logo. The bag had contained a partly empty canister of antifreeze. He had put the canister on a shelf and almost forgotten about it.

Apparently antifreeze had a sweet taste, irresistible to cats.

From another shelf he took down a wooden, six-bottle wine box. It held things he used when servicing his bicycles. At the bottom, a cassette brush was lying in an oblong, old-fashioned, enamel pie-dish, originally white with navy-blue piping, these days much begrimed.

He now removed this dish, gave it an extra wipe with a rag partly soaked in bike-cleaning fluid and, taking the antifreeze, stepped out of the door. Where best to leave the dish? His back garden was almost completely private, bordered on two sides by fields. There was next to no chance of the dish being observed by human eyes – beyond the remote possibility that someone might come to call, and even if they did, he knew nobody who wouldn’t ring at the front door rather than come round to the back. To be on the safe side, however, he placed the poison next to the shed where he kept his mower and wheelie bins.

During what remained of the evening his mind kept returning to what he had done, or was about to do, which was to cause the prolonged and agonising death of the ginger cat. At his usual time he tidied up the kitchen and climbed the stairs.

While cleaning his teeth he confronted what hitherto he had been avoiding: the mirror.

Lying in bed, Adrian reviewed the inward debate that had been going on since putting the dish out, or even while formulating his plan.

Of course, it was the careless – the literally careless – owner who was to blame. The cat was simply being a cat. He had never understood why anyone would want to keep such a creature.

Cat owners surely read the newspapers too, were surely aware of the feline slaughter of the nation’s songbirds and small mammals, and were just as surely indifferent to this. They let their cats roam at will, day and night, knowing they had the protection of English law.

The neighbourhood cats invaded his territory, the one tiny sanctuary that remained to him in this world of duplicity and greed. They did whatever they liked when he wasn’t on watch, and in the past week they had killed at least one of the young birds in which he had been taking such a fond interest. As soon as he had realised that the blackbirds were building in the larger of his two choisyas, he had refrained from all activity that might cause them concern. When mowing the lawn he had feigned ignorance of the nest-site; such observation as he had allowed himself had been conducted through a window.

After further thought, Adrian switched on the lamp, got out of bed and put on his dressing gown.

Better the annoyance of the ginger cat than a guilty conscience. And what if he were found out? What if the animal managed to return to its owner before it collapsed? It would be rushed to a vet, who might recognise the symptoms of ethylene glycol poisoning. The police might become involved. Those cat killers in the news were fined and disgraced and surely had to move house. In any case, he had read that most fledglings were doomed. Were that not so, the world would be overrun with blackbirds.

As he unlocked his back door he acknowledged that he was, yet again, absorbing the consequences of other people’s selfishness. The cost of not doing so was confrontation. Confrontation required courage, and it might just be that he had used up whatever small reserves of that he had been born with.

He kept an old funnel in the garage and used it to pour the antifreeze back in the canister, not knowing how else to dispose of it. Since the entire contents had now become polluted, he would take the canister to the council tip next time he was passing.

He had erred. He had let himself down. Even in conceiving of poisoning the cat, he had behaved without honour or dignity.

Feeling scarcely better, Adrian went back to his bed.

2

The baby blackbird had been killed on Tuesday: it was now Friday. On Wednesday he had seen the ginger cat again. It appeared to be in as rude health as ever.

The antifreeze had been in place for less than a couple of hours. He had collected it after dark and emptied it out before thinking of checking whether the level had fallen, though presumably all of it would have been lapped up if found. Thus he had been relieved to see the cat once more and had not even scared it away. It had shown itself yet again yesterday, whereupon he had thrown an old scrubbing-brush at it and made it scarper, the brush being the first thing to hand. Normal relations had been resumed.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays his cleaner arrived at nine o’clock. While she was dusting and vacuuming he found it hard to concentrate on his trades and had once or twice in consequence made a mistake. Those mornings, therefore, he now reserved for other activities, such as walking and cycling, which he not only enjoyed but kept him fit.

When the weather was dry Adrian also took exercise by tending his garden. He could easily have afforded a gardener but preferred to do the work himself. Such men as he had employed in the past, particularly in the years when his weekdays had been spent in London, had often done as much harm as good. For two weeks he had retained a female gardener who had been even worse. She had been engaged by his ex-wife without his approval or consent, and had taken it upon herself to prune disastrously and without reason a valuable Japanese maple, the finest of his small, front-garden trees. It was during the subsequent argument with Nicola, which had quickly got out of hand, that she had mockingly confirmed his long held suspicions about her and informed him that she was going to sue for divorce. At that he had gone into the garden to cut the tree down altogether. While doing this he had heard a violent spray of gravel and run round to the driveway, only to see his car disappearing down the lane, his wife at the wheel, returning to their house in Putney and her simian lover.

