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    â€œThank you for that,” she said.
    â€œThank you , my love.”
    â€œYou know what the trouble is, Sam? Most days I get so tired. By bedtime all I can do is lie here like a sackful of flour.”
    â€œNonsense. You’re a marvellous lay.”
    â€œIt’s sweet of you to say so, but all the same… Well, just wait until the children have left home and then you’ll see how different it will be. Not that I’m wanting to wish any of our lives away, obviously…” She sighed again and I felt her long release of breath, cool, fanning my shoulder blades.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have taken on that extra job today. The decorating. You’d better let me finish.”
    â€œOh, but I told you. I find it creative. Relaxing.”
    â€œMatt won’t be leaving home for six years. Six at the earliest. I’ll be forty-two by then.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that?” She laughed. “And besides. It’ll give me plenty of time to lose weight.”
    â€œI warn you: I’m not waiting six years until our next fuck. I might just get by—with a lot of self-restraint—until the morning.”
    â€œNo, you silly, I didn’t mean that. I meant, until you chase me naked through the house again…”
    â€œAh… Good night, Junie.”
    â€œSleep well, darling.”
    She turned again, and, retreating to her own side of the bed, soon settled into slumber.

7
    I couldn’t sleep, though—not for ages. At first I turned restlessly from side to side but then lay mainly on my back, hands beneath my head. Was Moira awake? I pictured her red hair splayed across the pillow; her slim dancer’s body sprawled languorously and bare; arms stretching in sudden exuberant abandon, as she, like myself, contemplated the future and felt an irresistible urge to express something wonderful. I felt confident that if she were awake she’d be thinking of me—and almost as confident that if she were asleep my shadow would be pressing on her dreams. And her dreams would be in Technicolor.
    I was going to be so good , so worthy of those dreams. A new man. Dynamic, cheerful, kind. Patient; understanding. Aware. Truly the Rock of Gibraltar that Junie sometimes called me.
    Away with gluttony. Meanness. Lack of charity. Away with jealousy and fear; small-mindedness. From now on I’d be living entirely for others. The doorway to life was so blazingly obvious once you’d discovered the key; I could only feel amazed and regretful I hadn’t done so sooner. But at least, thank God, it had happened while I was young. With perhaps a second allocation of thirty-six years still to look forward to.
    Yet even if there wasn’t, even if there was merely one of ten years…five, three, two…why, even this could prove sufficient. The Short Happy Life of Samson Groves .
    Yes. Even one year—broken down into segments—could provide abundance.
    Of course there’d have to be deception. But purely for the common good. It was through Moira that I was going to grow and blossom and bear golden fruit; through me that Moira was going to encounter love and passion and fulfilment. And Junie would awake to find an incomparably more thoughtful and devoted husband. Ella and Matt would awake to find the best damned father on record. It was as simple as that. I aimed to become the kind of dad I myself had used to dream about.
    I remembered not so long after the death of my parents watching a film on television: Down To The Sea In Ships . The story concerned a boy of my own age—an orphan like myself—who, by the end, had discovered not simply a friend but a father-substitute. This, in the person of the young Richard Widmark, whom the lonely lad (and I) had slowly come to idealize. And, oh, the envy that I’d felt! An unremitting ache which for days—weeks—had left me with a sense of deprivation not exactly more real but somehow