Anna heard nothing from Oliver after her failure to turn up in the Barton Road on the night when Henry was in Cambridge. At first she expected to hear nothing. She was absorbed in the sense that things were happening at some distance from her, and that if she only kept quite still and did nothing, things would continue to happen without her, which was what she wanted. But after a fortnight or so she became rather irritably curious. It was mean of Oliver, she felt, to make no attempt to let her know what had happened, or what was happening, or when the confrontation, if there was to be one, would take place. It was an indrawn, inactive curiosity, nevertheless.
She was expecting what she, like most women, called the curse, and was one of those who, despite the assurances of modern medical pamphlets, suffered badly from it. At school she had several times fainted dramatically in prayers, which had increased her unpopularity with those in charge, since for some reason one fainting fit in a crowd of girls almost invariably triggers off others, and the ranks of gym-slipped figures had then swayed like saplings in a storm, with here and there a crash on the polished boards of the hall. Anna still always spent the first few days of the curse curled up on hands and knees on the floor, swaying from side to side with pain and wishing she were dead. But this was always quite exciting and led to a period where some activity seemed possible.
It was the week before the curse, this week, she thought vaguely, not having really counted, that was to be dreaded. It was a lifeless week, a heavy, miserable week, a week of grief and pressure and hopelessness whose cause Anna usually managed to work out, and which she knew, rationally, would pass as it must with time; she was nevertheless always completely submerged by it. It was something to do with blood pressure on the brain, she had read somewhere, or with accumulation of fluid in the body. She had read too that most crimes committed by women – and not only crimes but driving offences and accidents – were committed during this miserable week. And once she had been lectured passionately by a woman don on the injustice of this man’s world where a woman might have to sit an examination on which her future depended in this lifeless week. It was the sort of thing that would interest Oliver, that, Anna told herself; except that he would probably say with some justice that if women were subject to fits of despondency and unbalance of this kind every four weeks it was maybe right to employ men before them. No one will employ me, anyway, she thought; it won’t make much difference when I sit an exam, what week it is.
She felt extraordinarily tired, and brooded over Oliver, Margaret, Henry and Mexico with a vague distaste for all of them; they were against her, in some undefined way, all of them, and they were best disposed of by keeping away from them and assuming they were not quite real. She was so tired that she told herself she was not very well, and ought to keep still; she spent her time in her room, only going out occasionally to have meals in Hall, or to look at the pigeonhole in which, if it ever came, she would find Oliver’s letter. She wondered idly how many other people in this intensely active society spent all their time sitting submerged in one room, and was sorry for them. Mostly she did just sit. Not reading, not thinking, just sitting on the end of the bed and staring out at the College garden, at the trees, and the lawns which must have been so enthusiastically walked about on by the earlier generations of young women in boaters and long serge skirts, and looked now as though they must have been empty ever since. Anna stared and stared, waiting for something to happen – the curse, Oliver’s letter, her event, or at least the next meal.
It was a curious period of her life to which she later looked back with incomprehension. The sky was heavy, an opaque slate grey for days on end, and her body was heavy, and she had reached what everyone would surely consider a crisis; and all she could do was stare, until even those heavy November skies took on a luminousness, a sort of ponderous, unrelated significance. Each bird mattered; a line of starlings, like fluttering dull rags falling, and then, as they gathered themselves, stretched and climbed, iridescent blue-green; the odd gunmetal pigeon, turning with a streak of brightness on its neck, against a gunmetal sky; they were omens, or rather they were ominous, it made some indefinable difference to have watched and seen them.
She tucked her legs under her, and let her hands rest on her crossed ankles so that she was squat and heavy, a broad-based triangle, watched for a morning or an afternoon, and then when the gong boomed, uncurled herself and went down to meals. She thought once, if I go on like this they’ll find out, and send me down, and that’ll fix it, but this idea came from somewhere very far away, not connected to her or what she was doing. She was so much not there that it was inconceivable that anyone should notice her; she could sit and sit and sit, and no one ever came, no one knew, no one cared, no one was in a position to care. She had the idea that it was like waiting to be born; pressure and incapacity, and inactivity, and a sense of complete ignorance combined with an almost entirely physical certainty that something momentous was in the offing, but could hardly come, because it was inconceivable. Like death, for that matter, of which she was afraid, because she could imagine the point of time before it. The thing itself, the complete change of circumstances, she could not imagine.
