Prologue

It snowed in the night. I sat where now I stand, watching the wind scatter the flakes in the haloes of the street-lamps, listening as its high, moaning voice strained among the chimneypots. All night, and all last evening from the earliest tinge of dusk, I sat where now I stand – and waited.

And now the waiting is nearly over. The sun is up, low in a clear, cold sky and, thrown up from the snow-covered pavement, a strange, reflected half-light creeps across the ceiling of the room. An hour, it signals, to the moment I have long known this day would hold. An hour – or less – to the sombre end of my flight from self.

What is she thinking, across the city in her crowded, brick-bound solitude? What farewell is she bidding, what leave is she taking, of that meagre portion of this world? When the hour is up, when the time is come, what will I seem to her? What will I seem to myself?

A taxi-cab has turned in at the end of the mews. It has come to collect me, come to bear me away in answer to a summons I once believed I could evade for ever. Once, but no longer. Not since that day last autumn when I heard her name again after twelve years’ silence and knew – for all my efforts to stifle the knowledge – that an old deceit was about to claim its due. Not since that day, which now, as the cab glides to a halt, black and burnished against the bare white carpet of snow, I relive in my memory. That day, and all the days since.