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‘For God's sake, we had no idea where you were,' she yelled. ‘I want you to move out. I can't have this.'

Winston was at the top of the stairs, holding the door as Eloise bumped past him. He came down and got the buggy.

‘I was just trying,' Sarah said, and then she found she couldn't say another word. She was crying and blubbing and Winston was
putting his arm round her shoulders, half picking up the buggy with the other hand.

‘She – we were just a bit worried. Maybe a note?'

Sarah nodded her head. ‘I'll pack my things.'

‘Hey.' He turned her face in his hand, a very soft hand. ‘Hey. She didn't mean anything. She always says stuff when she's mad, but she doesn't mean it.'

Sarah stayed in her room, only coming out to make toast when she thought she heard them going to bed. But Winston was still in the kitchen.

‘You OK?' he said.

‘Yeah, fine.'

‘Tea?'

‘Why not.'

They were whispering.

‘Looks like you're the only one of my students who's coming to the Bradford poetry symposium.'

‘Well, they'll be the ones missing out.'

He smiled.

‘Night then.'

‘Sleep well.'

Sarah slept terribly. Or sweetly. Depending on how you looked at it. She was woken by a vivid dream, the weight of a long, tender body weighing down her own. When she woke she felt bereft.

She saw him clearing away his duvet from the sitting-room sofa. Eloise was in the kitchen; gave her head a little flick as if shaking something away when Sarah came in, but she made no mention of the pushchair incident. Sarah gathered that Eloise had come round to letting her stay.

‘You haven't been helping yourself to coffee, have you?' Eloise said, as she held a spoonful of rice mess in front of the baby.

‘No,' Sarah said. She hadn't taken it without meaning to replace it. But she was too embarrassed to explain, especially being put on the spot like that.

As she was going out of the front door for her early lecture, Winston came running down the hallway stairs, his jacket flapping.

‘I'll give you a lift in.'

‘You don't have to,' her eyes going to where Eloise was sitting above them.

‘Don't be silly. I'm going in anyway.'

Sarah gave a quick brush to all the rusk crumbs on the front seat and climbed in. She watched his arms turning the wheel, thumping it down with force, watched the long side of his neck as he strained his head to see behind and a luxurious feeling of being cared for came over her as she sat beside him, like a maid with her knight. Winston smiled at her, pulled out into the traffic.

‘Got you a train ticket for next weekend,' he said. ‘I got the cheap deal, so I picked one up for you too.'

‘Wow. Thanks.'

‘And Anne Ralphs is speaking on Frost.'

‘I love Robert Frost.'

Sarah noticed that her heart was beating faster again.

At the station Sarah settled up with Winston for the train ticket. Insisted. He said he'd managed to get two rooms at a place that wasn't too dear. Sarah nodded. Said thanks. They got on the train and sat down side by side, facing backwards. It was a Friday night and the train was very full. There were people standing in the aisle, pressing up against the seats. By the time they pulled into Bradford Sarah had
slid down, sleeping with her head on his shoulder, and stayed there when she came to. When she couldn't bear the crick in her neck any more she made like she was just waking up, and Winston, acting as if it was completely natural that she should have slept like that, beamed a smile down at her.

She'd imagined the hotel as atmospheric and romantic. It was even more run-down than the Jacksons' flat: a boarding house with a reception desk crammed into a narrow Victorian hallway, a loud TV on a shelf above it and a noticeboard full of rules in several languages. A man who seemed to have slumped on the stool several years ago kept breaking off to shout in Greek at two kids playing on the floor.

‘Room 5. You can go up, but I dunno,' he said, ‘that cleaner, she slow.' He looked at the TV as he spoke.

‘But didn't we book two rooms?' asked Winston. The man stared at him, shook his head, and Winston blushed.

They had to go up three flights of stairs. Doorways opened onto life crowded into small rooms, washing drying on radiators, children sitting listless on a bed.

They found the room. Winston unlocked the door and they stood and looked around. The bed was unmade, someone's sheets still on and trailing on the floor. The carpet was covered in bits, in screwed-up, ripped paper. Looked like it hadn't been hoovered in years. Empty baked bean cans and beer bottles overflowed from the bin.

Sarah was trying to think what the smell was. Old dishcloths? A little girl came and stood in the doorway. She was Indian, plaits and a tunic dress. She held on to the doorpost, swinging round it, staring at them shyly. There was shouting from a woman's voice down the corridor. She grinned at Sarah and ran away.

‘It's for the homeless,' he said. ‘Must be being used for council overflow for the homeless.'

Sarah had made her mind up. ‘Let's go to the hotel by the station. And I've got money in my account so I won't hear of you saying no.'

The reception area was filled with plastic plants and mirrors and low lighting. Sarah paid for a room with two single beds. It was much dearer than she thought it would be, so two separate rooms were out of the question.

Long corridors of turquoise carpet. Two chocolates, one on each pillow of the two single beds. The walls were covered in swirling turquoise and lime flowers. The same flowers swarmed over the bed covers.

They had dinner in the restaurant. They both had steak and chips and black forest gateau. The Irish coffee afterwards was too frothy and sweet. Together with the sweet white wine it made Sarah's head woozy. Walking back along the corridor, he held her hand. The woody smell of Winston's aftershave, the musk from under his arms.

