‘Because –’ and his voice shook ‘– because by the time I’m your age you’ll be seventy-five. I’ll be like you are now, full of life and energy – and you’ll be seventy-five. And because – because I want to have children, you know that. Real children. I know we once talked about adoption but I want children of my own.’

‘Because I’m already old,’ said Molly, ‘and you’re young, and you don’t love me enough for it not to matter.’ She knew it was the most unfair thing she could say.

He looked away, fiddled with the keys on his sax. His new chance for happiness sustained him, otherwise he knew he couldn’t have gone through with this.

‘But – we’ve been together for over eight years,’ she said pleadingly. ‘Some people aren’t married for half that long, we’ve been happy. Haven’t we?’ She saw him in her mind, how he’d been lately, gently doped for at least half the time, out of it. And she saw herself, in the honeysuckle-scented dark room, with Anthony.

‘I have been happy Molly, you know that.’ His face was pale, and taut with tension. ‘You taught me most of what I know about love, and relationships, and being with someone. I don’t think I was grown up till I met you and I’ll always love you, in a way. But I – oh darling,’ and it was his turn to plead now, ‘I want other things too. I—’ he hesitated. ‘I don’t want a life like yours.’

Molly made a weird kind of groaning sound. ‘Banjo I can’t live without you, you are my life, you saved me when Mum died, I can’t live without you, I can’t survive!’ Her voice rose in the night, not meaning to.

He put the saxophone down at last, took her in his arms. She had been almost asleep when he finally came home. He knew he had to tell her when she sat up in bed blinking in her green nightdress saying, I missed you. She wept on his shoulder, he stroked her hair.

‘Who is it?’ she asked at last, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

He told his only lie of the evening. ‘No one you know,’ he said.

Later, in the night, in his arms, she woke crying so loudly that she frightened herself as well as him. Her breathing came in big gulps, fighting for air through her mouth, I can’t live without you, she said, I can’t live. And the image of her mother’s dead body in the car, in the garage which they had walked into together, came darkly, clearly, into both of their minds.

He was frightened then too and in more pain than he could imagine.

‘Then I can’t go,’ he said, ‘I suppose.’