“In the mornings I’m not well. In the afternoons, while Catherine is off round the province in a minibus doing political plays, I sit in an old record shop listening to music from the sixties. Played,” added Jack, “by an ex-British soldier. Then at night I give Irish classes.”

“Excellent. OK. Look as soon as you’ve finished something will you send it on?”

“Sure. I will.”

“Ha-ho.”

Jack put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and watched the Union Jacks blowing.

He disappeared into his study for three days. She came home each evening to the tap of the typewriter.

The demons that jealousy and drink would unleash were quietened. The few hours of sobriety made them wise, forgiving and nostalgic. A new beginning seemed possible. They allowed themselves two drinks between eleven and midnight and saluted each other. A mood of religious hilarity would take them.

“Are your characters happy, are they content?”

“They’re peaceful.”

“I worry about their wellbeing.”

“So you ought.”

He’d place the pages he had finished before her and watch her face anxiously for her reaction. She’d attempt a few lines, and look at him.

“What do you think?”

“It makes me wonder where you spend your days while I’m away. There’s a lot of erotic text here that as woman I have not experienced with you, and that makes me wonder.”

Jack laughed. “It’s called invention.”

“Is it? I find it sexually unnerving.”

And it was on one of those nights that Jack partly emptied, for a few seconds, his body of the sex that controlled it.

How he arrived at that state was through a hazardous frisson of the mind. Something had jerked him into a new uncertain state of desire. He had been stretched out beside Catherine. He felt her presence there, long and tall and blond in the bed, a womanly shape sleeping beside him. His full length in every respect. Willing to be abused by him insofar as her turn would come to humiliate him. Then he thought for a second that she was a man in the bed beside him. She, of course, when he told her these things, laughed and was delighted by the thought, because she was glad he was capable of such longings.

For she believed secretly that men only desire men.

For Jack it was a tender moment to be stretched alongside someone laughing.

“Catherine,” he said.