This morning he was again in his garden, trimming back, as far as he could reach, the runners of bramble that insisted on growing through the mixture of shrubs comprising his front hedge. In winter he tried to uproot as many of these as he could, but they weren’t easy to find or get at and he was never completely successful.

It happened that he was working today more or less where the maple had stood. To improve his privacy he had let the hedge grow thicker and taller in the eleven intervening years. He was wearing gardening gloves and had just stepped back to take one of them off, penetrated as it had been by a pyracantha thorn. A bead of blood had been raised, right in the centre of his palm.

He looked round. A woman he had never seen before was opening the pedestrian gate.

She bade him good morning and he returned the greeting. Even before doing so he had observed that she was in her mid forties, not fat, not very tall, and holding a piece of paper. He assumed that she was one of his fellow villagers and that the paper expressed a demand for money or labour in aid of the church roof or an impending community event, such as the sports day or fête. Such demands appeared at irregular intervals; he invariably, now, threw them away.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said.

‘Not at all.’

‘Can I give you one of my flyers?’

She stepped on the lawn and Adrian’s annoyance at being accosted vanished altogether. It wasn’t just her voice, which was refined but not affected, or the informal and attractive style of her hair, dark-blonde and collar length. Nor was it even the pleasantness of her manner. And he didn’t pay much heed to her grey blouse, pin-striped in white, or to her white jeans with their dayglo bicycle clips. There was something far more striking about her: an indefinable but immediate feeling of affinity.

‘It’s Tolly,’ she said, ‘my cat.’

He took the proffered flyer. It had been printed on a colour laser and bore an image of a smug, portly and recumbent cat, below the headline LOST.

‘You haven’t seen him, I suppose.’

‘No, I’m afraid not. When did he disappear?’

‘Tuesday night. He didn’t come in.’

Tuesday night?

With mounting concern he scrutinised the photo. Was this the shapeless tabby that had trespassed once or twice?

My cat Tolly has been missing since the evening of June 9th. He is a bit daft and might have done something silly and got stuck in a shed or outhouse. As you can see he is not much to look at but I love him and would be grateful if you would kindly check your property for me. Or if you spot him about the village, please let me know ASAP. Thanks.

Frances Johnson, 1 New Cottages

The message concluded with two telephone numbers, landline and mobile, and a Gmail address.

In the few seconds it took him to read the text, Adrian became aware of her fragrance – floral, clean, not too obvious. He looked up. Her eyes were kind. He felt something, the faintest jolt, where his heart might once have been. ‘We’ve never met,’ he said. ‘I’m Adrian.’

‘Fran. How do you do.’

‘We’d better not shake hands. I’m all sweaty from the gloves. You live in the village, I see.’

‘Yes, but I’ve only been here seven months.’

Was he detecting, in those sympathetic grey eyes, a glimmer of reciprocal interest? No. She was interested only in finding her cat. ‘I’ll check my shed and log store right away.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, giving him a smile, however, that unsettled him further.

‘Good luck. I hope he turns up.’

‘I do too.’

She was careful to shut the gate.

A moment later he heard the creaking of an old bicycle, heading back towards the middle of the village.

Adrian stood for a moment trying to recover his equilibrium and to deny the strength of the attraction he had felt, which nevertheless seemed, despite all his efforts, to be growing worse. Making his way to the rear garden, he wondered again whether she were attached. He had not risked a glance at her ring finger.

‘You need that like a hole in the head,’ he reminded himself.

Because he had said he would, he checked his shed and log store. He even looked in the garage and under his car.

‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ he growled, returning to his secateurs and groundsheet. The only result would be rejection, humiliation. Crowning all, it was the height of lunacy to start anything with someone who lived in the same village. New Cottages consisted of a terrace of four small, cream-painted houses near the pond. Hers would be the one on the left-hand end. The next in the row was owned by some London people and rented out to holidaymakers when not required by themselves or their friends.

The flyer, A5 size, had been produced by somebody literate and tasteful who understood desktop publishing and had access to a decent printer. A husband? Man friend? Even another woman? Or herself? My cat, it said.

