I begin to wash the dishes. I’m so tired I’m hallucinating. I can’t sense where in the tiny flat he is: I see a shape dart in the corner of my left eye, and think he’s crouching in the dark to jump out and frighten me. I put down the dishcloth and step sideways to check. Nothing there. He has gone into the bedroom. I lie on the couch. ‘Are you coming to bed?’ The married person’s question. ‘In a little while.’ I wash my feet, put on my nightie, get into bed. ‘I’m aching like a bastard,’ he says. ‘It’s those bloody typhoid and yellow fever shots. I feel hollow behind the eyes and in the chest—as if hot winds were blowing all through me, down my arms and legs.’ I say nothing. He lays down his book (African Discovery) and turns to me: ‘Forgive me, if I’ve made you unhappy and angry.’ I’m amazed that after all that madness he can lay his weapons down. H: ‘I’m sorry too.’ V: ‘You haven’t done anything to be sorry for.’ We lie side by side, wrung out. ‘It’s astonishing,’ he says, ‘and I’m mortified by it—how I wanted to go on and on with it, even when I could see it was making you more and more unhappy. I never got bored with it. I wanted to keep going.’ He was speaking almost wonderingly, as if about something he’d never experienced before. I said, ‘We had to get to the end of it.’ He said, ‘I love you more, for your toughness and your seriousness.’ I don’t remember now what I said.