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  Louise and Miriam exchanged a look of instantaneous, shared irritation, turned without another word, and marched shoulder to shoulder back into the kitchen.

  ‘I want to say something,’ Toby insisted.

  ‘Much better not,’ Andrew advised softly from his place at the Aga where he was watching a saucepan. ‘Keep mum and it’ll all blow over and we can have our tea in a bit of peace.’

  Toby shot him a brief annoyed look and addressed the women. ‘You can’t go off and talk about this as if I weren’t here,’ he said. ‘These are my relationships you are discussing. I insist on being part of the discussion. I have a contribution to make.’

  Andrew shook his head at the folly of the man. ‘Contributed plenty already, I’d have thought.’

  ‘I enjoyed the friendship there was between the three of us,’ Toby persisted. ‘It seemed indivisible to me. I never had any sense of it being wrong. We know from other cultures that many units are made up of a man and two women. I think we intuitively adopted a lifestyle which was honest and appropriate and right for all of us. Polygamy is an honourable tradition and one in which the women are close and supportive; it’s a feminist tradition.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Miriam said irritably.

  ‘Oh, Toby!’ Louise said reproachfully. She could remember only too well the perverse delight of guilt and fear of being caught.

  Andrew drained the potatoes and reached into a drawer for a large wooden masher. He set the saucepan noisily on the table and started mashing with enormous amounts of butter, salt, pepper and creamy milk. Toby eyed these preparations with some disdain. They had not eaten real butter in his house for something like eight years, or full-fat milk, or even real salt.

  ‘That’s all in the past,’ Toby said, swiftly overriding the women’s protest. ‘What we need to think about is the future. Louise can’t go rushing into an unsuitable marriage on the rebound. Miriam, you can’t go dashing off like this. We’ve been a unit, us three, for nearly ten years, we have to work this through together. There can be no partings without a full mutual consent. We have worked at loving each other. We have to work through our goodbyes.’

  ‘But I don’t want to work it through with you,’ Louise said in a strangled voice. ‘I’ve changed. I’ve changed towards you. It’s over, Toby.’

  Miriam grinned cruelly. ‘And neither do I.’

  ‘I was ready for this change,’ Toby swiftly changed tack. ‘I knew my relationship with you was waning, Louise. I don’t think it has been right for us for some time.’ He ignored her gasp of shock and turned to Miriam. ‘I think we’ve been through some kind of cycle,’ he said gently and persuasively. ‘A cycle of distance and other distractions. I think what we should do now is concentrate on each other, and work towards becoming more intimate. I want to give our relationship and our marriage another try, I want you to be the centre of my life.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re upset now,’ Toby said understandingly. ‘But I’ll leave you on your own for this weekend. You think it over.’ He smiled at her, his roguish charming smile. ‘I’ve been fooling around, Miriam, I don’t deny it. But we’re right for each other. We were when we first met. We are still. You know we are.’

  Miriam stared at the table and would not look at him.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ Toby said. ‘I want to give you your own space, Miriam. I want to give you a chance to think things through.’ He prompted Louise with a nod. ‘Talk it over with Louise, she knows how strong our marriage is, and she’s made her own decision to move on into the future. She knows we need to be alone together now.’ He glared balefully at her. ‘Louise has made a choice which leaves us alone together for the first time ever. I am sure she recognises her responsibility for making sure this works for us, at last.’

  Louise glanced away.

  ‘I am counting on you, Louise,’ Toby said ominously. ‘You have been so central to my marriage with Miriam, all these years. I am counting on you now to make the ending of this cycle work for all of us. I know you would not simply walk out and leave your friends, your best friends, to pick up the pieces.’ His glance flickered towards Andrew, who was intent on his mashed potatoes. ‘Whatever your decision about your future life, you owe us your support.’

  He stepped towards the door. Neither woman said anything. Miriam was struggling with a sense of duty and obligation. Louise was completely persuaded that it had all been her fault and that with her out of the way, Miriam and Toby would be free to love each other fully. Andrew Miles was watching him with respect bordering on awe, the potato masher poised in mid-air above the creamy peaks of potato.

  ‘Oh! Just one thing,’ Toby added with complete casualness at the door. ‘I think there’s been some kind of muddle about the bank accounts.’

  Miriam turned her face to him with a look of utter innocence.

  ‘My account’s been debited,’ Toby said. ‘Did you take my money by accident?’

  ‘No,’ Miriam replied. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It’s been taken out on my cash card,’ Toby said. ‘And my cash card’s gone from my desk at home. And nobody knows my pin number except you.’

  Miriam rose to her feet, outraged. ‘Are you accusing me of theft?’

  ‘No! No!’ Toby retreated quickly. ‘Just some kind of muddle or some kind of emergency. I thought with the women’s centre in trouble, or with you planning to leave you might have … well, I assumed you had … well, anyway, Miriam, the money’s missing. I’ve got no more than a fiver to last me for the whole of next month.’

  Miriam gave a cry of outrage and rummaged in her handbag and dragged out her wallet. She took all the notes inside and pushed them into Toby’s hand. ‘There’s a hundred quid, give or take,’ she cried, choking with rage. ‘And that’s the last you’ll ever have from me. Of course I wouldn’t touch your pathetic salary, I’d rather starve than live off you. And of course I won’t be coming home to you. You’re an adulterous cheat and a liar and I hope whoever has your credit card takes you for every penny you have.’ She pushed him for emphasis in the chest and then finally spun him by the shoulders and thrust him out of the door and slammed it behind him.

  ‘And don’t come back!’ she yelled. ‘I don’t want you! Louise doesn’t want you!’

  ‘Nor me,’ Andrew said softly and helpfully. ‘I don’t want him either. Not even in a frock.’

  Brownie the collie dog, unaccustomed to marital rows, jumped out of the basket and gave Toby an admonitory nip on the ankles to move him along. They heard his yelp of pain and fear and his feet scurrying to the outer door, and then they heard it bang, and he was gone.

  Miriam leaned back against the door. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly deflated. ‘Andrew, I am so sorry. You wanted a quiet weekend with Louise and here I am with all this mess.’

  Andrew waved the potato masher agreeably at her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I wanted to meet Louise’s friends. And we don’t get a lot of entertainment in the country.’

  Saturday

  LOUISE AND MIRIAM stayed up late talking. Andrew went to bed at eleven, apologising: ‘I have to get up early for the pigs.’ When Louise crept in beside him at two in the morning he greeted her at once with a sleepy hug and then wrapped his heavy limbs around her until he had her enmeshed in his body. Louise let him enfold her with a sense of complete bliss and slept with a smile on her face.

  At five in the morning, wrapped in a thick woollen dressing gown over his nakedness, he woke her with a cup of tea. Louise, after only three hours’ sleep, gazed groggily out of the window to where the sun was burning the white mist off the meadows and the pale backs of the Charolais cows were a white archipelago in a sea of cream.

  ‘Whatever time is it?’

  ‘Half eight,’ he said comfortably. ‘Here, have some tea.’

  Louise took the proffered cup and drank it gratefully. ‘I feel very sleepy,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to sleep?’ he offered