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any longer: somewhat lazily I had assumed it would be sufficient for Martin to masturbate in the shower and imagine he was penetrating some willing accomplice’s pussy. But in fact it wasn’t quite as easy as that.
    Ask for a divorce? I would be fully entitled to do that, of course. But it didn’t appeal to me. There was something basically banal about such a reaction: after all, we had been married for thirty years, we had been living parallel lives with a sort of shared mutual understanding, and we had booked a shared grave at Skogskyrkogården cemetery.
    But in the end I phoned her. Magdalena Svensson. I found her details on the Eniro website. She was at home in Guldheden, Gothenburg, and answered on her mobile.
    We met three days later, on the twentieth of August, in a cafe in the Haga district. It was an exceptionally warm day, and I had taken a morning train from Stockholm. As I arrived a bit early, I decided to walk all the way from the central station, and felt unpleasantly sweaty when I reached the cafe. Moreover a vague feeling of disgust had grown up inside me; I doubted whether what I was about to do was sensible, and very nearly turned back as I approached Haga. I had my mobile in my hand, was ready to ring her number and explain that I had changed my mind. That I didn’t in fact want to speak to her, and that it was best if we both forgot all about the whole business.
    But I didn’t. I pulled myself together.
    She was sitting at an outside table under a parasol, waiting for me. She was wearing a light green dress and a thin, white linen scarf, and even though I recognized her from the pictures in the newspapers, it was as if I were meeting a quite different person. She was young and pretty, but not especially sexy. She looked shy and uneasy – but considering the circumstances that was perhaps not so odd.
    She stood up when she saw me. She obviously belonged to the fifty per cent of the Swedish population who recognized me. I nodded to her to indicate that I had identified her, but it was only when we shook hands and introduced ourselves that I was struck by the paradoxical hopelessness of the situation. Either this cautious little creature had been raped by the man I had been living with for the whole of my adult life, in which case one had to feel sorry for her. Or she had voluntarily agreed to have sex with my husband, in which case there was no need to feel sorry for her in the slightest.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
    Apart from saying her name, those were the first words she spoke: I thought she was going to continue, but she said nothing more. It seemed to me that if she had been sitting there waiting for me – the older woman who had been betrayed – she ought to have had time to think of something more pregnant to say than that she was sorry. That television programme that never happened would have been a bit of a disaster.
    ‘So am I,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t come here to tell you how I feel.’
    She smiled unsteadily without looking me straight in the eye.
    ‘Nor have I come to hear about how you feel. I just want you to tell me what happened.’
    We sat down.
    ‘If you have nothing against that,’ I added.
    She sucked in her lower lip and I could see that she was close to tears. It was not difficult to work out how all those quotations from her in the newspapers had come about. Journalists had telephoned her, and she hadn’t had the sense to replace the receiver.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘It must be awful for you. I didn’t think about that.’
    When, I wondered. When didn’t you think about it?
    ‘How old are you?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer.
    ‘Twenty-three. I shall be twenty-four next week. Why do you ask?’
    ‘I have a daughter who is five years older than you.’
    ‘Really?’
    She didn’t seem to understand my point – nor did I, come to that. A waitress came to our table. I ordered an espresso, Magdalena Svensson asked for another