He had been alone for so long that he had become susceptible. It was almost as if she hadn’t regarded him as what he knew himself to be; her smile had seemed genuine. Or was he deluding himself? Did he merely want to believe again in disinterested kindness?

Supposing he, supposing they, did, through a series of extreme improbabilities … and suppose in the mean time Tolly were found, and autopsied, and the cause of death determined … no no, it was all too grotesque!

As he went on seeking bramble-stems he again turned his thoughts to Nicola. Such thoughts both displeased and gratified him: displeased because of all the bad memories, gratified because he had been free of her now for so long.

There was another kind of gratification in such thinking that he preferred not to acknowledge. His grudge was a bottomless fount of self-pity. He had forgotten none of her infuriating habits, not least that of continually asking him questions, which was outdone by the fact that she never took a blind bit of notice of his replies, nor indeed of anything else he said. The problems she created for him, expensive, time-consuming and sometimes embarrassing, he had quite early, even before the wedding, termed ‘Nicola-bollocks’. Her mental, like her domestic, untidiness sprang from the same inattention to detail that had exasperated him when trying to curb or at least keep track of her spending. Like most women, she was a slattern. Even as an undergraduate he had observed that women’s rooms tended to be unduly chaotic. The chaos, he supposed, derived from the incontinent, menstrual mutability of their nature, and from the knowledge, at the back of what passed for their minds, that a fawning male would always appear when things needed setting straight.

And now he had caught himself speculating again. The beast in him had been duped by the same lures that had kept his sex in subjection since the start of the hominid line, or even long before: since the fateful moment when the first tetrapod, baffled by its own enterprise, and dazzled by the unwonted light, had crawled from the primeval waters and onto dry land.

‘Nope, I’m cured,’ he muttered, locating and amputating at soil level a particularly vicious and branching stem. ‘Definitely cured.’

At mid morning he joined his cleaner in the kitchen for coffee, which was something he seldom did. He liked her well enough, but her powers of conversation were what one might have expected from an elderly countrywoman who had once been in service at the Hall and whose chief pastime seemed to be knitting garments for her many grandchildren – whose names he could never remember; they were called things like Chelsea and Chardonnay and Jordan. Adrian had once asked himself whether any of these parents ever christened a sprog Dalston or Dubai, Uxbridge or United Arab Emirates. Or, instead of Chardonnay, why not Vodka or Theakston’s Old Peculier?

‘How’s Mr Christmas?’

‘As always, thank you for asking.’

‘Arthritis any better?’

‘He’s a martyr to it, Mr S.’

‘There must be something they can do.’

She gave a fatalistic shrug. ‘He’s getting spurs as well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re called spurs, but they’re under his heels, growths of bone, like.’

‘Really?’

‘He may have to have an op.’

‘How do they affect him?’

‘It started to hurt when he walked. Easter time, it was.’ She explained that Jim had consulted his doctor and been referred to the hospital at Winchester for an X-ray, which had revealed these incipient outgrowths of bone. He had been prescribed cortisone and certain exercises, but they weren’t helping much.

‘It sounds awful,’ Adrian said. ‘I hope it clears up. Please give him my sympathy and best wishes.’ Then he took Frances Johnson’s flyer out of his shirt pocket and passed it over. ‘By the way, have you had one of these yet?’

She reached in her housecoat for her spectacles. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s Mrs Johnson’s cat. No, we haven’t had one, far as I know. Poor thing. I hope he hasn’t been squashed. They all get squashed sooner or later. They drive through here like maniacs.’

Adrian took a moment to parse this last statement, otherwise occupied as he was.

‘I hope she gets him back. Ever such a nice lady, she is. I do for the holiday rental next door, clean up on Saturdays and that. Jim does the grass and odd jobs there too. Pond Cottage, they call it. Used just to be Number 2, New Cottages. Mind you, it’s a long time since they was new.’

‘Next door to the Johnsons, you mean?’

‘Yes. Except there’s no Mr Johnson. I don’t know what’s happened to him.’

That was strange, for Mrs Christmas knew everything about Lalehampton and every last one of its residents. What she didn’t know from personal observation was gleaned from her equally garrulous peers, whether informally or during the weekly meetings of the Primrose Club at the Parish Room. Adrian had surmised that he himself might sometimes form the topic of such conversations, being described perhaps as an oddball, a dark horse nowadays, keeping himself to himself, et cetera. Mrs Christmas would be the only source of this gossip, having access as she did to the interior of his house and, uniquely among the villagers, to his company.

