‘I can’t stay. I just want you to do something for me. Something terribly important.’

‘What is it, my dear? Just tell me.’

Her head went up. Her entreating eyes held his.

‘I want you to divorce me. Completely and absolutely. This minute. Now.’

There was a pause. Then Quin, schooling his expression, said carefully: ‘I will, of course, do anything I can to help you. But I’m not quite clear how I can divorce you now. Dick Proudfoot is doing —’

‘No!’ she interrupted. ‘It’s nothing to do with Mr Proudfoot and documents and things. It’s much more fundamental than that. It’s to do with undoing a curse.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean that our wedding was a curse. But I knew when we said those words before witnesses… I mean, you might think if someone has bunions and cuts the sides out of their slippers it wouldn’t feel like a wedding, but bunions can’t stop oaths from mattering. So you have to absolve me and I know how you can do it because I asked Mrs Weiss. She wasn’t good about Hanukkah, but she knew about divorce and so did Paul Ziller, and anyway I knew before that. All you have to do is say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, three times. With your hand on my shoulder, I think, but I’m not sure about that. It’s an old Jewish law, truly, and it dissolves the marriage then and there. You should say it in front of a rabbi, but just saying it and really meaning it is what counts. Really repudiating me and wanting to be free. Only you have to say it — the man — because the old Jews were like that; it was the men who counted. And I know if you did it, things would get better. They might even be all right.’

She subsided, running out of breath, and as Quin was silent: ‘You will do it, won’t you?’ she begged. ‘If you said “I divorce thee” it might be better. More biblical.’ And as Quin moved towards the door, she added anxiously: ‘Where are you going?’

Quin did not answer. She heard him cross the landing; then he came back carrying a large white towel.

‘Come here,’ he ordered. ‘Sit down on the sofa. Next to the fire.’

She came, puzzled but obedient, and sat down.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Bend your head.’

‘But —’

‘You came to your wedding with wet hair. At least you can come to your divorce with it dry.’

As he spoke he began to towel her hair — but this was not what she wanted. This was not right. There was nothing in Old Testamental lore about having your hair dried by a husband who was putting you away and she tried to pull back, but it wasn’t like that. It was very peaceful and his hands…

But as he moved away from her scalp and down to the loose hair on her shoulders she became angry. For she could see his hands now and they had been a trouble to her from the start. When she was five years old, her father had brought back a book of Donatello sculptures from Italy and one night when she wasn’t well, he had shown her the plates.

‘A person can’t have made that,’ she had said, sitting on his knee. ‘It’s too beautiful. It must have come from a shop.’

It was the left hand of John the Baptist she had been looking at: the long fingers, one crooked to hold a scroll in place, the sinewy line leading to the wrist.

Now it was all going on again as Quin towelled her hair… as it had gone on in the museum when he helped her sort the cave bear bones… on the Orient Express when he cracked a walnut and laid it on her plate… and endlessly when he jabbed, poked at, emptied and almost never lit his pipe.

‘No, please, you must stop.’ She put up her arm to seize his wrist, but that was a mistake. Quite a big one really.

Quin folded the towel, carried it out of the room, and returned with a small glass containing a liquid the colour of a Stradivarius.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Drink this. It’ll warm you. And then tell me very quietly what all this is about.’

Ruth took the glass, sniffed, drained the Grand Armagnac. A small ‘Oh!’ of appreciation escaped her. She repressed it, called on her resources.

‘What it is about,’ she said, putting up her chin, ‘is… frigidity.’

Quin’s expression did not change. Only his eyebrows rose a fraction as he waited.

‘Proper, awful, medical frigidity, like in a book. Like I was reading about on the Grundlsee. Like in Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and Eugene Feuermann. I must have had a premonition because why would I read about it when I could have been reading Heidi or What Katy Did?’

‘One does wonder,’ murmured Quin.

‘I think I’ve always dreaded it most of all. Being cold. Not responding. Lying there like a log.’

‘Is that what you did?’

Now his expression had changed; the nails bit into his palm, but Ruth was looking at the floor.

‘Not exactly, because I didn’t lie. But effectively.’

‘This is Heini, I suppose? That is what we are talking about?’

