There is one other woman he sees: an old love for whom he had proved insufficiently interesting in his youth. In that sense, nothing has changed: she remains impatient and judgmental, easily irritated by his courtly good manners, which cannot disguise his desperate need for companionship. But in another sense, everything has changed, for this lovely, fearless creature from his past is now, after miscarriages and more, enfeebled, both physically and emotionally. ‘Nature had deserted her. Or maybe nature had taken over.’ Sturgis is gallant to the last, but ‘he sensed that she was anxious to get away from him, simply because he communicated a sense of the past being irrecoverable.’

What is Sturgis left with? Dreams of travel, of new connections, of escape from his bedroom — ‘the room that disclosed his condition to him most readily.’

This is a brisk and moving story by a writer no longer prepared to offer up the usual comforts of fiction.

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