I remembered how I’d turned away from him and stared out of my window at the trees and the departing wedding guests and the other cars in the hotel car park and said, quietly, as he had, ‘It seemed like the best way to me, Geoffrey.’

I thought of the five hours we’d spent on the Boulevard ­Périphérique in Paris. I thought of the horrible, fat Michelin book with its hundreds of pages, each one with a small piece of Paris on it so that the road kept running off the edge of one page and on to another but never onto the next page, always onto a different page somewhere else in the book that you could only find by consulting the index at the back and by the time you’d found it, it was too late. I thought of Geoffrey’s demented shouting as we went whipping past the Saint-Cloud exit for the fourth time. Shall I come off here, Harriet? Shall I? Shall I? Tell me what I need to do Harriet, you need to tell me, you need to tell me, you need to tell me NOW. Look! There’s the exit. You need to tell me now now now now now oh too late. I thought of the evening we drove down to London for a seven thirty performance of Oklahoma! at the National Theatre; of how at around eight o’clock, somewhere between Hendon and Cricklewood, Geoffrey stopped the car and pulled over and switched on the overhead map-light and without a word put his hand out for the A to Z; how he turned over a few pages and studied them and then handed me back the book and extinguished the light and moved slowly off again into the traffic. I thought of the satellite navigation device Geoffrey had bought, not long after his brother’s wedding, and what high hopes I’d had of it, but it too had been shouted at, and then banished, for choosing the wrong way and taking us to places we didn’t want to go, and after a short time we’d gone back to doing things the way we’d always done them, and I thought, now, of the hundreds of occasions when things had gone badly for us in the car. I thought of how, somehow, the between-car-journeys bit of our life suddenly became an unimaginably distant thing; I thought of how every single time it happened, my heart shrivelled up into a tiny dry peanut without the tiniest drop of love left inside it for Geoffrey, until the only thing left to do was to show him the back of my head and stare out of the window on my side and cry and silently repeat the chant, I hate you Geoffrey Parker, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.