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too, and concern, and probably disapproval.
    â€˜Is it serious?’
    â€˜I don’t want to talk about it, Becca.’
    â€˜You did.’
    â€˜Yes, I did. But now I don’t know what to say about it.’
    â€˜Why are you doing it?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Are you in love with him?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜So what is it?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    But I do, I think. It’s just that Becca wouldn’t understand. And if she did, she would begin to feel more sorry for me than I could bear. I could tell her about the excitement of the last couple of weeks, and the dreamy otherworldliness of the lovemaking. But I couldn’t tell her that Stephen’s interest in me, his attraction to me, seems like the only sense of future I have. That’s too pathetic. She wouldn’t like that.
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    I’m nervous when I meet Stephen again after work, because it feels as though I’m entering Phase Two of something, and Phase Two seems potentially more serious than Phase One. I know, of course, that Phase One involved all sorts of serious things – infidelity and deceit, to name but two – but it stopped, and I was OK about it stopping; I thought the Stephen thing was something I could brush off, like a crumb, leaving no trace of anything behind. But if it was a crumb, and I’d brushed it off, it wouldn’t have walked in to the surgery wearing a fake sling this morning. It’s beginning to look less like a crumb and more like a red wine stain, a grease spot, a nasty and very visible patch of Indian takeaway sauce. Anyway. The point is I’m nervous, and I’m nervous because I’m not meeting Stephen with the intention of telling him I never want to see him again.
    I don’t want him to pick me up from work because people are nosy, so we arrange to meet in a residential street around the corner; to avoid missing each other we choose a house to meet outside. And while I’m walking there I try to think of the man with the boil because this is bad, bad, underhand, deceitful, and you have to be good to look at boils in the rectal area (unless you’re very, very bad, I suppose, sick and corrupt and decadent), so when I spot Stephen’s car I’m not really in the right place to focus on what I’m doing, or how I should be with him. I get in and we drive off, all the way to Clerkenwell, because Stephen knows a quiet bar in a smart new hotel, and I don’t wonder until later why a man who works for a pressure group based in Camden knows anything about smart new hotels in Clerkenwell.
    But it is the right place for us, discreet and soulless and full of Germans and Americans, and they bring you a bowl of nuts with your drink, and we sit there for a little while and it occurs to me for the first time, really, how little I know this man. What am I supposed to say now? I can have state-of-relationship conversations with David, because I know the way into them – Jesus, I should do by now – but this guy . . . I don’t even know the name of his sister, so how can I talk to him about whether I should leave my husband and two children?
    â€˜What’s your sister’s name?’
    â€˜Sorry?’
    â€˜What’s the name of your sister?’
    â€˜Jane. Why?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    It doesn’t seem to have helped.
    â€˜What do you want?’
    â€˜Sorry?’
    â€˜From me. What do you want from me?’
    â€˜How do you mean?’
    He’s making me angry, although he’d be surprised that his hitherto minimal contribution to the conversation – a couple of ‘Sorrys’ and his sister’s first name, provided on request – could have provoked this response. He just doesn’t seem to get it, somehow. I am facing the imminent destruction of all that I hold dear, or used to hold dear, anyway, and he sits there sipping his designer beer, oblivious