Still numb with shock, she tried to formulate some kind of plan. It was so strange, she had no idea what she was going to say. All she could think of was the fact that her hands were cold.

Alan had always hated being touched by cold hands. If she touched him, would he wince and draw away? Should she just keep her hands jammed in her pockets? God, was this really happening?

‘Janey.’

It had taken forever but somehow she had made it across the street. Her heart was pounding in her ears and she still couldn’t speak but to Janey’s immense relief she didn’t need to because Alan was saying it all for her, pulling her into his arms and hugging her so tightly she could hardly breathe. Over and over again, as he covered her face with kisses, he murmured ‘Janey, oh Janey, I’ve missed you so much ... you don’t know how long I’ve dreamt of this day.’

‘You’re alive,’ she murmured finally, touching his face as if to prove it beyond all doubt.

His cheek was warm and her hands were cold but he didn’t flinch away. She had almost forgotten how good-looking he was.The sun-bleached hair was shorter; the face, confusingly, looked both older and younger and a new, pale scar bisected his left eyebrow. But the eyes, light blue and fringed with long lashes, were as clear as they had always been. They,at least, were unchanged. The eyes, and that hypnotically reassuring voice .. .

‘Oh my poor darling,’ Alan whispered tenderly, taking her icy fingers and pressing them to his lips. ‘Don’t say that; I can’t bear to imagine what I must have put you through. All I can say is that at the time I thought I was making the right decision for both of us. The trouble was,’ he went on, breaking into a sad smile, ‘no matter what I did or how hard I tried, and God knows I tried, I could never stop loving you.’

Chapter 38

Stupidly, she had almost forgotten that the flat had been Alan’s home too. It seemed odd, watching him walk into the kitchen and know without having to ask where things were.

‘It should be champagne, of course,’ he said cheerfully, uncapping the half-empty bottle of cooking brandy that was all Janey had in the way of something to drink, ‘but you look as if you could do with warming up, so .. . cheers.’

He had filled her balloon glass almost to the brim. With a trembling hand Janey raised it to her lips and gulped down several eye-watering mouthfuls, willing it to have some kind of effect on her numbed brain. She had fantasized over this scene a thousand times, her fevered imagination running riot as she covered every possible eventuality. It had never even crossed her mind that she might be so lost for words she would barely be able to say anything at all.

There were still too many questions to be answered. Alan had disappeared from her life and she didn’t know why. Now he was back and she was still none the wiser. The brandy, however, was beginning to make its presence known; she could feel that much, at least.

‘Sit down,’ she said haltingly, when Alan had switched on the gas fire and paused to admire the new painting above the mantelpiece. ‘You’d better explain everything. Right from the start. I need to know why you did it.’

She had chosen the armchair for herself. Alan sat on the sofa opposite, nursing his drink and looking contrite.

‘I want you to know, Janey, that I’m desperately ashamed of myself. I took the coward’s way out, I realize that now, but it really didn’t seem like that at the time. ‘I was under pressure, confused, I couldn’t figure out any other way of going about it without causing you even more pain.’

As far as Janey was concerned, even more pain was a physical impossibility. She had hit the threshold and stayed there, trapped like a bluebottle stuck to flypaper.

‘Go on,’ she said briefly, her eyes clouded with the unbearable memories of those first months. ‘What are you trying to tell me, that you’d met someone else?’

‘No!’ He looked appalled. ‘Janey, absolutely not. Oh God, is that what you thought?’

Impatience began to stir inside her. ‘I didn’t know what to think,’ she replied evenly. ‘I tried everything, but there were never any answers. And you weren’t there to ask.’

Alan had known this wasn’t going to be easy. He shook his head and tried again. ‘I know, and it was all my fault. What’s the expression? Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.’

Janey stared at him.

‘Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart, please. The truth is, I loved you too much. You were what I wished for, and I got you.’ He hesitated for a second, then went on, ‘And it scared the hell out of me. It became a kind of obsession, you see; I managed to convince myself that sooner or later you would fall out of love with me. It’s a terrible feeling, Janey, to think you aren’t good enough for your own wife. It was all right for you; you knew how much you meant to me, but all I felt was more and more insecure. Every single morning I’d wake up and ask myself whether this would be the day you’d decide you’d had enough of being married. To someone,’ he concluded brokenly, ‘who didn’t deserve you.’

He’d stopped speaking. It was Janey’s turn. Her glass was empty and she’d almost forgotten how to breathe.

‘But that’s crazy,’ she managed to say, her voice barely above a whisper. Of all the possible reasons she had come up with, this was one she had never for a moment even considered. ‘We were married, we were happy together.’ - ‘Yes, it was crazy.’ Alan nodded, his expression regretful. ‘I know that now, but at the time I think I was a little bit crazy myself. It was a kind of self-torture, and I couldn’t break the cycle. The more I thought about it, the more real it became.

And the fact that you seemed happy no longer counted for anything, because I’d convinced myself that you were only putting on some elaborate act for my benefit. You read about it all the time in the papers; it happens every day, for God’s sake. Perfect couples with apparently perfect marriages, except they aren’t perfect at all. Suddenly, out of the blue, the wife or husband says they can’t stand it any more; they hire a hit-man or simply up and leave with their secret lover.

Janey, it got so bad I had to get away. I didn’t want to go, but it seemed like the only option left to me. You have to try and understand, sweetheart. I was desperate.’