He struggled to find some way of questioning her further and saw that there was none. She would detect the lack of spontaneity, giving her something new and intriguing to mull over and discuss with her friends.

3

As ever, he ate lunch alone, a tablet propped up on his left. He was trying to concentrate, but his mind kept returning to his new acquaintance. ‘Ever such a nice lady, she is,’ Mrs Christmas had said.

From time to time, in spite of his resolve to do without it, Adrian craved feminine company. It might be pleasant to know a civilised woman to take out to dinner once in a while or share visits to concerts, museums and whatnot.

However, such relations with members of the opposite sex often did not end there, and he was determined not to get caught in the mangle again. Nicola had halved him, more than halved him. She had kept the London house besides. Then the lady in question lived just down the road. If he embarrassed himself he would create an atmosphere. He would have to avoid walking past her house or feel awkward when he did. And was she not a cat lover, just like the faceless keeper of his bête rousse?

Given her age, the likelihood was that she was not a widow. That meant she had been through at least one divorce. For obvious reasons, proceedings were more often started by the wife. She would know the score. Her house was a terraced cottage, her car no doubt the elderly Renault Clio he had seen parked outside it. If appearances were anything to go by, the difference between her net worth and his might be extreme.

‘You were right the first time,’ he told himself. ‘It’s out of the question.’

That afternoon he did well. Formerly he had traded only in shares: that had been one aspect of his former occupation, fund management. The rise in dominance of high frequency trading and the asset inflation caused by quantitative easing had made the stock market more of a bent casino than ever, so a couple of years ago he had ventured into commodities and thence into the bear pit of currency trading. All that was bent as well, of course, but he found it a little easier to make money there.

When London closed he rejected the idea of continuing a while longer on Wall Street. His luck was in, but he felt too tired, had been concentrating too ferociously. And there was something else, intrusive and unsettling, interfering with his desire to go on.

After showing Mrs Christmas the flyer he had put it back in his pocket. He took it out again and, having prepared a whisky and soda, made his way across the sitting room to his favourite armchair.

At leisure, taking the odd sip, Adrian re-examined the photo and text, again noticing what was indicated by the author’s skill at layout and her friendly style.

Could he really have poisoned her beloved moggie? Surely it was a coincidence that the animal had vanished just then. It had only appeared in his garden once or twice, if indeed her cat and the shapeless tabby were the same. New Cottages lay some way away. What was the home range of a cat, especially one as corpulent as this?

Besides socialising with women, he missed – yes, he sometimes admitted this to himself – the physical solace that only they could provide. By that he meant affection as much as anything else. Something about Mrs Johnson had suggested that she might be able to provide it. But except for her parting smile and the glimmer he may or may not have observed in her eyes, the meeting this morning had been brief and businesslike.

A phone handset, in its cradle, was waiting on the low walnut table beside him.

They were not teenagers. To call out of the blue like this might, certainly would, be too abrupt and creepy. He had acquired her number only because she had lost her cat. Ideally he needed another meeting before risking rejection, either to make a request for a date seem less forced or to let him assess her further and decide whether such a request was what he really wanted to make.

His memory of her had become hazy. His imagination might have enhanced her desirability. She wasn’t young. Then neither was he. In fact she had a good ten years on him.

‘Damn it,’ he muttered. Though his life was monotonous it had hitherto been calm. She had created ripples. If he lifted that phone the ripples might become waves – even a tsunami.

He finished his whisky and laid Mrs Johnson’s flyer aside, mentally compiling a list of reasons why he should not call her. Chief among these was the certainty that she would turn out to be spoiled, demanding, and hypercritical of him as a person and of whatever he tried to do to make her life easier. This attitude would not really be her fault. She would simply have absorbed the Zeitgeist.

Years ago, before the culture war had started, Adrian had thought himself a fairly liberal sort of fellow. By English standards he had been a liberal, in the earlier sense of that word. He had accepted the role of the state, had tuned in to the BBC without an awareness of being propagandised, and had regarded as unexceptionable the structure of the National Health Service and the rest of the welfare system. He had never heard of Antonio Gramsci or the Frankfurt School; when their influence had first begun to be felt, he had interpreted political correctness not as a strategy for mind-control and hegemony but as an attempt, albeit a clumsy one, to improve the civility of public discourse.

