He lifted the bottle and poured two measures of vodka into two glasses. One after another he drank them down to prepare him for the journey into town. He wrote down the name of the play that he had not yet begun, then stepped onto the street.

Catherine returned on the last train on Saturday night and took a taxi out to the house. He had spent the entire day walking round in one of those exhilarating hangovers that teeter on the edge of despair. Everything he looked at – people, leaves, water – he became engrossed in. Now he was sitting by the fire reading.

“Sit down here,” he said.

He lay his head on her breasts.

“How did it go?”

“Sara was good, I have to admit. But she surrounds herself with dreadful people.”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

“I suppose I did. But I missed you.”

He heard something wrong in her voice.

“Catherine,” he said, “you’ve been with someone.”

She looked shocked, and a little scared, and immediately admitted that, yes, she had. “I didn’t intend for this to happen. It will never happen again,” she said. But he looked at her in such a way that she felt mortified.

“I knew there was something wrong,” he said.

She did not answer him.

“Tell me everything, in great detail, that happened,” he demanded.

“Down, I suppose, to the size of his penis?” He did not answer. “Do I have to do this?”

“That way I can get over it.”

And slowly she told him, as if in a way she was repeating one of her dreams. The only difference being that in this case he knew he would remember every detail. She was shocked, as he was himself, by how easy he was taking her confession once she had begun. He sought out each salacious moment. He interrogated her until her lovemaking was as familiar to him as if he himself had been there.

“There’s no more,” she said, “unless you want me to start inventing things?”

“I wish you would,” he said hopelessly.

Then at last she said: “How did you know? It’s like you’ve been reading my mind.”

“I always suspect you.”

First she grew arrogant and high-principled. Then mellow and sad. They began undressing each other.

“I promise you,” she said, “it’s all over now. I want to love every ounce of you. I don’t want remotely to be with anyone else. I’m obsessed with you.”

“Did you bring some drink home?”

“Is the vodka gone?”

She opened the wine and began to cry.