Perhaps, in those days, I should have asked myself what it was he saw in us.

It was about a year ago that I first noticed a coolness between Gwendolen and Reeve. The banter they had gone in for, which had consisted in wry confessions or flirtatious compliments from him, and shy, somewhat maternal reproofs from her, stopped almost entirely. When we all three were together they talked to each other through me, as if I were their interpreter. I asked Gwendolen if he’d done something to upset her.

She looked extremely taken aback. ‘What makes you ask?’

‘You always seem a bit peeved with him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to be nicer. I didn’t know I’d changed.’

She had changed to me too. She flinched sometimes when I touched her, and although she never refused me, there was an apathy about her love-making.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her after a failure which disturbed me because it was so unprecedented.

She said it was nothing, and then, ‘We’re getting older. You can’t expect things to be the same as when we were first married.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You’re thirty-five and I’m thirty-nine. We’re not in our dotage.’

She sighed and looked unhappy. She had become moody and difficult. Although she hardly opened her mouth in Reeve’s presence, she talked about him a lot when he wasn’t there, seizing upon almost any excuse to discuss him and speculate about his character. And she seemed inexplicably annoyed when, on our tenth wedding anniversary, a greetings card arrived addressed to us both from him. I, of course, had sent her roses. At the end of the week I missed a receipt for a bill I’d paid – as an accountant I’m naturally circumspect about these things – and I searched through our wastepaper basket, thinking I might have thrown it away. I found it, and I also found the anniversary card I’d sent Gwendolen to accompany the roses.

All these things I noticed. That was the trouble with me – I noticed things but I lacked the experience of life to add them up and make a significant total. I didn’t have the worldly wisdom to guess why my wife was always out when I phoned her in the afternoons, or why she was for ever buying new clothes. I noticed, I wondered, that was all.

I noticed things about Reeve too. For one thing, that he’d stopped talking about his girl friends.

‘He’s growing up at last,’ I said to Gwendolen.

She reacted with warmth, with enthusiasm. ‘I really think he is.’

But she was wrong. He had only three months of what I thought of as celibacy. And then when he talked of a new girl friend, it was to me alone. Confidentially, over a Friday night drink in the pub, he told me of this ‘marvellous chick’, twenty years old, he had met at a party the week before.

‘It won’t last, Reeve,’ I said.