Slowly, he reached the tiles down to the shelf and replaced them.

“Unfortunately, the happy times didn’t last. Sarah thought it was amusing for a while to be married to a professor, but the novelty pretty soon wore off, and she was left with a guy who didn’t notice if she cut her hair or if she grew it or if she dyed it blue, a guy who didn’t go to the movies, didn’t watch TV. Plus, I don’t much care for parties, and she loved them. It was part of her job, she said, to go to parties and be charming and meet people; I fairly soon had had enough of the sort of people she met at the sort of parties she liked to go to, and maybe I didn’t make as much of an effort as I could have to try to get along with them, so pretty soon she started to go to the parties without me. After a while, and over the course of a couple of years, we just kind of drifted apart.”

“But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” said Emma. “Matthew and I do lots of things separately, and we still manage to get along.”

“But I know you do things together, too,” said Tom. “Sarah and I got more and more into the habit of not doing things together, so much so that we ended up not doing anything together, and I’m such a dope about these things that I didn’t even notice what was going on, until one day I happened to look up from the book I was reading over dinner, and I realized that I’d been reading alone at dinner for several weeks straight. And by that time, Sarah had gotten into the habit of doing the things she did with another guy who she decided she wanted to be with instead of me. And, you know something, it was only then, when it was too late, that I realized that living in my head as I do, and neglectful of our marriage as I’d been by that stage, that I really couldn’t fault her for wanting out.”

There was a silence.

“That’s a sad story,” said Lulu.

“Very sad,” said Emma; but there was a frown of puzzlement on her brow.

“Good point, Emma.” Tom nodded at her. “You’re quite right. It explains why I’m single, but not why I’m living like a student in one room of your parents’ house when most London University lecturers pushing forty can afford a place of their own. Well, see, all these parties that Sarah liked to go to, they were quite the fancy parties, film premieres and award shows and such. And it seems you need fancy clothes for all of those parties, and you need a different set of fancy clothes for each one, because it seems that in the film world, to be seen wearing the same clothes twice is a fatal sign of poor acting skills. So every time Sarah went to a party, she’d buy herself a fancy new dress and add in some shoes and a new brand of makeup for good measure, and, because she wasn’t very often working herself, despite all those parties and all those clothes, she’d put the cost of them onto all the credit cards that I didn’t notice kept turning up at the house in my name. And here’s where it’s dangerous to be not so good at noticing things, because it wasn’t until we were good and divorced that I finally got around to noticing that she had run my credit cards up to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.”