Finally, one weekend, when it was likely, although she had inspected the box every day for a week and a half before, finding only two messages from Peter Hughes-Winterton which she had put away unread, the letter from Oliver came. It was brief and unsigned. ‘Why have I heard nothing from you? I shall be in the usual place tonight if you want to come.’
Anna was sure immediately that she did not want to go. It would be a terrible trouble, Oliver would ask questions, she would have to argue. He would expect an attitude, and she had not got one.
The thought of Oliver had brought a restlessness into her mood from time to time; she had missed him, dreamed about him occasionally, saved up for him the importance of the line of blown starlings as though it was something he could be told, as though the importance could be communicated outside her room, beyond herself. Sometimes she had thought, loving him, I am seeing this cloud or that tree for him, for Oliver, that is its meaning. And sometimes it had been to betray the object, to reduce it to these human terms. Love was not necessary to vision. Nor Oliver to love, it seemed suddenly; to remember him and need him seemed much more desirable than to walk out of the College and actually to confront him. He would bring up things. Henry, Margaret; irrelevant things.
Nevertheless, she put on a jacket at about seven that evening and went out. If she did not sign out, it was unlikely that she would be missed if she didn’t come back; that at least had always worked before. Cambridge was cold and sloppy, and out towards the edges of the town, badly lit. Anna walked rapidly round the puddles, clutching the furry collar of her jacket around her throat. She knew this walk by heart, was mesmerized by it, had learned off every bush and gatepost, and would pace it in imagination as a substitute for counting sheep, to put herself to sleep at night. She had been forbidden to ride a bicycle. Oliver had pointed out sensibly that one might be recognized if she left it out in the drive. When she came, the house was dark, so that she wondered for a moment whether Oliver was, after all, not there. She tried the door, which they left open by arrangement; it opened; she walked in as she always did. The house was still dark, but there was a sound in the kitchen. Anna made her way, blindly and confidently, between the vases and tables to the back of the house. Oliver was sitting at the kitchen table, under the thin, greyish light, his head in his hands and a blue plastic shopping bag in front of him.
Anna said, ‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo,’ said Oliver, without lifting his head. ‘You’re late. I thought you weren’t coming.’
‘I did, you can see.’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, and for a moment they were both silent.
‘Shall I take off my jacket?’
‘If you’re staying.’
Anna hung her jacket over a chair, crossed the room and switched on the electric bowl fire which they stood on top of the Aingers’ Aga range – it was not worth lighting the Aga for Oliver’s weekends. The copper glowed red after a moment; Anna leaned over it, her back to Oliver, and warmed her hands.
‘It’s ghastly cold. Why hadn’t you put the fire on?’
Oliver didn’t answer. After some time, he said, ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’
‘Nothing. Really nothing. Just sitting in my room.’
‘Working for a change?’
‘No. Just sitting.’
‘Wasting some other girl’s chance of a good education. Why didn’t you write to me?’
‘I didn’t think of it.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Why didn’t you think of explaining why you didn’t come, last time? What did you expect me to think?’
‘Oliver, don’t. I knew you were going to make an issue of it. I can’t bear it if you start nagging. Really. I wish I hadn’t come.’
‘I only want to know why you didn’t come, last time. You must see that.’
‘You know why I didn’t. My father came. He said he … I didn’t know what was happening.’
‘So you took no steps to find out?’
‘No.’
‘That’s like you. Is there anything you would exert yourself about? Or maybe it’s just me – just my affairs – just my … that you don’t feel obliged to bother about?’
‘Oliver – you know I care. I do care. Look, here I am. I just didn’t know what was happening, that’s all. But here I am – can’t we just be like we used to be? And not talk about it?’
‘In a moment,’ said Oliver doggedly. ‘He came to see me, you know.’
Anna said nothing.
‘He was rather unpleasant, I thought. I told him he’d no right to interfere. I told him you’d do what you pleased, whatever he said. I told him he wasn’t in a position to tell you what to do.’
‘Well?’
‘He had nothing to say. As I expected.’
