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‘Alex, I say this without judgement. James Feeney is your husband’s lover.’

He didn’t apologise, he didn’t change his tone, nor did he soften it as he spoke the accusation. He didn’t look away in either embarrassment or polite graciousness. Instead, Harry held Alex’s gaze as though their lives depended on it, as if to support her through the interminable moments of shock that pulsed like tiny sparks of electricity, finally igniting into a whispered response that was explosive despite its hushed tone.

‘Are you mad? What is this, Harry? You must be determined to leave me not only in despair at loving someone I can’t have but also making sure you pollute any chance I have of rekindling friendship with my absent husband.’

He shook his head, expression filled with regret. ‘Would you have preferred me to leave you, knowing this awkward information, withholding the truth I’d learned?’

‘That’s a disgusting accusation. You know nothing about Matthew!’

‘I know what he’s hiding.’

‘Why would you presume such a thing without proof, without —’

‘I have proof.’ He covered her gloved hand.

She snatched it away so fast she nearly left the toffee-coloured suede glove behind. ‘What proof?’

‘I’m going to tell you everything but only if you stop snarling at me.’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘I hate being the conduit but I also can’t imagine you living in ignorance for much longer that your husband has a proclivity for men.’

She swallowed, knowing he was right. Somehow, very deep down in the private, darkest place where she stored her anxiety, Alex knew Harry was right about everything because it made so much sense.

‘Poking my nose into another man’s business makes me hardly recognise myself. If not for you in the midst of this, I wouldn’t have spared it another frown. I don’t care about Matthew’s leanings. I care about you and how profoundly you might be affected should his secret come out. And it could. If I can work it out in a few hours, so can someone else if Matthew or his friend gets sloppy.’

‘And they were sloppy today, I’m guessing?’ she said in a tight voice.

‘Let’s just say the lies caught up with them. Matthew didn’t expect you to be in Harrogate. And he might still have got away with it had I not already met Feeney.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, not looking at him, staring at her untouched tea instead.

__________

Harry watched as Alex’s expression turned from guarded to hostile, but as he explained that he’d left Harrogate and gone to the terraced house in York inhabited by James Feeney, the cast of her face shifted to dulled. She listened without interruption until he had nothing more to say.

‘So he wasn’t in London?’

He shook his head, almost guiltily. ‘He was in York last night because I am now certain I saw him, standing in the window of Feeney’s house. They obviously thought they’d spend Feeney’s day off in Harrogate, where presumably they didn’t anticipate they’d see too many people they knew in the winter. I suspect Matthew would have had an answer anyway for any unexpected meetings. What he couldn’t be prepared for was me.’

Eyes, round like the dark truffles he suspected she would carefully fashion for her salon, glistened in the shadowed refreshment rooms. ‘You challenged this man Feeney and he did not deny it?’ she qualified.

‘Those weren’t my words,’ he replied as gently as he could. ‘I said he admitted it.’

‘I want his exact words, Harry. There’s no point now in trying to shield me.’

‘All right.’ He was cornered. ‘I drove back to York fast to find Feeney at his home. I threatened him with exposure if he didn’t give me the truth and I believed him when he said, and I am quoting him accurately now: “Matthew and I have been lovers since we were seventeen, when he was expelled from his first school over our relationship. Not even his time while he was sent away to university could break our hearts.”’ Harry cleared his throat. ‘Um . . . now I’m summarising . . . he said that Matthew’s family had done everything in its collective power to separate them. According to Feeney, he too was sent away – to Cornwall, I gather – but they were in touch by letters throughout those years, “yearning for each other” were his words.’ He watched her eyes narrow with pain but she didn’t look away from the source; her shredded mind was thinking about Chetwin and his strange manner during their phone call after she mentioned Feeney. So he’d known about this relationship . . . it was likely why Matthew had been sent to bring back an agreement of marriage from ‘the Frobisher girl’. Matthew’s aloofness and couched words, his reinforcement there was no other woman for him, was how he hid without lying to her face; she was his shield.

‘He said Matthew coached him through a couple of difficult years, begging him to be patient until he could work out a way for them to be together and out of his family’s reach. Actually, the word he used frequently regarding the family was its “influence”.’

She looked into her lap. ‘So I was the escape route?’

He waited until she lifted her gaze to him again before nodding. ‘Feeney’s explanation was that in marrying you – a perfect bride that the family approved of for a most suitable marriage between excellent families – it took all the heat off Matthew. His father is said to have thought he had “come to his senses”.’

Alex frowned slightly at his loading of that phrase and Harry lifted a shoulder.

‘Feeney laughed at such a ridiculous notion – as he put it – and explained to me that you do not and cannot snap out of homosexuality. He actually admitted that both of them would opt to be different if they could but in the way that someone can’t help having poor eyesight, or be good at art, or brilliant at sport, some people are predestined from birth to want to share their lives with their own sex.’ He reached for her hand again. ‘To be honest, Alex, I felt then and continue to feel a helpless compassion for him . . . for both of them, to tell the truth.’