But pain is still pain, no matter how unreasonable. You can’t rationalise it away any more than you can rationalise away a headache. The argument becomes different, then. Whether you have slept with her or not, your conduct is hurting me. Doesn’t that bother you? I struggled to find a way of articulating this to him. Whenever I tried in my head, I made myself sound clingy and whiny. I made myself sound like a child.

We stood for a while like that, facing each other: him implacable, me increasingly despairing. In the end, he put both hands on my upper arms and said, his voice a model of reasonableness, ‘Look, Lisa, it’s a whole bloody month till your Easter hols. Get a grip. You always go a bit crazy at the end of term and I get it, your job is stressful, but mine is too and what if I got completely paranoid every time I got overworked?’

‘I’m not paranoid …’ I said, but weakly.

‘You think it’s easy for me, being on the receiving end of all this, considering what I do all day long?’

‘That’s not what I …’

‘Just answer the question. You think my life is easy, stress-free, do you?’

‘I’ve never said …’

‘Answer the question, yes or no. Is my life easy or not? Don’t give me a load of bullshitting caveats, just answer the question, is my life easy, yes or no?’

‘No.’

He heaved a sigh and his shoulders sank a little, as if I had just made an enormous concession. ‘Thank you.’

We stood like that for a moment or two, his hands still on my arms. Then he lifted his hands and placed them firmly on my shoulders. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, conciliatory.

‘Look at me.’

The injunction made me look at the ground.

‘Lisa, I said, look at me.’

I looked into his eyes.

He shook his head slowly, lips pressed together, his expression one of sorrow rather than anger. ‘Just think about this for a minute. Which of us spends all day problem-solving, prioritising, being rational, and which of us lives in the realm of the imagination? You teach novels, and plays and poetry, all well and good I’m sure, but you spend your whole life with stories people have made up. You wouldn’t be like this if you taught chemistry or geography, believe me, or if you had a job like mine where every day is about prioritising what’s important and what’s not. If you did that, you would realise Jasmine is nothing. Can we please just keep a sense of perspective?’

In the face of these observations, I did not know how to respond. Anything I said would sound like a protest against the rational.

He shook his head again. ‘You overthink everything, don’t you?’

‘I …’