Jomier has been talking to Tessa, his friend from the playground, but now, on the pretext that she must see to her daughter Tatty, Tessa gets up and crosses the room. They have run out of conversation. Jomier is happy to be left alone. He is in existential mode. If the human body renews itself every seven years, is the Tilly who is talking to Henry’s friend Tony a different person to the Tilly he married thirty-eight years ago? Has she in fact gone through five metamorphoses so that he should not be labelling her, in his memory, Tilly 1 and Tilly 2 but Tilly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? Is that what is behind the concept of ‘the seven-year itch’? It is not that a husband and wife have grown restless but they have changed into different people. The synapses that made up the brain of the Tilly who fell in love with Jomier have been replaced by synapses of a brain that falls in love with Max. No, that would have been Tilly 3. Tilly 2 was merely disenchanted because her husband had turned into someone who was not her type – Jomier 2. He had changed from a teasing lover into a routine husband; from a romantic revolutionary into a pedantic barrister who brought his work home – not just briefs in his briefcase but an adversarial manner when talking to his wife. The burned-out motor of the Miele vacuum cleaner was caused by a blocked nozzle: for weeks Rosa, their Galician cleaner, had been hoovering without any air, let alone dust, passing into the Miele’s paper sack. Who was responsible? Rosa. But Rosa was acting as an agent for Tilly, therefore the buck stops with Tilly. Tilly: Machines are a matter for men. Jomier: Keeping house is a matter for women. Tilly: Who says? Jomier: Convention. Tilly: Fuck convention. Jomier: Including the convention that a husband provides for his wife? Tilly: You resent it, don’t you? You fucking miser. You’d like to keep all your money for yourself.

Tears. Jomier remembers the tears. He had never hit Tilly but his sarcastic courtroom manner had on occasions made her cry. ‘You’re just better at arguing.’ Sniff. Tilly would never admit that she was in the wrong. Her tears were not an admission of defeat. They were a symptom of frustration – that after a day dealing with dirty nappies, squabbling children, baby food, something for supper, overflowing washing machines, reproving nursery-school teachers (Henry had bitten Tamsin), and perennial anxieties about meningitis, measles, chickenpox, grommets, inoculations, she is now indicted and prosecuted by the man who promised to cherish her for the Galician cleaner’s failure to notice that the nozzle of the Miele was blocked.