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fear of that. She knew Michael and she trusted him as he trusted her.
    She took extra care with her make-up, and dabbed on his favourite scent. It was her choice too. She always bought it, and he had recognised it and said how much he liked it. ‘But of course,’ she had smiled at him. ‘Isn’t that how it always happens? If I’d been choosing you a tie I’d have selected the one you’re wearing.’
    I’m getting ready to meet my lover, she thought, breathing in the soft sweet perfume on the pulse point of her wrist, so why isn’t my heart racing? She frowned at her reflection in the mirror over the dressing table, as she had frowned this morning, with the same sensation of flatness. There wasn’t a thing wrong with her life. She loved her job, she loved Michael, but if she loved Michael why didn’t she feel excited about going down and surprising him and having dinner with him and being with him?
    Perhaps it was the weather. She really hated the winter. Perhaps it was blunting her feelings, because usually she enjoyed being with Michael. And she needed her dinner. She would choose something absolutely delicious from the menu and she and Michael would have a feast.
    He wasn’t in the lounge, which was full of armchairs covered in green cabbage-rose chintz, with a beamed ceiling and the big log fire she had been promised. The middle-aged men and women sitting around looked as though they were mainly here on winter bargain breaks, and Pattie got several admiring and enquiring glances as an elegant girl alone.
    After one man with a very red face and a prodigious waistline tried to chat her up she took out Duncan Keld’s book and started to read. She looked less aimless that way, and from the first paragraph she was hooked. He was very, very good, and when she looked up again a waiter was hovering with a menu and she realised the time was passing, and the lounge was almost empty.
    She ordered and took her seat. The dining room was about half full, but Michael wasn’t there, and that probably meant that he was eating somewhere else. She should have got in touch. She could at least have rung before he left and said she was following, although even while she was packing she had still been undecided. It would have taken hardly anything to make her change her mind again. And yet she wasn’t usually a ditherer.
    She could see the door from where she sat, and she saw Michael come in with two other men when she was nearing the end of her meal. He didn’t see her, and when they reached their table he took a chair that meant he had his back to her, and he and his companions went on talking business.
    She couldn’t hear them, they were at the other end of the room, but their gestures and expressions had all the signs of amiable discussion, and she looked at Michael’s shoulders and the back of his head and thought, he hasn’t a clue I’m here.
    There was no reason why he should have, unless he’d looked in the register, and it was stupid to feel resentful because he didn’t know when she was near. If it had been the other way round and he had been waiting, and she had walked into a room, not looking for him and not expecting him, she wouldn’t have sensed his presence either. Worse than that, now that she did see him she had no urge to go over to him. And it wasn’t because they were talking business and she was reluctant to interrupt. It was because nothing was calling to her.
    He would be pleased to see her, he had wanted her to come, but surely she should be feeling more than this? It was as though seeing him was like the meal she had just eaten, pleasant, satisfying. She had only said goodbye to him yesterday, but she wasn’t hungry for him and she never would be. If she didn’t see him for years she would never starve from wanting him, and perhaps that meant she was incapable of real passion. She hadn’t thought about it before. At twenty-two she had believed she was happy, but the underlying restlessness of