She didn’t answer my suggestion directly. Instead she confessed, “I thought-I thought he might follow me. After leaving the railway station, I walked and walked. For hours. First this direction and then that. Until I was completely lost. And there was nowhere to turn, no one I could trust. Not even the constables I passed from time to time. But they must have seen me, because suddenly they were hunting me. He must have given them my description. And I didn’t know what they would do with me, if they caught me. I’ve heard-the suffragettes. They were treated cruelly in prison.”

“The police last evening weren’t hunting you,” I said gently. “They were searching for a deserter. I was on an omnibus. They stopped it and told us why.”

“A deserter?” She stared blankly at me. “I- Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. Unless, of course, the man you speak of is wanted by the police.”

“No, of course he isn’t.” She seemed shocked that I should think such a thing.

I realized then that a guilty conscience had led her to believe the worst.

“He. Your husband?”

“No. Yes.” She came to take the chair across from me, staring at the window. “I wouldn’t want you to think ill of him. That he’s brutal. It was as much my fault as it was his. I-I taunted him. I said things I shouldn’t have. When he struck me, he was as shocked as I was. But I couldn’t stay, you see. Not after that. We can’t take back our actions, can we? However much we may wish to.”

She was taking the blame for what had happened. But I kept an open mind on that issue, having been accustomed to hearing battered women in hospital claim that their drunken husbands hadn’t meant to strike them, that it was their own fault. Their excuses were infinite. Dinner was late, or their husband’s trousers hadn’t been pressed properly, or the children were noisy. I had been a junior sister on a women’s ward where broken bones and bruised bodies were common, and the husband, once sober, came to beg forgiveness. I knew, as the women in the ward had known, that the words were hollow, the promises too. But almost invariably, the wife returned to her home, because she had nowhere else to go.