‘Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?’ said Anna. She felt that it was very far from all right; that Henry could not be dismissed in so cavalier a fashion; that he had a right to be heard, and his way of looking was not yet proved wrong. And that Henry was nothing Oliver should be allowed so easily to despise or pull down. But she was very weary, she would do what came.
‘It’s all right if you think it is,’ Oliver said. ‘When you didn’t come I didn’t know what you did think.’
Anna did not think anything formulated enough to communicate. She said, ‘I’m hungry. Can we eat? Let’s not make a scene, please, let’s not.’
Oliver pushed the blue shopping bag across the table in her direction.
‘You’ll have to come to grips with things some time,’ he said. Anna ignored this. She opened the shopping bag and found a tin of luncheon meat, a tin of baked beans, a sliced white loaf, a packet of margarine, a tin of peaches and two bottles of beer. Oliver had what amounted to a moral belief that in order to eat simply one must eat nastily, as his mother had done, as everyone had had to do in the war. Anna had tried on previous occasions to explain to him that an unsliced loaf could be fresher, that things could be done with eggs or cheese and potatoes, that were impossible with luncheon meat, that the extra few pence spent on butter made a great difference, that you could buy a whole ripe melon for the price of a tin of gluey peaches, that food could be a pleasure. At these times Caroline came out strongly in her. Oliver would retort illogically that he had never seen any point in making a fuss about food, and add that he had never been able to tell the difference between butter and margarine anyway, and what was more, didn’t believe that she could with her eyes shut.
Anna gave up arguing when she worked out that this everyday food was a way of keeping her in her place as a Severell, and of emphasizing Oliver’s own natural place. It was one of his social quirks, that was all, and better ignored. Today the thought of the grainy texture and artificial metallic taste of the luncheon meat made her feel sick, but she turned out the contents of the tin of beans – a basic food that she did like – into a pan, and stirred them over the gas without speaking. Oliver put out the meat, and brought plates and forks, and in a moment they were sitting, as usual, one each side of the scarlet formica, with the hot tomato sauce slopped on the cold chunks of meat, and a piece of bread and margarine on the table top beside them.
Oliver said, ‘I can’t think what he’d got himself all worked up about. He’s never shown any signs of caring what happened to you before, has he?’
‘Well –’
‘And now he wants to give you some money and send you away, he says. Or something like that. As though anyone couldn’t see that the things you must face are here. And now.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘He can’t avoid things that way.’
‘Oliver, you’re nagging again. You’re …’
‘Do you know what he told me? He seems to think that I – that you – that all this is my way of what he calls getting at him. A – a kind of revenge on him. For being a great writer I suppose. I can’t see any other meaning in it.’
‘Well, it’s a feeling we all have, isn’t it? That he’s an injustice of some kind? That no one has a right to be so sure …’
‘Anna. Now, look, tell me – you don’t think there’s anything in this? This revenge?’
‘No,’ said Anna wearily. She didn’t want to have to feel anything about anything. She pushed away her plate and said, ‘I can’t eat this meat, Oliver, I just can’t. I don’t feel very well, I’m sorry.’
‘You must tell me what you think.’
Anna, from a great distance, tried very hard. ‘No one does anything only for one reason ever, do they? I mean, both you and I are drawn together partly because we’re frightened of him, or discouraged by him, or something like him. For comfort, I’ve always thought that. But it’s silly to think that’s the only reason, or the most important. If I thought you were only getting at him through me, because I’m his daughter, I wouldn’t come here. Obviously I wouldn’t. Would I?’
‘I was really put out. Such a pettiness …’
‘Don’t.’ Anna was herself, in spite of the reasonable tone she was managing quite nicely, put out by Oliver’s revelation of Henry’s view of the affair. She was aware that Oliver was forcing the issue, making her decide to come down, deliberately and publicly, on his side. She knew that Henry was partially right, and thought she knew that he was in a larger sense wrong. But she was hurt that he could think so little of her that he could believe her so easy for Oliver to take in. And above all, weary of having to work out other people’s feelings in relation to herself. It was best, even if one knew it was not true, to be able to act as though no one thought about her when she was not there. She said:
‘I expect it seems quite reasonable to him. I mean, you do attack him rather, don’t you? And he wouldn’t understand us – you and me – how could he? I mean, you’ve got Margaret, it’s not as though … You can’t expect him to understand anyone needed comfort. He doesn’t need it. All right, he’s wrong, but do we have to worry about him?’
