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guilty about it. I feel I should be able to remember him.”
    “Here.” She opened her handbag. “See if this helps.”
    Dobie took the photograph. It was passport sized and murky in colour, having clearly been taken on one of those do-it-yourself machines, but the facial outlines were clear enough and his recollection was instant. Fidgety Phil. The one whose hands were always moving, playing with a slide-rule, toying with a pencil, riffling a notepad. Front row, right-hand desk. Eyes always moving, too, slithering this way and that. A nervous lad. “So that’s Cantwell.”
    “Remember him now?”
    “Yes.” He gave her back the photograph. “I’m all right with names, you know. And faces, most of the time. It’s putting the two together that I find tricky.”
    “It’s like that with lots of people.”
    “I think,” Dobie said, rather to his own surprise, “my wife’s having an affair.”
    Dr Coyle, on the other hand, evinced no surprise at all. “And I suppose you feel guilty about that, too.”
    “Yes, I do. I always thought it would be the other way round. But it isn’t.”
    “Women don’t feel guilty about that sort of thing. Not as a rule.”
    “Don’t they?”
    “We usually rationalise it, somehow. While men tend more to look for some kind of distraction to take their minds off the problem. The usual kind of distraction is another woman. And so it goes on. Ad infinitum.”
    “Big fleas and little fleas.”
    “Exactly.” Kate studied the distant woods on the hill that lifted itself across the horizon way towards Caerphilly.
    “Sammy’s a very little flea, though, isn’t he? Not much of a distraction, really.”
    “There’s a problem, all the same. A kind of counter-problem.”
    “Not a very interesting one. I don’t know why he did it, but if I did know it wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing can do that.”
    She had lowered her head again and appeared to be studying the shape of her hands, which again lay folded upon her dark-skirted lap. Small pale hands with neat blunt fingernails. She was anything but fidgety. And yet, Dobie thought, that outward relaxation, here as in the courtroom, somehow conveyed the sense of some deeper inward tension. He said, “Do people often talk to you like this?”
    “Of course they talk to me. I’m a doctor.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    Kate, who knew that it wasn’t, nodded and said, “Yes, they do. All the time.”
    “People used to talk to me a lot. I got very tired of it, of listening to problems and so forth. So in the end I sort of shut myself off. It isn’t hard to do. In fact it’s easy.”
    “I know.”
    “But don’t you do that,” Dobie said.
    He saw that she was crying. Female tears invariably embarrassed him, but not on this occasion; it was obvious that she had something to cry about and that these indeed were not female tears but the true lacrimae rerum , a celebration of that great star-laden sadness that sometimes moved behind mathematical symbols as he manoeuvred them across the emptiness of a paper page. Of course he got tired of it. Anyone would. But it was a celebration for all that. He felt in his pocket and discovered there a large white cotton handkerchief, which Kate accepted.
    “Can we maybe talk more later? About Sammy?”
    “It won’t help,” Kate said indistinctly.
    “Not him, no. But it might help me .”
    He got up and walked away down the dusty path. Kate, inaudibly sniffling, watched him go. After a while she put the handkerchief, not very noticeably dampened, into her handbag. She felt a little better now, she thought.
    More relaxed.
     
     
     
    The telephone was ringing as Dobie entered his flat. Nobody, as was evident, was there to answer it. Only us chickens. He bolted into the sitting-room and grabbed the receiver.
    “Yes?… Yes… Oh hullo, Jane.”
    No hurry after all. He pulled up a chair and sat down on it, panting slightly. “Look, I’ve just this moment got back myself, I don’t think