When Chris told Doug Ronson what he had bought for Leah, Doug was so impressed that he took down the address of the website the necklace had come from. He bought a necklace for Helen with not one but three diamonds, each bigger than the single diamond on Leah’s necklace. Privately, Chris thought this one-up-manship a little tacky. He didn’t know that the necklace was Doug’s way of saying sorry for an un-confessed crime. Lately, Doug and Helen had both been very busy; it had been difficult for them to find time to see each other. On several occasions, in the middle of long, Helen-less stints, Doug found himself logged on to his old account on uniformdating.com. Working quickly, as if Helen were about to come in and catch him at it – even though she was hundreds of miles away – he would select the first randy girl within easy driving distance, sidle into his Alfa Romeo with a pocketful of condoms, and be back in his own bed by morning. He told nobody about these trips.

Helen was careful not to show how pleased she was with the necklace. She wanted Doug to propose to her, and she had decided that the best way to effect this outcome was to behave as if all his attentions were nothing less than her due – to create, very subtly, the impression that she might tire of him at any moment. She needn’t have worried: just as Chris was intending to break up with Leah on the eve of his deployment, so Doug was preparing to ask Helen to marry him before he left for Afghanistan. Each time he cheated on her this conviction grew stronger: the less Doug thought of himself, the more highly he valued Helen. He reasoned that his infidelities were purgative, that he was ‘getting it out of his system’ before he committed to one woman for the rest of his life. Yet a small sad part of him knew that it didn’t matter whether Helen were his girlfriend or his fiancée or his wife, because he would continue to have sex with other people whenever he thought he could get away with it. For ever and ever hymen.