‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘All that intelligent insight …’ He checked himself and sat looking at her, rueful and critical and — Ella thought, condemning. They were up in her little room, high under the roof, the child sleeping next door, the remains of the meal she had cooked on the low table between them, as they had been a thousand times. He turned a glass of wine between his fingers and said, in pain: ‘I don’t know how I’d have got through the last months without you.’ ‘What’s happened particularly the last few months?’ ‘Nothing. That’s the point. It all goes on and on. Well, in Nigeria I won’t be patching up old sores, wounds on a mangy lion. That’s my work, putting ointment on the wounds of an old animal that hasn’t the vitality any more to heal itself. At least in Africa I’ll be working for something new and growing.’

He went to Nigeria with unexpected suddenness. Unexpected, at least, to Ella. They were still talking of it as something that would happen in the future when he came in to say he was leaving next day. The plans for how she would join him were necessarily vague, until he knew the conditions there. She saw him off at the airport, as if she would be meeting him again in a few weeks. Yet after he had kissed her good-bye, he turned with a small bitter nod and a twisted smile, a sort of a painful grimace of his whole body, and suddenly Ella felt the tears running down her face, and she was cold with loss in every nerve. She was unable to stop crying, to prevent the cold that made her shiver, steadily, for days afterwards. She wrote letters, and made plans, but it was from inside a shadow that slowly deepened over her. He wrote once, saying it was impossible to say definitely yet how she and Michael could come out to join him; and then there was silence.

One afternoon she was working with Dr West, over a pile of the usual letters and he remarked: ‘I had a letter from Paul Tanner yesterday.’

‘Did you?’ Dr West, so far as she knew, did not know of her relationship with Paul.

‘Sounds as if he’s liking it out there, so I suppose he’ll take his family out.’ He carefully clipped some letters together for his own pile, and went on: ‘Just as well he went, I gather. He told me just before he left he’d got himself involved with a pretty flighty piece. Heavily involved, it sounded. She didn’t sound much good to me.’

Ella made herself breathe normally, examined Dr West, and decided that this was just casual gossip about a mutual friend, and not meant to wound her. She took up a letter he had handed her, which began: ‘Dear Dr Allsop, I’m writing to you about my little boy who is walking in his sleep …’ and said: ‘Dr West, surely this is your province?’ For this amiable battle had continued, unchanged, for all the years they had worked together. ‘No, Ella, it is not. If a child walks in its sleep, it’s no good my prescribing medicines, and you’d be the first to blame me if I did. Tell the woman to go to the clinic and suggest tactfully that it’s her fault and not the child’s. Well, I don’t have to tell you what to say.’ He took up another letter and said: ‘I told Tanner to stay out of England as long as possible. These things are not always easy to break off. The young lady was pestering him to marry her. A not-so-young lady, actually. That was the trouble. I suppose she’d got tired of a gay life and wanted to settle down.’