She knew that she herself would have to worry, at some later time. But not now, not now. If Oliver went on talking about Henry, they would work themselves into just the scene she would do anything to avoid. Oliver pushed his last little block of meat into his mouth and chewed it with obvious enjoyment. Then he pointed his fork at Anna and began again.
‘I admire his work. I can’t help it. I admire it more than anything else being written. I have to. But that’s no reason for what he suggests, and no reason for him to dictate my actions –’
‘He’s not dictating yours, it’s mine, isn’t it, he cares about?’ This was meant to annoy. It did.
Oliver said, ‘I had hoped the two were interchangeable, here.’
‘Oliver, you’re nagging again, terribly. You’ve got to stop, I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Please stop going on and on about him – he’s gone home and he’s probably busy writing away and not thinking about us at all, and that’s an end of it. I’d never come here again if I thought we were just going to go on and on discussing him. It’s just what you ought to think would be very bad for me.’ She said urgently, in another voice, ‘Besides, I’m going to be ill. It’s that foul luncheon meat. I wish you’d buy something else.’
Oliver opened his mouth to say something, but had no time to get it out before Anna was violently sick. She just managed to reach the sink. Oliver watched her for a moment, closed his mouth, and then asked very sharply, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’ Anna ran the taps, both of them full on. ‘A worried tummy. Worry takes me that way. I’m sorry to be so disgusting, it seems to happen when I’m with you, doesn’t it? I feel better for it, if that consoles you.’
Oliver looked as though it didn’t much. He said, ‘The Aingers left a bottle of whiskey. Would that be good or bad?’
‘Good, I think. Either that, or it’ll finish me off. Do you think we ought to take their whiskey?’
‘I’ll replace it.’
Anna was not sure that he would, but could not care. Oliver, distracted from Henry, became very gentle; he shepherded her into the drawing room and settled her in a chair. ‘Just keep still,’ he said, with practical firmness. ‘You look terrible.’ He bent and kissed her for the first time that evening – an undemanding, reassuring kiss which made Anna suddenly want to weep with gratitude. He could be so good, she thought, as he went out again, so comfortable. The room was back with her, familiar now. For years after she had forgotten Oliver, she imagined, these things, red velvet and bearskins, pampas grass and Benares brass, cylindrical cushions and Chinese jars would knot in her midriff, disturb her, claim extra attention, put her on her guard. She thought, he has done this at least to me more or less permanently. And then, if this is all he has done I suppose I am lucky.
Oliver returned with whiskey, hot water and tumblers. He poured Anna what seemed to her a very strong drink, and then, after some thought, an even stronger one for himself. He sat down in the chair opposite her and said, ‘I don’t like you to look like that, Anna; I feel it’s my fault.’
The harrying tone had gone; he leaned back on the chair, unusually relaxed, his face, as it always was at these times, less fine-drawn, older, kinder. Anna took a gulp of whiskey. Once it was inside her she was not sure it was a good thing. She took another, hopefully.
‘Drink it slowly,’ Oliver said. ‘It’s not medicine, it’s good whiskey. I do hope you are happy, Anna. I hope I’ve made things better for you. I meant to, whatever he may think.’
‘I feel distant from things,’ Anna said, describing the happiness she had, and meaning that she felt distant from Oliver too. She was not sure if he had heard her; he was lying back in the chair, his face turned to the ceiling, his eyes closed. She took another mouthful of whiskey, studied him, and felt a prick of desire for him in her distance. Since she had known him she had learned to recognize a female version of the male undressing look, which masqueraded most often as an absentminded stare or an especially intent friendly smile – always a furtive excitement under some look that denied it. Anna began to think that she had done right to come. She might gain a peace from sleeping next to Oliver tonight, a real peace. He was now so much the only human being she trusted; indeed, in many ways, the only human being she knew. How impoverished I am, she thought. But not bitterly. If they could sit together like this all evening, she would have as much as she wanted or could manage. She would be comforted.
Oliver sat up abruptly and said, ‘But we’ve got to talk. Haven’t we? We’ve got to come to some decision about what to do next. We can’t go on pretending that this is just a temporary entanglement, can we? We must say where we stand?’
