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smothering loneliness of a hotel? She had not been home in nearly two months, and now she could not face it alone.
     
    S HE PICKED up the telephone and rang Andrew in England, where it was four o’clock in the morning.

CHAPTER 4
    E GG ?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘An egg. Want one?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Thank you. Are you having one?’
    ‘Am I, sorry?’
    ‘An egg.’
    ‘Oh. I don’t think so. Thank you. Unless—’
    Oh, Christ, Andrew thought, locking his teeth together. She is actually going to ask:
Unless you mind having one on your own?
    ‘Unless you mind having one on your own?’
    ‘Why does Daddy always get an egg now?’
    Natalie and her brothers looked up from their bowls at the breakfast bar.
    ‘Can I have an egg too?’
    ‘Eggs are yuck. I want toast.’
    ‘You’ve got cereal. Eat up. Then go and clean your teeth.’
    The children resumed a subdued sucking on their honey clusters and some half-hearted kicking at one another’s ankles, silently enquiring of one another whether that was the I Mean It voice or the Don’t Bother Me one.
    ‘Didn’t I hear the phone last night?’
    ‘Yes. About four o’clock.’
    ‘Was it a call-out? I didn’t hear you go out.’
    Andrew lowered his voice and turned away from the children. ‘Valerie, I thought the kids aren’t supposed to know I’m sleeping in the spare room? How could you not know it was a call-out if the phone was still in our room?’
    ‘Oh, it goes over their heads,’ Valerie said, glancing over to the breakfast bar. The chewing children looked blandly back at her. ‘You three. Teeth. And do it properly.’
    ‘Why is Daddy sleeping in the spare room?’
    ‘Is that why he gets an egg?’
    ‘Cereal’s yuck.’
    ‘
Now,
’ said Valerie, talking in unmistakable I Mean It.
    They scattered, like little looters disturbed from the wreckage of their breakfasts. When they had gone she turned round to Andrew.
    ‘So was it? A call-out?’
    Andrew sighed. ‘No.’
    ‘Quite enough nastiness already, with that letter-bomb. Poor woman.’
    ‘Hmm.’
    ‘Quite enough, you being called in on your bank holiday off, without another call-out at four o’clock in the morning.’
    ‘Yesterday was an emergency. The ambulance people twigged that a crime was involved, and the casualty doctor called us. A criminal explosion could be a terrorist bomb. You’ve got to act immediately.’
    ‘Oh, don’t emergency procedure me. Why would the IRA blow up a seventy-five-year-old spinster?’ Valerie said.
    ‘I didn’t say political terrorists. We ruled that out quite quickly. But someone sent an old lady a letter-bomb that blew up in her hands, even if it wasn’t meant to be fatal. I call that terrorism.’
    ‘So who was it?’
    ‘Dunno yet, unlikely to be a random nutcase. More likely a—’
    ‘On the phone, Andrew. At four o’clock in the morning.’
    ‘Oh. Actually, it was Sara,’ he said, very nearly failing to sound neutral. ‘She’s in New York. She claimed to have forgotten the time difference, but you know what she’s like.’ His voice tailed away into a slight clearing of the throat. He remembered Sara’s tearful voice and felt like a disloyal bastard to be running her down. But Valerie must get no inkling of how he still felt about Sara. She was already making him suffer enough for their non-existent affair, the affair which he and Sara had never actually, but nearly (to his regret only nearly), had.
    ‘So, no, instead of a random nutcase,’ Valerie said, ‘your little blip.’ She turned to the cooker and set about boiling Andrew’s egg.
    Andrew sat down and opened the paper. To content herself with just that was a sign of new and considerable restraint in Valerie and he knew he should give her credit for it. Three months ago she had declared herself prepared to accept what he had told her all along, that the affair had never happened, and that when he had left to move into a flat it had not been in order to be with Sara. On that basis Valerie