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firmly, recognizing a mutual capacity to lie. 'She's a catalyst, she analyses dreams. And,' Ernest continued as if his wife had never spoken, `she'll never marry our boy, you know. Never in a million years. No grandchildren there.' This was a cunning move.

    `How do you know?' she wailed. 'She led him out of the wilderness and she loves him too, in her own way. You just can't bear the fact she knows too much about you. And the wretched clients.
    Oh Ernest, what have you done? What have you done?'
    Ì've done nothing!' he shouted. 'She wanted to go! She wants the sea!'
    She hesitated for a full minute.
    `Charles Tysall's dead, isn't he?'
    He lost his rag and his skin went red.
    Òf course he is! Dead for a year! Wife dead for two, though it took them a year to find her.
    What more do you want, woman? Sarah Fortune's as strong as an ox.'
    She held her peace.
    Sarah had long since bought the new mirror for the hall of her flat. Like the old, it caught the reflection of herself as she entered, greeted her at the end of the corridor on to which the door opened, revealed her with the cunning of an old enemy. The replacement of the mirror was supposed to be therapy, a positive step towards putting things back the way they were before the former mirror was broken.
    A gesture to prove it was not all her own fault, as everything else was. Sarah Fortune knew she was beyond redemption. Leaning out of the window with her arms on the wrought-iron balcony, staring into the night, imagining the sound of the sea and the wind in the trees, waiting for thunder, tears and some sensation of liberation, she was feeling nothing, apart from a desire to run back up to his flat, demand entry and say, I didn't mean that, can we just go on as before? An impulse so overpowering she had found herself halfway there, twice. Then crept back, regretting as much as anything the failure to explain, the sheer cowardice. But if she had said, It isn't as if I don't love you, as well as revere everything about you, he would have laughed and said, How can you love and leave at the same time? And she would say, Because I cannot be what you want me to be and in the end you would hate me for that.
    He did not imprison; he was too kind. At least not with stone walls or shackles, only with constancy; the terrible patience of waiting for her to arrive and the unspoken denial of what she had been and what she was. She saw him come out of the big front door at midnight, dressed in a track suit, the dog alongside. Jogging away across the park, running for company, his nightly ritual. One lover, the best and most honest of them all, padding across the brown grass, back into his world. And she to hers.
    Only if she put her hands very firmly over her own ears, could she conjure up the remembrance of dreams, the instincts of courage, and the sound of the sea.

CHAPTER TWO
    There was no fence to separate the small figure of Stonewall Jones from the scrubby garden into which he stared, or from the greenish, mud-coloured land which stretched from behind his thin back into the distant strip of gold which meant the sea. From his small height, he could see everything he wanted.

    When he was as still as now, he merged with any landscape, a colourless little boy, whose pale orange hair corresponded with the freckles all over his skin and the eyes which seemed merely to reflect, without any shade of their own. Stonewall suited his nickname.
    Others were called Jack or John and came to fit a more aggressive mould even at eleven years old, but Stonewall blended effortlessly into ageless scenery as a born observer. No-one noticed him at home any more either. He had once been the apple of his mother's eye, but that was when he was a baby. She had new babies now and there was no room. He was good for nothing but hanging round in school holidays, coming up here with the bait he dug twice weekly for Edward Pardoe and which he had just delivered to the kitchen at the back.
    `Baah,' he breathed.