ABSTRACT
Alice spent a week obsessively thinking about how angry she was and how outrageous Margaret’s behaviour had been. Oliver hardly spoke to her and she didn’t try to get him to talk. She thought she could find out what she needed to know from the websites but what she really needed to know was that the treatment would work for him. She was caught in the not unusual trap of feeling that she couldn’t live with him but she certainly could not live without him. He sat in his study and she spent a lot of time in the garden ferociously pulling out weeds one at a time and making ugly little piles of earth with a few weeds and also some bulbs and a few periwinkles. These were supposed to be making ground cover and keeping the weeds out but they were thin and had not got any kind of a grip before the weeds had spread in a glorious riot of dandelions, buttercups, and brambles. She got hot and angry and began to throw the weeds into a pile on the path with the result that there was a mess of earth all over the path and a mess of bits of weed all over the presumptive vegetable patch. Nothing will ever grow here except weeds she stormed to herself but she stayed there and went on scratching at the hard, dry earth.
