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the laundry basket along with one of his shirts. It made sense. We would be back soon and the housekeeper, Mrs Travers, would be in the following day to take care of everything. Mrs Canning was in Vienna for ten days. I remembered the moment well because it gave me such pleasure. That our love was routine, taken for granted, with an immediate future measured in three or four days was comforting. I was often lonely in Cambridge, waiting for Tony’s call to the payphone in the hallway. In a passing moment of something like wifely entitlement, I lifted the wicker lid and dropped my blouse on top of his shirt and thought no more about it. Sarah Travers came in three times a week from the nearest village. We once spent a pleasant half-hour shelling peas together at the kitchen table and she told me about her son, gone off to be a hippiein Afghanistan. She said it with pride, as though he’d joined the army for a necessary and dangerous war. I didn’t like to think about it too closely, but I assumed she had seen a succession of Tony’s women friends pass through the cottage. I don’t think she cared, as long as she was paid.
    Back on Jesus Green four days went by and I heard nothing. Obediently, I read up on the Factory Acts and the Corn Laws and studied the newspaper. I saw some friends who were passing through, but never wandered far from the phone. On the fifth day I went to Tony’s college, left a note with the porter and hurried home, worried that I might have missed his call. I couldn’t ring him – my lover had taken care not to give me his home phone number. He rang that evening. His voice was flat. Without greeting, he instructed me to be at the bus stop the following morning at ten. I was halfway through asking him a plaintive question when he hung up. Naturally, I didn’t sleep much that night. Amazing to think that I lay awake worrying about him , when I should have known in my silly heart that I was for the chop.
    At dawn I took a bath and made myself fragrant. By seven I was ready. What a hopeful fool, to have packed a bag with the underwear he liked (black of course, and purple) and plimsolls for walking in the woods. I was at the bus stop by nine twenty-five, worried that he’d be early and disappointed not to find me there. He came around ten fifteen. He pushed open the passenger door and I crawled in, but there was no kiss. Instead he kept both hands on the wheel and pulled away hard from the kerb. We drove ten miles or so and he wouldn’t speak to me. His knuckles were white from his grip and he would only look ahead. What was the matter? He wouldn’t tell me. And I was frantic, intimidated by the way he swung his little car out across the lanes, overtaking recklessly on rises and bends, as if to warn me of the storm to come.
    He doubled back towards Cambridge on a roundabout andpulled into a lay-by off the A45, a place of oily, littered grass with a kiosk on worn bare ground that sold hot dogs and burgers to lorry drivers. At this time in the morning the stall was shuttered and padlocked and no one else was parked there. We got out. It was the worst kind of day at the end of summer – sunny, windy, dusty. To our right was a widely spaced row of parched sycamore saplings and on the other side of it the traffic was whining and roaring. It was like being on the edge of a race track. The lay-by was a couple of hundred yards long. He set off along it and I kept by his side. To talk we almost had to shout.
    The first thing he said was, ‘So your little trick didn’t work.’
    ‘What trick?’
    I quickly turned over the recent past. Since there was no trick, I was suddenly hopeful that there was a simple matter we could straighten out in seconds. We could be laughing about this, I even thought. We could be making love before noon.
    We reached the point where the lay-by joined the road. ‘Get this clear,’ he said, and we stopped. ‘You’ll never get between Frieda and me.’
    ‘Tony, what trick