Michael was waiting for me when I got back and he’d been drinking. As I closed the front door behind me, I knew at once this was a very different atmosphere to the one I’d encountered yesterday. I walked down the hall to the kitchen and he came towards me from where he’d been waiting. A muscle was going in his cheek and the familiar anger vein was throbbing in his forehead. He’d called the club, he said. I’d been so long, he was worried. Asked the doorman who I was lunching with, who’d signed in as my guest. He said he knew my nasty little ways of old. Knew exactly what I was up to. He began to shake with fury, his face florid. He said he was mortified, thoroughly ashamed of me, that I was a complete embarrassment. And then it started. How nobody liked me, nobody. I had no friends; people only accepted me for my association, by marriage, with him. His friends all pitied him, wondered why he stayed with me, this timid soul who churned out drivel. Terrible disposable book after disposable book. I was a laughing stock. He said pity was the only reason he stayed with me. That he knew I’d be destitute if he left me. The house, in a covenant organized by trustees of his parents, belonged solely to him. He knew I’d be on the streets. He said he despised me. All this, as he prowled around me, whisky on his breath, hissing in my face, leaning in now and then for my ear. Michael was always careful now, not to make too much noise.

I groped for a stool. My legs were wobbly and I always physically shrank under the verbal abuse, often with my head bowed, my eyes shut. Still he prowled, and hissed: about what a pathetic creature I was. Overweight, fat, ugly. An insult to my sex. And all this, actually, I could take. As long as I took cover, thus, in silence. I knew, from his sister, that when they were younger she’d suffered similar insults when he’d been thwarted in some way. She’d repeated some of the things he’d just said to me word for word, so although it left me breathless, I could take it. I waited, mute and trembling, on the kitchen stool, for him to finish. In the past, of course, when I was younger, I’d retaliated: shouted, screamed even, but that would only kick-start something extra – something he’d yet to say, about the children – so I didn’t. Finally he bent right down to put his face close to mine, that vein pumping in his forehead, to deliver his last insult.

‘And don’t you ever think of leaving, you sad little bitch. Because you know what I’ll do. You know I’ll find you. Or someone else.’