I wasn’t going to be taken in by that one. I knew a trap when I saw it. ‘Why is it dependent on me?’ I asked. ‘Stopping seeing him should be your decision.’

I had seen the trap but I had missed the snare. ‘Precisely,’ she said.

I suppose it’s possible, as I look back upon it now, that this situation, whatever its small inconsistencies, could have gone its humdrum way for some considerable time. Most marriages not in their first flush have a third person hovering close, to take the strain, to absorb surplus energies, to act as a kind of referee and Vice-regent and au pair all at once. But Sharon and I didn’t just have a third person at our shoulder, we had a fourth – Thomas Hardy. And it was as much Thomas Hardy as Rowland Fitzpiers that brought the Fugleman marriage to its final bloody close.

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