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Without her we should have been almost mute. But then without her all would have gone on as before. ‘Coffee?’ I inquired.
    In the kitchen Adam hovered. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Zoë. It’s no big deal. We all know the score.’ I said nothing. ‘I’ll drive you home if you’ll wait a bit.’
    ‘I’ll walk,’ I said.
    The Johnsons were leaving, discomfited. The display of intimacy had offended them. I was able to wish them a pleasant goodnight, and then I left. I walked home, the rain flattening my hair once again, the pathetic fallacy working overtime. In Edith Grove I fell into a black sleep. Sometime during the night I was aware of the telephone ringing, but could not extricate myself from sleep long enough to answer it. In any event I knew who was calling.
    What stayed with me when I surfaced on the following morning was a feeling of acute shame, even horror, at the memory of my dilapidated appearance. I could see myself with my wet hair, and my two bulging plastic carrier bags: I could still feel the droplet of water making its way down my neck. On such details do our fortunes depend. I did not for a moment blame Adam for his defection, for it seemed to me that I had provoked it. Memory should have told me that this was not the case, that I had chanced upon a matter that I had not been meant to witness, that this incident, though clandestine, had been entered into spontaneously on both sides, that I was, if anything, the intruder, unwelcome, and the more unwelcome because I had discovered Adam to be at fault. For this I blamed myself. In addition to my unfortunate appearance I had cast a shadow over two people’s innocent enjoyment. For I could not see it as particularly reprehensible. The ethos of the age had dismissed loyalty, constancy, fidelity as disqualifiers for successful guilt-free relationships. Such old-fashioned beliefs were dismissed as hang-ups, a cute unserious term for what was in effect a reversal of the established order. I myself had known no guilt when exchanging one partner for another during that first summer in Nice, but somehow that was different, affectionate, as if we were all children accustomed to harmless play on whom the shadow of the adult world had yet to fall. The sun, the sun! In London’s perpetual dusk the incident looked clumsy, badly managed, graceless. At the end of a dark day it took on an air of undeserved finality. The only conclusion to be drawn was that I had been defeated by an adversary whom I could not have anticipated, and had almost sealed my fate by appearing in such an unflattering guise, as if to emphasize my unsuitability for any role other than the one I had come unwittingly to fulfil. There was an inevitability about this scenario that absolved the other two protagonists from blame. I alone, with my wet hair and my plastic bags, was deserving of censure.
    The removal men arrived sharply at eight, and I made tea for them. I had thought that the transference of my furniture would take a mere half-hour, but this was not the case. When I emerged onto the pavement the woman who had congratulated me on my youth and warned me of its inevitable demise was standing there with a suitcase.
    ‘I’m off to warmer climes,’ she informed me. ‘Marbella. You’re leaving, then?’
    I was leaving, I confirmed.
    ‘Give my regards to Mrs Cunningham. Mrs Gould, I must remember to call her.’ She laughed, as if my mother’s marriage were a fantasy. ‘Good luck, then. All the best.’ Like many others she meant well.
    This evidence of other lives proceeding normally was a useful indicator that the world had not come to an end. My feeling of shame had given way to a more settled regret, which was compounded by the unkempt and unfinished appearance of my new home. Until that moment the flat, which I thought of as ‘the other flat’, had seemed temporary, unreal. Now as I went into the much smaller kitchen to make more tea for the men I could see my actions