They ate, and he looked over at her and said: ‘And you’re such a good cook too. What am I going to do with you, Ella?’

‘What you are doing now,’ she said.

He was watching her, with a look of desperate, despairing humour that she saw very often now. ‘And I’ve not succeeded in changing you in the slightest. Not even your clothes or the way you do your hair.’

This was a recurrent battle between them. He would move her hair this way and that about her head, pull the stuff of her dress into a different line, and say: ‘Ella, why do you insist on looking like a rather severe schoolmistress? God knows, you’re not remotely like that.’ He would bring her a blouse cut low, or show her a dress in a shop window, and say; ‘Why don’t you buy a dress like that?’

But Ella continued to wear her black hair tied back, and refused the startling clothes he liked. At the back of her mind was the thought: He complains now that I’m not satisfied with him and I want another man. What would he think if I started to wear sexy clothes? If I made myself very glamorous he’d not be able to bear it. It’s bad enough as it is.

She once said, laughing at him: ‘But Paul, you bought me that red blouse. It’s cut to show the top of my breasts. But when I put it on, you came into the room, and came right over and buttoned it up — you did it instinctively.’

Tonight he came over to her and untied her hair and let it fall loose. Gazing close into her face, frowning, he teased out fronds of hair over her forehead, and arranged it around her neck. She allowed him to do as he liked, remaining quiet under the warmth of his hands, smiling at him. Suddenly she thought: He’s comparing me with someone, he’s not seeing me at all. She moved away from him, quickly, and he said: ‘Ella, you could be a really beautiful woman if you would let yourself be.’

She said: ‘So you don’t think I’m beautiful then?’

He half-groaned, half-laughed, and pulled her down to the bed. ‘Obviously not,’ he said. ‘Well then,’ she said, smiling and confident.

It was that night that he remarked, almost casually, that he had been offered a job in Nigeria, and was thinking of going. Ella heard him, but almost absentmindedly; accepting the off-hand tone he imposed on the situation. Then she realized a pit of dismay had opened in her stomach and that something final was happening. Yet she insisted on thinking, ‘Well, it will solve everything. I can go with him. There’s nothing to keep me here. Michael could go to some kind of school there. And what have I here to keep me?’