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there.’
    â€˜I’ll come down with you and help you find a taxi.’
    â€˜I thought I might drive your car.’
    It was dark. The streets here were narrow and congested. Mopsa had held a driving licence for thirty years but not driven for the past fifteen.
    â€˜I’d rather you practised in daylight first,’ Benet said.
    Mopsa argued about it while putting her coat on, she argued about it in the lift, surprisingly giving way without another word when Benet said she had left the car keys upin the room and the spare set at home. The night was black and damp with a smell of gunpowder in the air. Children had been letting fireworks off in advance of Guy Fawkes Day. Mopsa waved from the taxi window, she leaned out and waved as if she were going away for ever.
    James’s crying awoke Benet after about three hours. She had been dreaming of Edward, the first time she had dreamed of him for months. She was telling Edward she was going to have a child, his child, and no, she didn’t want an abortion, she wanted the child, and the alternative was not marriage, she didn’t want to marry him or even be with him any more . . . It had been very much like that, things in reality had been very much like that dream. Waking up was a shock because she had thought the dream was real. James was sitting up inside the croupette, crying and sobbing.
    Benet picked him up and held him and he stopped crying, though his breathing was rough again. She wondered if this would count against a ‘quiet’ night. The next doctor or nurse to look in would probably ask her and she couldn’t lie to them, for James’s sake she wouldn’t dare. The room was not dark, it was still lit by the single dim wall light. It was very quiet for a hospital, silent but for a distant faint metallic clattering. She started thinking about Mopsa. She was aware that it was a mistake to admit anxieties into her mind at this hour, but, once there, they stuck, they refused to go away. Had she been wrong to let Mopsa go off alone? Suppose she hadn’t been able to find the doorkey? Or once she was in, suppose the lights had fused? Benet was sure her father would never have allowed Mopsa to be alone. And if Mopsa had got into the house safely, had answered the phone and spoken to him, was he too lying sleepless down there in the south of Spain, worrying about his wife, furious with his daughter, thinking of all the things that might happen?
    James was sleeping now against her shoulder. She laid him back in the cot inside the tent and put her handthrough the opening in the zip so that he could hold it. When the nurse came in at four he was still sleeping and Benet said nothing about the disturbance of two hours before. She went to sleep herself, she had no more dreams. The room was beginning to lighten, a grey dawn showing through the slats of the blinds, when next she woke. A siren had awakened her, and when she knelt up and looked out of the window, she saw an ambulance passing with its blue light on.
    As soon as it got to eight Benet thought she would phone the house in the Vale of Peace. It was not yet half-past seven. Mopsa was not a late riser, she was always up and about by eight. Inside the steamy tent James slept, lying on his back, the vaporizer puffing away. They would let her take him home before lunch. Then a week or two for convalescence, and once Mopsa had gone back, there was no reason why the two of them, she and James, should not go away for a holiday. Why not? She could afford it now. She could afford any amount of holidays, or tax-deductible working trips, as her accountant called them.
    â€˜You don’t have holidays any more, Miss Archdale.’
    They could go somewhere warm, North Africa, or the Canaries. James wouldn’t get croup there. Her American publishers wanted her to go to California as part of a promotional trip and she could pay a visit to Universal Studios where they had begun shooting
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