‘Would you rather I’d waited longer? As for being smashed in the face –’ he rubbed his cheekbone ‘– that’s quite a punch you pack.’

She shuddered. She got up and began slowly and stiffly to pace the room. ‘I hardly touched you. I wish I’d killed you!’ By a small table she stopped. There was a china figurine on it, a bronze paperknife, an onyx pen jar that matched the ashtray. ‘All those things,’ she said. ‘I looked after them for you. I treasured them. And now you’re going to have them all shipped out to her. The things we lived with. I used to look at them and think, Maurice bought that when we went to – oh God, I can’t believe it. Sent to her!’

He nodded, staring at her. ‘You can keep the big stuff,’ he said. ‘You’re specially welcome to the sofa. I’ve tried sleeping on it for two nights and I never want to see the bloody thing again.’

She picked up the china figurine and hurled it at him. It didn’t hit him because he ducked and let it smash against the wall, just missing a framed drawing. ‘Mind the Lowry,’ he said laconically, ‘I paid a lot of money for that.’

She flung herself onto the sofa and burst into sobs. She thrashed about, hammering the cushions with her fists. He wasn’t going to be moved by that – he wasn’t going to be moved at all. Once he’d packed those things, he’d be off to spend the next three months touring Europe. A free man, free for the sights and the fun and the girls, for a last fling of wild oats. After that, back to Patricia and a home and a job and responsibility. It was a glowing future which this hysterical woman wasn’t going to mess up.

‘Shut up, Betsy, for God’s sake,’ he said. He shook her roughly by the shoulder, and then he went out because it was now eleven and he could get a drink.

Betsy made herself some coffee and washed her swollen eyes. She walked about, looking at the ornaments and the books, the glasses and vases and lamps, which he would take from her tomorrow. It wasn’t that she much minded losing them, the things themselves, but the barrenness which would be left, and the knowing that they would all be Patricia’s.

In the night she had got up, found his wallet, taken out the photographs of Patricia, and torn them up. But she remembered the face, pretty and hard and greedy, and she thought of those bright eyes widening as Patricia unpacked the tea chests, the predatory hands scrabbling for more treasures in the trunk. Doing it all perhaps before Maurice himself got there, arranging the lamps and the glasses and the ornaments in their home for his delight when at last he came.

He would marry her, of course. I suppose she thinks he’s faithful to her, Betsy thought, the way I once thought he was faithful to me. I know better now. Poor stupid fool, she doesn’t know what he did the first moment he was alone with her, or what he would do in France and Italy. That would be a nice wedding present to give her, wouldn’t it, along with all the pretty bric-a-brac in the trunk?