‘I’ve got it down to three,’ he said. ‘Which one do you like?’

I set down my briefcase, tried not to stare at the pen marks on the table.

‘That one,’ I said, pointing to the one that most resembled his real signature.

‘Huh,’ he said. Then he turned to smell my chest. ‘You smell good,’ he said. ‘What is that?’

‘L’Autre,’ I said.

I’d gone into a perfumerie, a tiny, exclusive boutique, and asked for something that would linger in a room after I’d left it. Something people would remember.

L’Autre was the perfume the matron in a black pantsuit had produced.

‘What is that?’ my mother asked when I met her for lunch later that day.

She leaned forward, blowing smoke out of her nose before inhaling my wrist like a sniffer dog hunting for contraband.

‘Bah.’ Her head jerked up. ‘Smells like BO. Men will hate it.’

Now, in the mornings, I step out of the shower, spray L’Autre in a cloud above my head and walk into it, my eyes closed, letting its tenacious little atoms grip my hair and clothes and skin.

Night Is the Only Home I Know

It’s his classic line, the one Boulet says before he commits the final crime, the one that sees him executed by a firing squad. Night is the only home I know.

Alexandre says it to the woman he loves, Mathilde.

During rehearsals Tom took to saying the line to himself, dozens, hundreds of times per day; Night is the only home I know; Night is the only home I know; Night is the only home I know.

He said it into the mirror. He said it in the shower. He said it reading the sports section and again when watching TV.

He’d get up in the night when he thought I was asleep and pad around the living room, saying it again and again, until he must have been numb to the words, to their meaning.

I asked him to say it for me, once. To me. ‘Pretend I’m Mathilde.’

He looked shocked; he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask again.

Allowances

On the first of every month I do a calculation, adjust the amount for inflation and cost-of-living increases.

Neither of us says a word about it.

Grooming

One night: my hand on his chest.

‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom, you have chest hair!’

I looked closely at the little blond hairs, sparse but plucky, laying themselves flat against his skin.

‘I’ve always had chest hair.’

‘No you haven’t.’

I pulled at them, watching the skin rise in little tents.

‘I did. I’ve just been… removing it. Until now.’

‘Removing it? Like waxing?’

‘Exactly. Loads of actors do it.’ He yawned. ‘I’m growing it in for White Light. People didn’t wax in the nineteenth century.’