She threw open the door, and the light from behind her fell into the room. He was lying in the large bed, his clothes in an urgent heap on the floor and the duvet pushed down his waist so she could see the beginning of his pubic hair, a bottle of red wine open and half-drunk on the bedside table. The air smelt thickly of sweat, perfume, sex; it caught in Irene’s nostrils and tipped her back to her own past and other dark rooms.

‘It was me,’ said Irene. She didn’t recognize her own voice. She heard Frankie come into the room behind her. In the free-standing mirror next to the wardrobe, she saw herself reflected: a bony, wild woman with badly cut hair, a shabby coat, an inside-out jumper, burning eyes.

‘You made a promise,’ she said and started to pull off her wedding ring. As she held it between her index finger and thumb, she had a flash of recall – Adrian standing beside her in the register office, trying to push it onto her finger with shaking hands, and half laughing, half crying as he did so. ‘You made a promise,’ she repeated. ‘And I believed you. Your word, your fucking fucking word.’

She hurled it at him, seeing it spin and gleam in the half-dark, like a little missile spinning through space. But it clinked harmlessly against the wall behind him and fell out of sight.

Adrian did something then that Irene knew she would never forget, not even when she was an old woman and all of this ugliness had faded into a story told to nobody else – he gave a little snorting laugh, as if he was amused and contemptuous of Irene’s melodramatic gesture. The laugh lodged in Irene’s brain, a fluttering, obscene sensation. He didn’t care, she realized. He was so blinded by lust and passion that he literally did not care what she was feeling at this moment. If she started banging her head against the wall; if she fell in a heap, wailing hysterically; if she cried and cried and begged him to stay with her, he wouldn’t care. If she’d had a knife handy, she could have plunged it into her chest, just to make him understand what he was doing to her. Or a match and she could have set fire to herself and stood in red leaping flames in front of him: look, look, look at me now, look, you wanker, you deceiver, I’m burning, I’m dying. But maybe he still wouldn’t care, just sigh at the inconvenience of her. There was nothing in the world she could do to alter her lovelessness. She felt she was gagging on her own bitter humiliation and a scream rose up in her, rushing through her body like a hot wind.