To the question ‘How long will you be living in the house? Should I plan for five, ten, twenty years?’, she had answered, ‘I’m not psychic.’ Underneath ‘Do you need privacy? Any particular part of the garden?’ she had written, ‘We’ve got privacy. No part of our garden is overlooked. Surely this sort of generic questionnaire is bad for your business? Why don’t you tailor your questions to individual clients’ needs?’

In person she’d been rude, but this was worse. These were words she’d had a chance to think about, ones she’d committed to paper. She had saved her most cutting response for last. The final question was about the pH and texture of the soil, any micro-climates there might be in the garden, frost pockets, shelter, prevailing winds. Many of my clients didn’t have a clue about this sort of thing and wrote ‘Not sure’ or ‘Don’t know’, but I still felt the question was worth including, because sometimes people knew more than you expected them to, and it could be a big help to have this kind of information upfront.

Beneath my last question, she had written, ‘Get a life!’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’

‘Is she always like this?’ I asked. Not at all inappropriate, I felt, under the circumstances.

‘You will come back, won’t you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Please. I . . . I promise, I won’t touch you again.’ He blushed.

I thought about his ‘den’, the ghetto she’d confined him to in a house that was otherwise hers, and about my bedroom as a child, the tapestry slogans on the walls, stitched by my mother: ‘Jesus is the silent listener to every conversation’, ‘Seven days without prayer makes one weak’. I suppose I was looking for someone whose pain matched mine. I was doing the same thing years later when I met Aidan, when I had even more pain to find a match for.

Against my better judgement, I kept them on as clients. The next few times I went to Cherub Cottage, she was there, and he was as he had been the first time I’d met him—full of confident knowing smiles at her expense. I tried not to meet his eyes but it was hard. I couldn’t believe he was the same man who, in her absence, had behaved like a gauche schoolboy. I’d started to have sexual fantasies about him by then, ones that involved far more than sex. In my idealised version of our story, fate had given me a clear mission: I was the only person who could save him from her. If I let him down, he’d never escape her clutches or the confines of his petty, constrained life with her.