Adrian’s personality and outlook had remained unchanged, but the political landscape in which he perforce dwelt had shifted and was still being shifted bodily to the left. By infiltrating the education system and using it to influence the children and young people in their care, activists had managed to replace the politics of class with the politics of identity. The idea was to divide, to set everyone against each other so that they became dependent on the state. To this end, family life had been specially targeted, first through the legal, tax and welfare regimes, and secondly by belittling and disempowering fathers.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and in due course Adrian became a reactionary. He kept private his growing consciousness of what was happening, and was in any case wary of the increasing politicisation of his workplace. But when his wife announced that she was going to divorce him, and when, abetted by the court, she made good on her threat to clean him out, his withdrawal became physical as well as mental. He resigned his position and with the remnants of his savings moved permanently to what had been the family’s weekend place in Hampshire.

Since then he had withdrawn further and further. He had no friends and kept up nothing more than a sterile and desultory correspondence with a handful of men he had known at the university. His day-trading was his only significant interaction with the outside world. There he was so ruthless and successful that he had not only recovered everything Nicola had been granted, but multiplied it.

If Adrian had known at twenty-seven what he knew now, he would never have proposed to her or anyone else. Only a foolhardy or ignorant male would these days consider placing his fate – and his assets – in a woman’s hands, no matter how pretty her smile or sympathetic her manner.

Then, assuming that he called Mrs Johnson and anything came of it, he would have to forgo the routine he had established since the divorce. His time was entirely his own. He had long ago recognised the folly of engaging in society and trying to be helpful. No good deed was ever repaid with anything but resentment, or worse. Far better to remain apart and give others the least grounds for complaint; one was criticised no matter what. If he and she ever did become intimate, she would no doubt expect him to fraternise with the rest of the village, just as he had been made to in Nicola’s time. Re-immersion would be difficult and embarrassing.

He had recently read of a sharp rise in sexually transmitted diseases among not only the young but also the middle-aged. Though he did not suppose for a moment that Mrs Johnson was infectious, he now remembered the article and it gave him cause for thought. He even remembered that he detested wearing a condom, the essential shield these days against catching anything; and he could not help asking himself whether he was now too old and dignified to participate in the sweaty absurdity of human sexual congress.

In all there were at least half a dozen good and logical reasons to suppress the feelings this morning’s meeting had aroused in him.

Alas, such feelings had nothing to do with logic, or even goodness.

During his bleakest moments, Adrian sometimes conceded that he was lonely. How could he be otherwise? He had been isolated both by circumstance and his own personality. The Mrs Johnson of his imagination was nothing but an eidolon created by a needy psyche scenting the promise, or the possibility at least, of succour. He knew nothing of substance about her.

But still …

It was the kindliness in her eyes he remembered most. He remembered too the affinity he had imagined he felt with her, and the impression she had left in her wake of a capacity for understanding and even tenderness.

Of course, all that was humbug! On the other hand, their meeting might represent an opportunity. Except for her cat he might never have met her. In his business dealings he was always aware of the need to seize an opportunity. Could he let this one, however slender, pass him by? If he did, would he regret it?

The idea occurred to him to pretend that he had spotted Tolly in his garden. Call her and say he was looking at him, and what should he do? She would come at once. When she arrived he would claim that Tolly had meantime disappeared through the hedge. After a fruitless search, assuming Adrian still fancied her, he would invite her in for a consoling drink, during which he could safely moot the idea of an invitation out.

Unfortunately this plan was dishonest. For all its utility it offended him, and what sort of relationship could he have with anyone if it were based on a lie?

He picked up the handset. Why not? This might prove to be an excruciating mistake, but why not? He would do the correct and manly thing and risk the direct approach. When she turned him down he was sure she would at least be polite.

Adrian consulted the paper again. It was minutely trembling.

4

Valerie paused. Did she really want to be doing this?

The blue button was still waiting. It wanted her to accept a set of terms and conditions she hadn’t read, though she had scrolled all the way through it in order to make this blue button appear. Presumably the next page would ask her for her credit-card details. The card was already out of her purse and lying on the arm of the sofa.

The fee was only thirty pounds, and she didn’t actually have to message the man whose profile she had been so eagerly studying. Even if she did, and even if they arranged a meeting, she could always withdraw before making contact.

The alternative to clicking on the button was the status quo.

Bob, that thorough-going shit: Bob had driven her to this … this humiliation. His treachery had come like a blinding flash, too bright to bear, burning its after-image into her retinas so that now she