Wordlessly, she held out her glass and watched Alan refill it. He still wore Pepe jeans, still moved with that same casual, confident grace. He had always exuded such an air of confidence; how could she possibly have known that beneath the surface lurked a maelstrom of insecurity and self-doubt?

The brandy was no longer lacerating her throat. This time it slipped down like warm honey.

‘You should have asked me,’ she said, tears prickling the back of her eyes. ‘If you’d told me how you felt, I could have—’

‘I didn’t want to hear it,’ Alan interjected, his own eyes filled with pain. ‘Don’t you see, Janey? If you’d reassured me, I would only have convinced myself you were lying. And that would have been almost as unbearable as hearing you say you didn’t love me.’

‘Oh God.’ With a trembling hand, Janey covered her face. What he was telling her made an awful kind of sense. Such paranoid beliefs, once they took a hold, made reassurance impossible.

‘You should have gone to see a doctor.’

‘I did. After I’d, um, left.’ Alan gave her a crooked half-smile. ‘And a world of good that did me, too. He said that, in his experience, any man who harboured suspicions about his wife most probably had every right to do so. Then he told me that his own wife had walked out on him three weeks earlier and it wasn’t until she’d gone that he found out she’d been having an affair with their dentist for the past five years.’

‘I wasn’t having an affair,’ said Janey, her voice beginning to break. ‘I would never have done anything like that. Never.’

‘Yes, well.’ He dismissed the protest with a shrug. ‘You can understand it didn’t help.’

Janey could understand that such a bloody useless doctor should be struck off the medical register. She shuddered at the thought of the damage he might have inflicted on countless innocent people.

‘Are you still cold?’ Alan patted the empty cushion on the settee. ‘Why don’t you come over here, sweetheart? Sit by me.’

But Janey needed to hear everything first. There were nearly two whole years separating them, two blank years in which anything might have happened. She couldn’t relax until she knew it all. She also needed more brandy .. .

‘Where did you go?’ she pleaded, suddenly desperate to get it over with. ‘Where have you been living? What have you been doing?’

His smile was bleak. ‘Existing. Trying to stop loving you.Telling myself a million times that I’d been a complete fool who’d made the worst mistake of his life, but that it was too late to go back.’ He stopped for a second, gazing into space and swallowing hard. ‘I’m sorry, Janey.

Here I go again, moaning on about my own stupid feelings when what you want to hear are the facts. OK, well they aren’t exactly riveting but here goes. I hitch-hiked to Edinburgh, did a bit of bar work, got myself a filthy little bed-sitter and spent most of my spare time shaking cockroaches out of the duvet. After a few months, when ‘I couldn’t stand the place a moment longer, I travelled down to Manchester. That was just as awful, but the customers had different accents and at least the pub employed bouncers to break up the fights, instead of expecting me to tackle them myself.’

Janey shuddered. ‘That scar on your forehead ...?’

‘A bloody great Scotsman with fourteen pints of lager inside him and a broken bottle in each fist.’ He touched the scar as if to remind himself. ‘I was lucky. One of the other barmen almost died.’

Janey bit her lower lip. Alan could have died. She had thought he was dead .. .

‘Go on. How long were you in Manchester?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Three, four months? Then I moved down to London. Another lousy bed-sit, another family of cockroaches to get to know. I did some casual work here and there when I could get it, but it was pretty much of a hand-to-mouth existence. Not to mention lonely.’

‘But you must have met people, made new friends?’

‘I didn’t want to,’ he replied simply. ‘I didn’t think I deserved any. Unless I was working, there were times when I didn’t even speak to a soul for days on end. London’s like that; you can almost begin to believe you no longer exist.’

‘Girlfriends?’ said Janey, needing to know. It had been almost two years, after all.

But Alan smiled and shook his head. ‘Hadn’t I suffered enough? Janey, my feelings for you were what got me into this mess in the first place. I was hardly going to risk it again, was I?

Besides,’ he added sadly, ‘I was still in love with you. I didn’t want anyone else. And even if I had, it would have been too much of a betrayal.’

‘And now you’re back.’ Janey still felt as if she were in suspended animation. It was a curious feeling, like one of those near-death experiences people reported, when they hovered on the ceiling and gazed down at their own lifeless bodies. She had no idea of the time, no conception of what she might say or do next. It was as if all this were happening to somebody else.

Alan nodded. Again, the hesitant half-smile. ‘I’m back.’

‘Why?’

He took a deep breath. ‘Please let me get it all out in one go. Wait until I’ve finished before you say anything. I haven’t been able to stop loving you, Janey. I tried, but it didn’t work. I’ve no idea how you feel about me, now. I don’t know, maybe you’ve put the past behind you, met someone else and forgotten you even knew me ... but I had to find out. I need to know if you do still care for me. And if you can ever forgive me. I have to know whether there’s a chance for us to carry on as we were before. As husband and wife.’

He looked so unsure of himself, so scared of what she might say. Only sheer desperation had given him the strength to admit his own weakness and declare his feelings for her with such heart-wrenching honesty. And he had always been the stronger partner in the past, thought janey, so seemingly secure and laid-back with his devil-may-care attitudes and freewheeling lifestyle.

But he hadn’t been secure at all, she realized; he had needed her, more than she had ever imagined. He hadn’t abandoned her for another woman, either. Nor had he ever stopped loving her. And now he needed understanding, love and forgiveness in return.