I didn’t know what to ask next. There were so many things I did and didn’t want to find out. I sat down on a corner of the bed, stood up, and sat down again. Something made me cast my eye over Sharon’s space suit. I expect I was looking for signs of carousal: knife slashes or sooty fingerprints or hairs from the beard of Fitzpiers’s SF friends. But the suit was spotless except for a minuscule orange stain on the skirt, and a suggestion of an indentation – indications, both, that Sharon had sat for God knows how long on an object resembling the pip of a satsuma. I can’t tell you why but I found that detail horrific; it somehow implied bestial engrossment and oblivion. In which case I knew what I needed to know. ‘I take it you got something out of this,’ I enquired in a rather unsteady voice.

I might have been mistaken but I thought Sharon laughed. ‘Naturally’, she said. ‘But I hope you’re not going to pump me for details.’

Details? What else was there but details? ‘Is the number of times you were swapped a detail?’ I asked.

She stopped what she was doing and turned around to face me. ‘Are you asking me for the number of different men, or do you want me to count repeats?’

‘Whichever you feel you can talk most cheerfully about.’

‘Well that’s neither. It really is my affair, you know. You oughtn’t to expect me to give you a blow by blow account.’

I didn’t care for her choice of words and I didn’t like her attitude. Which meant that I was now where it was safest for me to be, aggrieved, at the nub of the thing. ‘Look Sharon,’ I said, raising my voice, ‘don’t tell me what I ought or ought not to expect. You’re my wife – if anyone takes you to a wife-swapping party it ought to be me.’

‘I see,’ said Sharon without any surprise – I’ve always hated that in women: their assumption of my predictability – ‘so that’s why you’re stung – because he took me and you didn’t.’

‘So what’s wrong with that?’ I suspect that by this time I was shouting. ‘Haven’t I provided enough diversions for the snivelling little prick?’

‘You haven’t provided anything. And he isn’t little. He’s bigger than you are.’