Or when she sent him a card on Valentine’s Day, with a childish heart inside and an arrow through it. ‘From someone who loves you’, she wrote in capital letters.

‘Sorry, I forgot all about it this year,’ he said when he opened it.

‘Never mind,’ she said, glaring at him with humiliation. ‘It’s just a stupid commercial con really. We both know that; it doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, maybe that’s not from me.’

‘Right,’ he said, attempting to laugh.

‘From your secret admirer.’

‘Ha!’ he said.

She shouldn’t have sent him a fucking card anyway. She should have just poked him in the eye. Bastard, she said in her head. Wanker. She made a face at him when he turned his back, and was alarmed at her infantile fury. Soon, she thought, she would just go off like a bomb.

Or there was the night he hadn’t come home; how could she have just let that go? She had woken at intervals to find him absent, rung his mobile but it was always turned off, then at six-thirty in the morning she sat up in bed, hearing the front door shut softly, then the noises of him downstairs, clattering a cup, turning on a tap, whistling. Fucking whistling! She threw herself out of bed, pulled on her towelling robe, yanking the belt so sharply she almost couldn’t breathe, and marched downstairs, stubbing her toe on the last step.

‘Where the bleeding hell were you?’

‘Sorry. Like an idiot, I left my blasted key in my other jacket and by the time I realized it was late. I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Oh for goodness sake, you could have rung.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he repeated.

‘How did you get in, then?’

‘I found it in my jeans pocket after all,’ he replied lamely.

‘Oh yes. So where did you sleep?’

‘At Jack’s house?’

‘Jack? Jack? Who’s Jack when he’s at home?’

‘One of the cast,’ he said vaguely. ‘You don’t know him.’

She snorted derisively and he looked at her calmly.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ he asked. He wanted her to say that no, as a matter of fact she didn’t. Then he would tell her and pull the house down on them both. The relief of wreckage.

She sat down in a kitchen chair and rubbed her face. Hysteria left her and she just felt tired. ‘Of course I do,’ she muttered. ‘Of course I believe you, Adrian.’