And to be honest, I was grateful for the delay. It gave me a chance, I thought, to sort through my feelings: to recover from my embarrassment at the blunders of the night; to tell myself that, after all, nothing much had passed between us; to put the whole thing down to the drink, and the darkness, and the giddy after-effects of the dance. I saw Graham on the Monday, and made a point of mentioning Caroline’s name, telling him she’d fallen asleep in the car on the way out of Leamington and had slept ‘like a child’ until we reached the Hundreds gate; and then changing the subject. As I think I have said before, I’m not a naturally mendacious man. I’ve seen too many of the complications, in the lives of my patients, to which lies lead. But in this instance I thought it best to try and put a definite end to any speculation regarding Caroline and me; I thought this for Caroline’s sake as much as my own. I rather hoped to run into Seeley. I planned to ask him, baldly, to do all he could to quash those rumours he’d mentioned, which suggested that I was romantically interested in one or both of the Ayres women.