Ruth nodded. ‘I told you Heini had changed his mind about Chopin and the études and he is preparing for this very important competition and he is going to play Lizst’s Dante Sonata which is all about the Eternal Feminine and he wanted… love. He said so on Christmas Eve and it was very moving. And when I left the annulment papers on the bus, it didn’t seem any good waiting till we could be married, so I arranged everything and Janet was very helpful and lent us her flat. She even gave me a bottle of wine — it was a Liebfraumilch from the Co-op, but it didn’t taste like the wine we had on the Orient Express.’

‘No,’ said Quin gravely. ‘It wouldn’t do. I have to say that Liebfraumilch from the Co-op might make anyone frigid.’

But to speak lightly was an effort. He wanted to strangle Heini slowly and with his bare hands.

‘Oh, please, it isn’t funny! It’s a frightful condition. Krafft-Ebing says the causes are often psychological, but how could I ever afford to find out what awful thing I saw my parents do — and Fräulein Lutzenholler is a dreadful woman. She’s supposed to be a professional and all she can do is drink cocoa with the skin on and babble about love. And if it’s physical that’s worse because you know how complicated the nervous system is and I don’t want to have operations.’

Quin had mastered himself. ‘Look, Ruth, the first time people make love is often a disaster. It’s a thing that has to be learnt and —’

‘Yes but how can it be? How can it be learnt if people are so frigid that there never is a first time? If they take their sweater off and then put it on again and run away down the fire escape? How can they ever get it right when they don’t even do it?’

Quin rose and went to the window. It struck him that the view was the most beautiful, possibly, in the world, and that he must be careful not to smile. ‘You mean you never got as far as making love at all?’

‘No. And it’s so awful because Heini took such trouble getting the contraception things from the machine and getting cream chocolate instead and then I rushed out into the night like a frightened hen. He’s scarcely spoken to me since and you can’t blame him.’

Quin came back and sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘And why do you think me saying “I divorce you” three times would make it better?’

Ruth looked at her empty glass, then down at the carpet. ‘You see, I want to be liberated and giving and, of course, I love Heini very much. But my family… it’s difficult to get away from one’s upbringing and they are old-fashioned and marriage has always been… marriage. Even ones like ours that aren’t proper ones. And I thought, maybe it isn’t just my nervous system being deformed or having seen something horrible in a haystack on the Grundlsee. Maybe some part of me is going to go on running down fire escapes till I’m unmarried. Which is why I want you please to do this thing now. It’s perfectly valid, I promise you.’ She looked about her and her eyes rested on two silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. ‘We could light some candles,’ she said. ‘That would make it more solemn.’

‘So we could,’ he said. He got up, carried the fluted candlesticks to the low table, lit a match.

‘Now,’ he said.

She turned to him. ‘Now you’re going to do it?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Well, no,’ he said apologetically. ‘What I’m going to do now is not exactly that. What I’m going to do now, is kiss you.’

‘Oh, God — you mustn’t go away! I shall die at once if you leave me.’

He turned to where she lay beside him on the pillow. The window framed the night sky and the constellations named for the heroines of legend: Andromeda, the Pleiades… She belonged in their company now, this gallant girl who had taken her first journey into love.

‘I was going to get us something to eat,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly midnight. You must be starving.’ He ran his fingers down the curve of her cheek, her throat; gathered a handful of her tresses. ‘I am looped in the loops of her hair,’ he murmured, his face in the hollow of her shoulder.

‘Miss Kenmore didn’t teach me that,’ said Ruth, not pleased with this gap in her education.

‘No. We have rather moved out of Kenmore country.’

A long way out of it. He had evidently decided against killing her by getting out of bed and as she folded herself against him, she realized that she must be careful not actually to become him, which would be impractical. Then suddenly she drew away.

‘Quin, something terrible has happened! I haven’t had my tristesse!’ She gazed at him, her eyes huge. ‘You know, the thing you have afterwards. Total despair. Postcoital tristesse, it’s called. It’s in all the books! It’s when you realize that in spite of everything, every human soul is tragically and hopelessly alone, and I don’t feel it at all; I feel absolutely marvellous. I told you I wasn’t like other people.’