It was after eleven when he returned to the flat that evening.

The front door led straight into the small sitting room where she was sitting reading, cosy in the warm light of the single table lamp. Outside she could hear the sleet hitting the window. The shoulders of Jon’s heavy jacket glistened and sparkled with unmelted ice. ‘Well, have you changed your mind?’ he asked.

For a moment she was confused, still lost in the world of Lord Byron and his friends. Unwillingly she dragged herself back to the present. ‘No. I haven’t changed my mind.’

‘It’s not working, is it?’ He stood in front of the electric fire and began slowly to unwind his long scarf.

‘What isn’t working?’ She kept her eyes on the book before her. Her stomach had clenched uncomfortably at his tone and the print blurred into an indistinguishable black haze.

‘Us.’

She looked up at last. ‘Because I won’t go to the States with you?’

‘That and other things. Kate, let’s face it. You’re too obsessed with your damn poet to have time for me. Look at you. Even now you can’t take your eyes off some bloody text or other.’ He swooped on her and grabbed it out of her hand. ‘See!’ He held it up triumphantly. ‘Victorian Poets!’ He hurled it down onto a chair. ‘He -’ by implication Kate gathered that ‘he’ meant Byron, ‘- comes between us all the time. You have no time for us; for our relationship, Kate.’

‘Jon – ’

She was stung by the injustice of the remark but he swept on. ‘No, hear me out. You’re completely obsessive. You have no time for me at all.’

She leaped to her feet. It had taken her much of the afternoon to calm down after their exchange at the British Museum earlier.