I remembered Ben’s hostility on Thursday evening. His anger.

Mel added: ‘And I said that you’d threatened me.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d threatened to hurt me, beat me up, if I was ever unfaithful.’

Her words landed like a punch to the kidneys.

‘Jesus, Mel, I would never hurt you. Never. I’d jump off a cliff before I did that.’

‘I told Ben we had to end it, because I was afraid of what you might do.’

‘Dread to think how that little bombshell went down.’

‘He . . . wasn’t happy.’

I paused to digest this new information. Things were starting to fall into place.

‘That’s why he got drunk on Thursday night. Because you told him you were calling the whole thing off.’

In a small voice she said: ‘I think so, yes.’

‘And that’s why he went off with one of his guns?’

‘You’ve got to understand, I had to have something to stop it dead, right there, something that would shock Ben into staying away for good.’

‘So you told him some lies about me being an abusive husband.’

‘I made up a story.’

‘But Ben still wanted to carry it on?’ I didn’t want to name it, refer to it as an affair. It made it seem more real, more serious, more final somehow.

My wife nodded.

‘He’s been bored with Beth for years. Whatever spark they had, it went out a long time ago – that’s what he said. He told me that if she hadn’t got pregnant at university they would probably have split up within a few months. But then Alice came along and he felt like he had to do the decent thing. So they got married instead and she gave up her degree to have Alice and look after her. She was going to go back to finish her course, but it never happened for one reason or another.’

It wasn’t something that Beth had ever spoken to me about, but I knew from what Mel had told me previously that they were married young. Beth had dropped out of her degree in the second year. I couldn’t remember what she’d studied, something arty. It was before I’d met Mel but I had seen the wedding photos once: they looked like a couple of teenagers, Beth in a loose-fitting cream dress to disguise her bump, Ben with a crew cut and glasses, looking like an awkward kid who had borrowed his dad’s suit to go to the prom. They were the first people either of us knew to get married, the first to have a baby by a long way. Alice was fourteen now, a smart and focused teenager who had a maturity that belied her age. Beth sometimes joked that she was a daddy’s girl, but in the best possible way – Ben and she had a closeness, an understanding, that was clear to see when they were together. Most of our peers from school and university – all in our mid-thirties – either had young children in nursery or primary school, or had not even got started on babies yet.