One morning I woke up to the realization that there was a foreign object on my bed-side table. I have always been a creature of strict habit around the bed. I sleep better knowing what’s waiting for me where, and that there will be no surprises when I wake. That was one of the reasons why I was only ever moderately unfaithful to Sharon (though I admit that it doesn’t explain why I grew so keen that she should be unfaithful to me). But this morning when I reached for my watch I found myself fingering unfamiliar surfaces, and when I opened my eyes I was looking at something I had never seen before but which I knew at once was another of Sharon’s impulsive purchases from the Burlington Arcade. It was a cloissoné photo-frame, all glowing pink enamels to match the bedroom décor – that was partly why she had to have it – and hinged in the middle, like a diptych, to take a pair of photographs. Only instead of the photographs being of her mummy and daddy or my mummy and daddy, or even her mummy with my daddy or my mummy with her daddy, they were of me and him – can you credit this? – me and you-know-who, in the same frame, as if we were family; me, looking gaunt and dealing with the sorrows of adolescence, and him at the same age, a hopeless fart of fifteen, with fluff on his face.

On the other side of the bed and glowing pink herself, Sharon was awake and grinning; her arms stretched out far above her head, her armpits, faintly dewey, waiting to receive me.

‘I was struck by the resemblance,’ she said, after I’d said nothing.

I trust I will be believed when I state that no two boys were ever less alike. I might not have been a handsome teenager, but I think there was a certain sinewy strength in my appearance for anyone who knew how to look for it, behind the pain a princely capacity to feel pain; whereas little T.H. in his photograph stood barely formed, scarce half made up – not much of an improvement on the infant who was all but tossed aside at birth (as Sharon had unwisely told me), so few of the usual signs had he exhibited that experienced midwives associate with life.

Struck by the resemblance, indeed! I think Sharon could count herself lucky that she wasn’t there and then struck by something else. I have a feeling that I even went so far as to test the weight of the cloissoné photo-frame. There certainly would have been trouble of some kind had a solitary sparkling crystal of perspiration not trickled, at that moment, down Sharon’s side and sent me, oblivious to all else, prospecting for its source.