I didn’t reproach her. I didn’t pester her. I didn’t pity her. In any case, she soon seemed to have forgotten the matter. ‘Yesterday’s dreams fade,’ she said once, ‘but every night brings a new dream, isn’t that wonderful?’ When I heard her say that, I realized that I hated her. I hated everything about her: her voice, her face, her smile, and most of all I hated her neck, that long, thin caricature of a neck. I stroked her hair and said, ‘Yes, dear, it’s wonderful.’

She always said I didn’t understand anything about beauty. But that’s not true. I just didn’t understand anything about the things she understood to be beautiful. I hadn’t got a clue about poetry, but when she let me read one of her poems I knew straight away it was no good. It was about a woman on a journey, a fearful creature sitting on a train in a sequinned dress and white shoes and feeling exposed to the gaze of strange men. It had no rhythm, no melody and no soul, just a few distorted and overblown images. A sequinned dress, on a train!

In the nights when Martha was downstairs parading in front of the mirror, I would sit at the window and imagine what things would have been like without her. I tried to picture myself somewhere, as far away as possible, somewhere without tired commuters’ faces, without dusty shelves and the smell of leather, without the customers’ stupid questions, without this woman’s dreams that were not mine. I would sit there staring out into the night until I heard her footsteps on the stairs, when I would creep back into bed and pretend to be asleep.

‘Let’s go,’ she cried that day. ‘We’re going out!’ She jumped up from the fitting stool as if she’d been stung. Her face was flushed, she was so taken by her idea. I had no objections. The shop hadn’t been doing well for a long time by then. To tell the truth, it was completely dead.

We drove to the new leisure centre with the glass roof that glittered above the fields in the distance. ‘I have such a longing in me,’ she cried. ‘I want to be among people! I want to feel their warmth and hear their laughter!’ She was shouting stuff like that across the concrete expanse of the car park, where a few vehicles sat glowing in the heat.

I said, ‘Go by yourself. I don’t feel like it.’

‘Of course you’re coming,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said.

There was a flash of malice in her eyes. For a moment I thought she was going to slap me.

‘You’re my husband, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She nodded, took a step away from the car, then immediately turned again and I thought: this is it. But then something unexpected happened. She took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead. Her lips were cool and dry. I felt like a fool. She walked away, then stopped again. For a moment she stood there in the sunlight, arms slightly raised, as if talking to some invisible person, or as if she were a little girl again, about to start dancing. Then she vanished in the shadow of the entrance.