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He let me see that he doesn’t think it’s going to stop at Jeff. Neither do I.”
    “You haven’t told me about his questions.”
    “Oh, he asked a lot, about us. I told him everything. I mean how we lived. And that you were in Kuala Lumpur on business.”
    “He asked what I was doing up north?”
    “Yes, but I couldn’t tell him, of course. I just said I never really knew what you were doing. And that’s true enough, isn’t it?”
    “I could tell you about what I’m doing if it would really interest you.”
    “Thank you, Paul, but we’d better go on the way we always have. I guess I’m too stupid to be the little wife who shares everything. I’ve just enough sense not to try and take that on. Will you get me a cigarette?”
    I put an ash tray handy and sat down. She smoked, propped up in bed, not looking at me, but I couldn’t leave her yet. Somehow it was always like this when we were alone together these days, both of us self-conscious, as though neither of us could get away from the sum total of what our marriage had become.
    “I dreamed about Booney,” she said suddenly.
    I sat very still, waiting.
    “He’d grown bigger, Paul. Just about as big as he would be now. I dreamt that last night.”
    My stomach closed tight with pain. It was three years since either of us had spoken of Booney. And the last time it had been me. Ruth hadn’t wanted to then, it was something I tried to force, and she cried out to stop me. So I’d stopped.
    Booney was Richard Jeffrey Harris, our son. He was dead for nearly four years, and at three years old. It was leukaemia. We flew with him to a clinic in Switzerland and then one in Chicago. The doctors told us to take him home, that it wasn’t anything the tropics had done, and that we might keep him alive for a while with blood transfusions. I didn’t want to do that. Ruth made me. He died more slowly, watching us.
    It was Ruth who cut all that there had been of Booney out of our life, she never mentioned him, there wasn’t a thing left in our house that had been his.
    “Paul, I did wrong. I shut that door, didn’t I? I shut it on Booney and you and locked it. It was my fault. Only I couldn’t help myself then, I just couldn’t. It was as though I hadn’t the strength to do anything else.”
    “I know.”
    “That tore us apart, didn’t it?”
    “Ruth, it’s something that was over, long ago.”
    She shook her head.
    “I don’t think it will ever be over. I don’t seem to have ever made anything good for anyone. But I want to try again, Paul. Come to America with me! And don’t just say you can’t. You could if you wanted to. You’ll have all Jeff’s money now. We could live anywhere we wanted to. I wouldn’t mind where so long as it isn’t here. Can’t you see what all this is doing to me? I’m going to be living with plain naked fear, getting up with it and going to bed with it.”
    “You could go to the States. I think maybe you should.”
    “Without you? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? A nice hotel somewhere and I’d just sit and wait, wondering when they were going to get you, too.”
    I went over and sat on the bed. Ruth’s hand was lying on a gold thread Kelantan bedspread. I covered it. There was no movement of her fingers inside mine. She was looking at a wall. In a little I said good night and went out. She didn’t say anything.
    Ruth always locked her bedroom door because she was afraid of burglars, even though my room was just opposite. I didn’t hear her get out of bed to do that, but I knew she would. In a little I lay in blackness and thought, not of my wife, though I should have done, or of Jeff, whom I had loved. I remembered Booney, the child whose hair was as dark as mine, and whose eyes were much bluer.
    You commit yourself a few times in this life. I’d been committed, to plan and scheme and shape, to the old dream of making a straight road for a son, with the errors … your errors … marked plain to be avoided. Booney