‘Oliver,’ said Anna, sitting up. ‘Oh, don’t –’
‘If we’re going to go on seeing each other, we must know on what terms. I saw that when he came. It’s been my fault. I’ve pretended to be looking after you, and pushing you around, and I’ve said nothing about myself. I’m not very good at talking about myself. I’m afraid of being snubbed. I’ve never been able to afford to lay myself open to being hurt. But it isn’t fair to you – oh, and let’s be honest, it’s impossible for me, any longer – to pretend that I’m not – involved. I don’t want to go on in this hole and corner way. I want to be with you, Anna, openly.’
In Henry’s face, Anna thought, and clutched desperately at the arms of her chair, so that her nails scratched and slipped on the leather. She said, ‘Oliver, please, don’t.’
‘You’ve been very good, you’ve never said anything about my being married, you’ve been remarkably accepting. Remarkably. But I’ve no right to expect you to go on indefinitely – not when we’re both deeply involved. As we are. Both of us.’
‘You don’t have to –’
‘Listen to me, Anna. I want to tell you about Margaret. For my sake. I want you to know what I’m like.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No, don’t. I don’t want to know.’
‘He spoke to you about her.’
‘Yes. But it doesn’t make any difference. It can’t. Oh, please –’
‘You must listen to me, too, Anna,’ said Oliver leaning forward and bearing down. ‘I need you to listen. I want you to share.’
‘No,’ cried Anna frantically, standing up and retreating into the window. ‘I said I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to care. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I see,’ said Oliver. The dry sharpness crept back into his voice. ‘I suppose I partly knew you’d take that line. I hoped you might have grown out of it. May I just ask, what did you think about me and Margaret, then? I suppose you must have thought a little? Or did you just assume we were happily married thank you, and that you were just an extra amusement, for my spare time, my weekends off?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, since that was what she had thought.
‘And you thought that was satisfactory? You thought I thought that was satisfactory?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna flatly. She saw Oliver’s face and added, ‘Oh, I know you’re very puritanical, but you’re very contradictory too. Aren’t you?’
Oliver demanded loudly, ‘Then what do you want?’
‘I told you,’ said Anna, still flatly. ‘Comfort. A resting place. Someone – you – to talk to. Not to have to worry about people’s feelings all the time. No more. I’m sorry.’
Oliver was silent for a long time, presumably digesting this; Anna could not look at him to see. Then he said wearily, ‘Well, what shall we do?’
‘Just go on?’ said Anna doubtfully. She was aware that she had hurt him, and could not summon up the strength to do anything about it. It had never been her place to comfort him, and she didn’t know how to begin; besides being uncertain whether she wanted to.
‘Well –’
Anna went over to him and sat at his feet. She said, ‘It seems to spoil things to think about them,’ and, ‘I’m sorry. I feel so ill, I can’t think, I don’t know what’s the matter.’
This was the right move; it allowed Oliver to escape the impasse by being kind and practical to her; they managed to spend what was left of the evening more or less peacefully, discussing the Sunday papers, and other neutral things.
Anna was aware that they both hoped that a solution, or at least a wiping out of what had passed, could be achieved in bed. They went to bed early. Anna managed to be privately sick again in the lavatory before going into the bedroom. She lost the whiskey and retched on an empty stomach for a moment or two until tears came to her eyes. She swallowed finally on the bitter taste left by the whiskey as though it was an injustice Oliver had done her. She was beginning to think that she had been attacked by food poisoning or an ulcer; practical worries about her health were another inheritance from Caroline that were just beginning to be apparent in her. She found a thermometer in the bathroom cupboard and took her temperature; it was just slightly above normal. I must keep an eye on it, she told herself quite in Caroline’s manner, and went through into the bedroom where Oliver was already sitting bolt upright and naked on one edge of the enormous concave mattress.
‘I never know what women find to do in bathrooms,’ he observed precisely, whilst Anna undressed. They were beyond romantic modesty and the saving up of nakedness for the ultimate moment, but they were not the kind that romps, or laughs, or admires or discusses each other’s body. Anna clambered up onto the bed beside him, and realized that whatever saving grace there might have been in passion, she could not face it. When Oliver made a move towards her she said with unintentional sharpness, ‘Please be gentle, I feel bad,’ and Oliver stiffened for a moment, and then was, silently and with some grace, very gentle. Afterwards they lay quietly with Anna curled against Oliver, her head on his shoulder. In the beginning, Anna had assumed that it was possible to sleep like this, but Oliver, disillusioned by other experience, always shifted her carefully and turned away from her, into himself, to sleep. He did this early tonight, and Anna, feeling that she had come to the end of something, slept almost immediately herself.
