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but it was his phrase, not hers, and it came to both of them as a quotation from an earlier, stale exchange. She said rather too abruptly, ‘After all, you had to keep your hand in for the real thing when it came along.’
    It was a brave attempt to restore the lightness between them. And it succeeded, in large measure. He recognized it for what it was, and immediately felt a pig for bridling a moment earlier. He went back to the bed and took her hand. ‘You are different, you know. I didn’t expect there would be anyone like you when — when I dabbled a little with those other women. They were there and available, so I didn’t turn them away, that’s all. But you make me wish I had.’ At that moment, he almost believed himself.
    Gabrielle smiled up at him. ‘It’s nice of you to say so. But you couldn’t know you’d find me, could you? I’m just glad you did, that’s all. You mustn’t mind me being a neurotic old cow who wants her man to herself.’
    ‘But you have me all—’
    ‘Hush now!’ She put her fingers lightly, laughingly on his lips, stilling his words, enjoying that small mastery over him. ‘I know you’d like to be with me all the time. It’s just that when you’re not, strange fancies take over. I haven’t much else to occupy my tiny mind, you see.’ She beamed up at him, hoping their display of confidence would disguise the emptiness of her life without him and the desperate loneliness and insecurity which sometimes beset her in the gilded cage of the penthouse apartment at Old Mead Park. She wondered if it would be too late at forty-one to have a first baby. And how her new partner would react to that idea.
    He put on the jacket of the business suit and completed the last move back into that working world of which she knew so little. When he kissed her briefly and left, she felt he was already a stranger.
    She dressed slowly, fighting ineffectively against the bleakness which always stole over her when they had parted. Perhaps it was no more than the post-coital triste which her reading told her was common after the heights of passion. For in truth she was a novice in the emotions which are the setting for any stolen passion such as this.
    James Berridge had been his wife’s first lover. She was an attractive woman, with a suggestion of the gypsy girl beneath her well-bred, intelligent exterior, and in her two decades of unhappiness there had been many opportunities for her to take others. Yet now, after twenty years, Ian Faraday was her first excursion from the long-cold marital bed.
    At forty-one, she was thrown off balance by her first heady experience of passionate sex and the disturbing flood-tide of emotions which came with it. It was both exciting and disturbing, not least because she did not fully understand what was happening to her. She spent the days when she could not see Ian wishing that she could be with him, wishing that like him she was free to make her own domestic arrangements.
    Like all lovers in her situation, she hated the secrecy shrouding a liaison which she yearned to present to the world in all its proud beauty.
    Her resentment turned inevitably to the husband who was the unwitting obstacle to her desires. She frightened herself by the new intensity of her hatred for him. There were certainly times now when she wished him dead, and delicious intervals when she considered the vision of the simpler world in which that would leave her.
    But what she found most disturbing were the moments when she discovered herself toying with the idea of killing him herself.

 
    6
     
    It had been a good day, Charlie Pegg decided. He had completed the installation of a new boiler in an Oldford garage in the morning, tested the system, and found it working perfectly. The staff had been full of praise as the heat seeped into their hangar-like workshop. The sense of accomplishment had given him great satisfaction in itself, for this had been the biggest heating job he had so far