He did not know what to do with his hands

Clive has started going up to bed after Anne.

He tells himself it is the football, or the back door he likes to check twice. Really it is so that by the time he gets in she is already on her side, facing the wardrobe, and the question of what to do with his hands has been answered for him.

For twenty-two years he slept with one arm across her waist. He never decided to. It was simply where his arm went.

Then last spring a surgeon drew on her with a purple pen, and afterwards there was a drain and a list of things she must not lift. He was good at the list. He carried the shopping. He learned to hand her a cardigan before she asked.

What he did not learn was how to come back.

Treatment finished in August. Her hair is growing back soft and darker. And Clive lies right at the edge of his side of the mattress, frightened of rolling over in his sleep and catching her where it still aches.

He is frightened of other things too. That if he looks, she will see something cross his face. That if he does not look, she will think he can't. That if he reaches for her she will think he wants more than she is ready for, and if he doesn't, she will think he does not want her at all.

So he does nothing, very carefully.

He notices she has started changing in the bathroom. She comes out in the long cotton nightie with buttons to the collar and gets into bed without looking at him. One night she says, to the ceiling, You can say if it puts you off.

It doesn't, he says, too quickly. Then nothing more, because every sentence he can think of sounds like something a man would say if it did.

She turns over. He watches her shoulder in the light from the landing and does not touch it.

In 2006 Patricia Fobair and colleagues published a study in Psycho-Oncology of younger women who had been treated for breast cancer. Worries about how their bodies looked, and difficulties with intimacy, were common afterwards. But women who had a good relationship with their partner, and could talk to them openly, tended to have fewer of those problems.

Partners, meanwhile, often pull back for fear of causing pain, and the person who has been ill can feel that pulling back as rejection. The care is real. From the other side of the bed it just looks like absence.

It comes out one Sunday morning by the sink. She is rinsing a mug and he is behind her with the tea towel when she says without turning round, You don't touch me any more.

He opens his mouth to say that isn't true, and finds he cannot.

I don't know where I'm allowed, he says. I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to get it wrong.

She puts the mug down. Her hands are wet. So you've decided for me.

I know you didn't mean it like that. She dries her hands slowly. Then ask me, Clive. Just ask.

That night he goes up when she does. In the dark he says it the way you would ask directions in a strange town.

Can I put my arm where it used to go?

She is quiet for so long he thinks she has not heard. Then she finds his hand and moves it herself, to her waist, a little lower than before, and holds it there with hers on top.

He does not know if he is doing it right. He lies very still, the way he used to when the children fell asleep on him. Her breathing does not slow. Neither does his. Neither of them mentions the months before.

But her hand stays on his, and some time near morning he realises he has stopped bracing.

He had thought keeping his distance was a kindness, until she asked him to close it.