But the cry faded away, leaving her stranded and inert, with only the sound of Jamie breathing heavily into his pillow and the patter of the travelling alarm clock to break the silence. It was 5am, but not, Claire thought, quite as cold as it might have been. Still oppressed by the various neuroses she had taken to bed with her six hours before, she got up and twitched open the curtain to reveal the Holiday Inn forecourt in all its neon-tinted glory, like a sci-fi film set dropped arbitrarily onto the Oxfordshire verdure. Even at 5am there were people about, goading cars noisily out of their parking bays, smoking cigarettes down by the breeze-blocked foyer. Why did people have to get up at five on a Sunday morning, she wondered, much less smoke cigarettes against the dawn? There was a copy of the book lying on the upturned suitcase, the pages separated into quarter-inch clumps by a line of book-marks and Post-it notes, left there expressly to intoxicate, even now, before daylight in an Oxford hotel room, quite irresistible.
