We were neither of us much amused. I could see that Sharon felt that I had failed some crucial test. As for me, the idea of competing with Fitzpiers over fatherhood filled me with distaste. My only strong desire now was to pull out and leave the pair of them – correction, the three of them – to their devices. Fitzpiers had already tapped my unconscious and swapped my wife, I couldn’t see any good reason why he shouldn’t go on to slap my baby. A delicious sensation of languor, as sensuous as sleep and as sweet as corruption, overtook me at the thought of giving everything to someone else. Hadn’t I been trying to give Sharon away from the moment that I’d met her? It felt like a fulfilment. The reason I’d been put on earth.

And the sight of me packing my bags seemed to fill Sharon with a quiet and melancholy calm also. She clearly believed that I’d had my chance and turned it down and therefore ought to go. But at the last moment, as I sat on the edge of the bed in which I’d always felt a stranger, and told her that I didn’t want anything from her, that she could keep whatever we owned, that it was all much more hers than mine anyway, she attacked me with everything she could find. She threw shoes at me and coat hangers and a shaving mirror and the hair dryer, all the personal and pointless things we had bought together over the years rained down on me, and I fended them off, I ducked and sheltered, until she caught me decisively on the temple with the Swedish bathroom scales. The sight of my blood made her the more determined. She seized back the scales and using both her hands she crashed them against the side of my face. For a moment I thought she had taken my ear off – gone for it deliberately, in order to rob me of my obscenest organ – for I was bleeding copiously, I could hear with an unfamiliar roaring loudness as if an impediment had been removed at last, and I felt an unaccustomed flap of skin against my neck. I was in a dreadful panic. My body, as I had once before explained to Sharon, was a mystery to me whole; how much the more so, then, was I bewildered by it dismembered. I covered myself with both hands when she came for me again, and I knew that she wouldn’t stop of her own accord, that she would certainly kill me if she possibly could.