In the room someone had turned the sheets back. Winston picked up the chocolate on his pillow and began to eat it. He offered her the other one but she shook her head. He put it down on the dressing table and stood in front of her. He took a step closer and placed both arms round her, leaned his head down on top of hers. She could feel the prickle of stubble through the hair on top of her scalp. She thought how she would tip her face up, begin to kiss him.

He began to place small kisses along her parting, on her forehead, his shoulder in her face, his hands hot and trembling as they pressed into the tops of her arms, gripping too hard. She turned her face up, let her lips travel over his chin. She felt repulsed by the uneven, stubbly male skin. There was a smell of wine and chocolate on his breath, and that slightly unwashed odour from beneath his jacket. What she wanted was to breathe cool air, breathe freely.

‘Stop.' He didn't seem to have heard. ‘Stop a moment. Wait,' getting
angry now. She pushed his arms away, stepped back, gulping in the air of a stuffy hotel room, rubbing the places on her arms.

He looked astonished. ‘Sarah?'

‘I don't want to do this,' she shouted at him, unspeakably angry now. ‘What d'you think you're doing?' She might as well have slapped him.

‘But I thought.'

‘You thought. You're married for God's sake. It's disgusting.'

He dropped his head on his chest, the guilt and the shame arriving all in one package, just for him.

‘I'm sorry,' he began. ‘I'm sorry. I thought.'

They took it in turns to use the bathroom, slid into their beds and said goodnight. Then they both lay tense and silent in the noisy darkness of the town, the diffuse street glow through the thin curtains.

Long after his breathing became heavy with sleep Sarah still lay awake in the dark and stuffy air. She felt cold tears down the side of her skull. She lay, mourning how Winston's sweet weight and long limbs had moved through her dreams. And later, as she began to go down into sleep, she found another feeling, spiteful and triumphant – because he shouldn't have done it, should he? Because he had got what he deserved.

She remembered the boys she had flirted with, encouraged, in the union bar after a couple of drinks. How she had liked to see that look in their eyes, when innocent and hopeful and close they had asked her out, wanted to walk home with her, and she had made them feel small and stupid, laughed and told them to push off.

She opened her eyes wide into the darkness and realised in that moment what she had done: she had chosen Winston, because she knew that it would end this way; she'd wanted to leave him smarting; she'd known that in the end she would stay safely alone, sleeping in a single bed.

She cried then, because she understood that it wasn't in her to want anything else. Romance, falling in love, someone had buckled the tracks a long time ago; trying to set out to those places now was always going to take her somewhere she didn't want to go.

She thought about leaving first thing in the morning and missing the symposium. But here was the thing: just how much more was there still to be lost? Angry now, she determined to stick it out and go to it, enjoy the poetry and writers who would be there, lose herself in the intensity of other people's worlds.

In the morning she and Winston took turns in the shower, hearty and polite as if there had never been any other agenda to their camping arrangements. Went down to a breakfast of tinned tomatoes and watery scrambled egg. The consolation of toast and marmalade.

He said, ‘I'd better get going.'

She nodded. ‘I'll follow on. You're speaking, so.'

She was relieved when he left, the horrible intimacy over. As soon as she got back to the Jacksons' she was going to ask Laura if she could still move into Sally's old room. She saw them toasting slices of bread in front of the gas fire.

She walked down to the drab modern campus on her own, and the wind picked at her. She was damp and cold in a drab city, and this would be her life, walking alone, all those sweet destinations overshot.

In the glass foyer of the entrance she spotted a familiar figure and froze. What was he doing here? Wondered if there was another event going on, something mindless and sporty. She hoped to sidle past him into the lecture theatre, but as she handed in her ticket at the desk Nicky turned and saw her. His face lit up.

He chugged over, clean and uncomplicated and handsome. ‘Hi. You're here. Worried you'd bailed. You said you were getting a ticket in the Yeats seminar, so I thought, good idea.' He seemed under some misapprehension that she'd be pleased to see him there. He smelled
of fresh air from the wind outside. She couldn't read his expression as he half laughed and steered her into the gloom of the auditorium – she shifted away from the warmth of the hand that he had placed in the small of her back.

He found them seats near the front and sat down alongside her, pleased with himself, his left knee jigging and making the row of seats vibrate gently. Just the two of them, since they were in fact really early, alone in the banks of empty seats. And she wondered for a moment, could it be possible, had he really come partly in the hope of meeting up? But she wasn't his type, nothing like the Camillas and the Cassandras in his little group.

She looked sideways – and yes, he was completely handsome, dark red hair that always made her stomach flip, clear cheeks, flushed with pink today, a fine mouth. Then they had to stand to let others into the row and he took her elbow, made her jump, and he laughed about that. He carried on holding her arm, his hand warm and homely and oddly comforting, and out of nowhere she found that she wanted to cry.

CHAPTER 27

Gairloch, 1981

She had fallen in love. She had gone ahead with planning the wedding. But it had been wrong of her. The marquee. The bloody cake. The frock. All the guests. And then she'd heard that he'd be there. Leading the wedding service. And everything crumbled to ash. A taste of ash in her mouth. She was fooling herself. She should never have let it go so far.