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again her dishevelled hair fell across her cheek. With a practised movement she pushed it back behind one ear, a gesture Dan found touching. ‘Oh please, do sit,’ she said. Then she added, ‘I shan’t, I must go and change.’
    But she didn’t go. Instead she took Anders’s cup from his hand and sipped the coffee before giving it back. As she did, Dan realized she was pregnant. The bulge was very faint but momentarily unmistakable. He looked up to see a clear intelligence in her eyes as she regarded him.
    ‘You’ll stay for lunch?’ Anders said. ‘I have to run back into town with some papers but I’ll be straight out again.’
    ‘No, really. Thank you but I can’t.’
    ‘You’re sure?’ his wife asked. He told her he was sure.
    In the days that followed he found himself intrigued by the fact that Anders had married two such different women. For himself the thought of another wife was unbearable. Not because there was no one like Connie but because he could not again become as he had been when he fell in love with her. Realizing that she had fallen just as deeply in love with him had given him immense confidence, made him so sure of the future that the possibility of losing her had not occurred to him. And yet it was she who spoke the first words of commitment. Had she not, it might have taken months before he dared make such a statement. Why? His nature? His boys’ boarding-school upbringing? His parents’ reserve? Any or all of these. But once Connie had said ‘I love you’ a barrier had burst inside him. He’d told her everything he had felt since the first evening when she’d stopped him on a London street to ask directions. It came pouring out – her beauty, her laugh, her smile, her soaring soul.
    ‘Why you not say?’ she demanded. ‘In London I am not sure you are serious!’
    ‘Not even when we made love?’
    ‘Oh a man will love with a cat and it mean nothing to him.’
    ‘I don’t want ever to make love to anyone again but you. Ever.’
    ‘This is true?’
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘Then do it now!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Make love to me!’
    ‘Here?’
    ‘Yes, here. Now.’
    And she pulled him with her as she went down on the leaves and grass between the dense trees with the sound of the city traffic faint behind them.

5
    The insurance company agreed to cover the smashed upstairs furniture and what had been irrecoverably damaged of the household linen and his clothes, but only after a deduction of 10 per cent for each year of use. Because he had no savings, Dan had to buy with care, seeking out second-hand furniture. There’d been office equipment in the small bedroom – the room they had spoken of as Carlos’s. It too was reimbursed. Thankfully he didn’t need to replace his computer – it had been in the kitchen where he preferred to work. Somehow it felt less solitary working there.
    There was only one shop to buy office equipment in Norrtälje. Dan finished his purchases in a morning and went for lunch afterwards before the drive home. In the softly falling snow outside the restaurant he saw a woman standing beside a man, his arm around her shoulders as they studied the menu. Briefly she turned her head and pressed her lips against his bare fingers. As they entered the restaurant Dan kept his gaze away from them. When he left the sun was out, the street was busy with lunchtime shoppers. So many different faces. All filled with light and beauty.
    Another day in Norrtälje he caught sight of Anders Roos coming out of his showroom. He considered turning down a side alley, but why? He knew why. Because Anders was a ghost from his former life. It was too late. Dressed in a tailored black overcoat with a fur collar and a Russian-type fur hat – Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace – Anders had already turned and seen him.
    ‘Dan! Hang on!’
    He came across the street smiling. ‘What are you doing back in town?’
    Dan began to explain about the new computer he’d been looking at.