n the abstract Joe loves having a place in the country, couldn’t wait to tell his colleagues, his clients, about their “weekend house,” but the country has never really been his cup of tea, and he’s been happy to let Alice take over these past few weeks.

Joe loves living in New York, would be quite happy if he never traveled farther north than Ninety-first nor farther south than SoHo, other than for his work on Wall Street. He loves the pace, the people, the lifestyle, and if there is any hindrance at all it is Alice.

He is still trying with Alice, God how he is trying. He has—again—mentally renewed his commitment to her and is trying his damnedest to be the husband he knows she wants him to be, but he’s in New York, where there’s temptation on every cross street, and he can feel the itch beginning again.

Just the other week he’d been at a client dinner at Le Colonial. He arrived early, went upstairs to the bar, expecting to have a quiet drink, perhaps review some papers, but the music was throbbing and the room was crushed with beautiful people. He watched with amusement, noticing how everyone spent their time looking around the room to see if they were missing something, or someone, more interesting, and found himself drawn to a dangerous-looking brunette in a tiny black dress and high leather boots.

He was just enjoying the frequent flirtatious glances, the hint of a smile from her as she realized he was staring, when his client showed up. Ah, well. Better for it to be over before it had begun. Nevertheless, he had gone back up to the bar when the dinner was over, had hoped she would still be there, but of course she had gone.

And Alice? Alice now feels much the same about New York as she did about London. Easier only because she is anonymous in New York, doesn’t feel the same pressure to be the perfect trophy wife. But Alice is beginning to spend more and more time in the country, and the longer she stays there, the more work she does to the house, the more she falls in love with it and the less she wants to leave.

Alice has knocked down walls and discovered raised wooden paneling that was hidden sometime in the 1960s. She has ripped up the linoleum in the kitchen and discovered wide old oak planks. She has found the room that must have been Rachel Danbury’s office, and finds she can spend hours sitting on the window seat in there, gazing up at the trees, thinking about nothing other than how at peace she feels.

The more she discovers about the house, the more she feels as if she knows the writer. She has yet to lay her hands on a copy of The Winding Road, but it’s as if Rachel Danbury’s personality is embedded within the walls, the very foundations of the house, and Alice is slowly drawn into her spell, falls more in love with the house with every passing day.

There are times, however, when Alice has to go into the city. She does so reluctantly, but Monday to Friday—or Tuesday to Thursday if she can get away with it—go in she does. To the theater with Joe, to openings at the Met, charity benefits at the Frick, restaurants, bars, and clubs. She goes in to have her highlights done at Frederic Fekkai, to shop at Bergdorf Goodman for the requisite black-tie outfits, to lunch with Gina at Jean-George or Le Cirque 2000—the only thing she truly enjoys about coming into the city.

Alice is astonished at how close she and Gina have become in such a short space of time. “My replacement,” Emily had said with a sniff in mock disgust, but to a large extent it’s true. Emily is her oldest friend and will always be her best friend, but with the distance now separating them, Emily can’t possibly understand what her life is like.

And she and Gina seem to have so many things in common. “We’re so lucky,” Gina says repeatedly. “You and I have such wonderful husbands. Can you believe how lucky we are?”

Alice smiles each time and agrees, grateful that Joe is back to being the man she married, the man she first fell in love with when she was a teenager. He’s home every evening, and phones when he says he’s going to. His mobile is always on, and for the first time in years she doesn’t lie in bed awake every night, heart pounding as she tries not to think about where he is or what he’s doing.

She doesn’t dwell on those years of insecurity and panic, on pushing those fears out of her head because the truth might be too terrible to contemplate.

Now, even those nights when Alice is in the country and Joe has stayed in the city to work, she phones and he picks up. He’s never unavailable these days, never seems to have inexplicable absences or business trips to unnamed hotels. She phones him late at night, at the apartment, and he answers and tells her how much he misses her.

And on the weekends, when he catches the train down to Highfield on a Friday night or a Saturday morning, and she picks him up at the station in her new Ford Explorer, he puts his arms round her and kisses her deeply, and she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt he really loves her.