In the Name of Love by Patrick Smith

so it wasn’t a problem, and on evenings when she hadn’t been able to phone, Dan and Carlos went ahead without her. ‘No sweat,’ Carlos said whenever she got in late, flustered and apologetic. Dan encouraged him to be relaxed about such things. He and Connie had already seen too many marriages turn sour over trivial complaints.

8
    The day he saw the truth started like any other day on the island except that his sleep had been troubled all night with dreams of the past, of skiing and sailing, of missed lunches, of suppers alone with Carlos. Finally, as dawn came, he got up from his makeshift bed in the living room and went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. While he filled the kettle he glanced out at the pale light and saw, through his own reflection, the familiar landscape, and found that many things came together at once.
    He turned off the tap, went back to the living room and sat on the unmade bed, a sickening tension spreading from his throat to his stomach as details of his dreams formed a pattern.
    He remembered how, the evening after the roof caved in, he had stopped deciphering the entries in Connie’s agendas and chosen to riffle past the pages before putting them back in the holdall, as though what he saw there could not possibly concern him.
    He went to the closet in the little entrance hall and took out the holdall, then put it back almost at once. He already knew that the appointments without initials or venues, the ones he had scarcely looked at so quickly did he thumb past them, would begin not long after he and Connie returned from the week’s sailing with Eleonora and Anders. He remembered what some of the unattributed entries looked like. A time, mostly around twelve or one, occasionally early in the evening, five or five thirty, just the time followed by neither a place nor a person. Which would mean that both place and person were always the same. The last such entry was three-quarters of the way through the year, probably early September. Eleonora had left for London the first week in October, her application for divorce already registered with the district court.
    He got up again and went back to the entrance hall and stood a moment before the closet door but he didn’t open it. Instead he put on his anorak and boots and went out. Walking fast along the coast he remembered a garden party on an island that last summer before Eleonora left, when he found himself standing beside her, each of them holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other. There was talk and laughter all around and yet, as so often, he couldn’t think of anything in particular to say to her. It seemed to be enough that they stood side by side. She smiled as they watched Anders listen to some young woman with his characteristic intensity, holding his head a little back as though reading her face. His hair was still dark brown then, as brown as his eyes. A descendant of immigrants invited to Sweden from Belgium in the 1600s because of their ironworking skills. That was Anders Roos. A generous and charming man.
    ‘Anders says he hardly won a point yesterday,’ Eleonora broke the silence to tell Dan. The phrase was so typical of their noncommittal dialogues that Dan had almost laughed. He and Anders had started to play tennis together once a week. Dan had been a schools champion before his labouring days in London, and, even when he took it easy, Anders, an average club player, rarely managed to win a game. They both enjoyed their Saturday mornings just the same.
    ‘Where did you learn to play so well?’ Eleonora asked.
    ‘School.’
    ‘ Really ? That’s what you spent your time doing there?’
    Dan smiled. He liked the way she teased him, as though they were siblings.
    ‘Sports were taken seriously,’ he said.
    ‘Like us then. Tennis, golf, bridge and riding, those were the accomplishments a girl was supposed to need in life. Sounds like we went to the same sort of place.’
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Mutatis