She woke quite suddenly, several hours later, feeling weighted and suffocated, tried for five minutes to pretend that she was not awake and to sink back into sleep, and then struggled out from under the hump of bedclothes onto the pillow. Oliver’s head, turned away, was a furry black space beside her; beyond him, she could see the luminous circle of figures on his alarm clock. It was three o’clock. Anna decided that she felt now not so much ill as overcome. It was dark and stuffy, and the pressure inside her was so great that it seemed the curse must come at any moment now; something sharp and precise tugged like a plucked string in her belly and was decidedly unpleasant. She saw quickly that she would not be able to sleep again – there was nothing worse, she thought, hating Oliver for his unconcerned withdrawal, than having insomnia when one was sharing a bed with someone who could sleep and would be disturbed if one tossed about too much, or put the light on to read. She sat up cautiously and looked down on him, and despair swept over her. It was the black, angry despair of curse pressure; she realized this, and yet believed as she always did, that there was no reason to suppose that what she saw in these moments of lucid misery was any further from an ultimate truth because it took up only one week out of four. It made so much more impression on her, after all, than whatever occurred in those three other relatively placid weeks. She felt that she had come to nothing, utterly to nothing, that she had not lived one moment of her life, and probably would not. It was so powerful that it felt like a final revelation.
She remembered what she had felt when Henry left her, and thought that she had been right; this was too much for her, too much was expected of her, unless she moved quickly she would find that she had been radically affected, even changed, by Oliver, and nothing could be further than that from whatever she was waiting for. Oliver was not being helpful; he was beginning to talk too much. I won’t come to my event, she told herself, with the mind of someone who had been involved with Oliver Canning. I shouldn’t be fit. I must save myself.
She slipped out of bed carefully and began to dress in the dark, automatically and with surprising speed. It was the small clatter she made amongst the things on the dressing table, seeking blindly for her comb, that woke Oliver. She heard him stir and feel for her; then he said, ‘Anna,’ switched on the lamp and sat up.
Anna blinked at him, found the comb, and began to coil her hair round her head, feeling composed and unreal.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going,’ Anna said, applying hair pins.
‘Why?’
‘I can’t sleep. I can’t stand it any more. I don’t want to go on with this any more. I’m going back.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ said Anna finally, ‘it’s the only thing to do.’
Her absolute certainty of this seemed to convey itself to Oliver; he did not speak for some time, and then said, ‘It seems a bit silly to start a scene at this time. I’ll drive you back and you can think it over.’
‘I don’t want a scene, now or ever. I only want to go. And I don’t have to think it over; I know. And it’s no good driving me back because College doesn’t open until breakfast time.’
‘Hadn’t you better wait, in that case, until you can get in? You’re not very well.’
‘No,’ Anna persisted. ‘I’ve got to go now.’
She looked at him, curious about what he might do. Now she was dressed, his naked trunk protruding above the sheets seemed ridiculous and faintly obscene. The room was heavy with slept in bedclothes and the warmth of sleep. Anna half hoped, as she had hoped earlier with Henry after running away from school, that he would now ask the right question, say the right thing, break her stubborn silence which she had neither power nor inclination to break herself. She was very conscious that if it had been any other week she would never have got so far; but it seemed both right and final. And still, she was curious about what Oliver would do.
He began to speak, then changed his mind and drew his face into its beak.
‘Well, if you must,’ he said, ‘go. I don’t want to have to think at this time of night. I’m too tired.’
He is like me, Anna thought with a last curious onslaught of love, as she realized he had no more to say. She could not think of a way to say goodbye, so she left silently, turning on the threshold to look at Oliver, who was lying down again, with the bedclothes pulled around his neck.
‘Your coat’s in the kitchen, remember,’ he said. Anna thought, it’s funny, he won’t ever know how much I do love him, how I dream about him. She closed the door behind her. Oliver rearranged the pillows, pulled the blankets closer, turned from one side to the other and back, and then slept.