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open-handed blow on the side of the head after – sheadmitted to herself afterwards – she had gone on at him for hours. His disgust at himself had been alarming, an almost tribal shame as of a native who has disturbed the graves of his ancestors. After her elaborate description of how far he fell short of being a man, she had stopped and begun to worry about his stillness. In the end, it had taken her two days to coax him like a small boy out of his self-contempt. He had promised her that it would never happen again, and it never had.
    She believed she knew the truth of his reputation for violence. When he was young, it had been a gesture he knew how to make, which earned him an easy acceptance in the rough context he was born in, and it had remained something he could never believe in seriously. He had never hit the boys, even in a token way. Yet in the moments when her frustration with her own life left her with no charity for him, a voice in her that was like an echo of her mother would say he was a violent man.
    The housing scheme they lived in, too, she would sometimes use against him. She liked their council house but she would keep handy in her mind her awareness of the haplessness of neighbours, the aimless family quarrels that they had two doors down, the way several people whom they knew organised their lives with all the precision of a road accident.
    But all her accusations were subsumed under the one basic charge: he was wasting himself. He let days happen to him, that was all. Somehow, although less effectively and with increasing difficulty, he still provided a decent enough home, saw that she and the children lived more or less all right. But he seemed to make that his only purpose, had a life but no sense of a career.
    She had loved that in him when he was younger. But she sensed, around her, friends she had known at school constructing weatherproof lives for themselves against all the inclemencies of middle age and she and Dan still lived as if they didn’t know the weather would change. He had no ambition. Under the constant abrasion of that thought, something she had always known about him, and had liked, turned septic and became a constant irritation. At school he had given up an academic course because it separated him from his friends. At one time she thought she had understood. He loved being out on the streets.He was big and strong and wanted to be in about life. There had been something in that she had admired. But it looked a lot less attractive to her now.
    Part of the reason was a transferred guilt she felt about herself. When they got married, she had given up university. He had wanted her to go on but she had lost belief in what she was doing, felt she was dealing with hothouse concerns that would wither into irrelevance if you took them out into the open air. But though the action had been hers, it had turned with time into an accusation against him, as if she had given him herself and he had failed to justify the gift.
    She knew the sense of betrayal was mutual. The openness between them had diminished and she sensed him believing the blame for that was originally hers. She knew he felt that no matter what he did now it would be misconstrued, that she attributed motives to his actions he had never imagined being there, so that he sometimes called her Mrs Freud. It must have felt to him that whatever small present he tried to give her, of a compliment or a generous remark, it was held cautiously to her ear and shaken, as if it might explode. He had once said to her in total frustration, Jesus Christ! Ah was tryin’ to be nice. If a fucking gorilla gave you a banana, ye would take it. It might be a gorilla. But it’s still a gift.’
    These days she found herself wondering more and more what was wrong with the gift he had tried to give her. It wasn’t that he had welshed on the giving. Perhaps it was connected to the fact that he had from the beginning seemed to her potentially more than