How could he argue with this? He was not a chauvinist. He understood that his partner was not at his beck and call; that the world placed enough pressure on Claire’s flesh already without him adding to it. How could he articulate his deep conviction – that she would be happier if she addressed her issues with sex – without sounding as if he was manipulating her into meeting his needs by presenting them as her own? So he released the pressure: he put his arms around her and said, ‘Come on, I love you, please stop crying, please don’t be upset,’ and things like that.

It was a good thing, then, it had to be a good thing, that she was allowing herself to write in this notebook, diary, whatever it was, about sex; but David noticed, and was amused by, his disappointment that the passage was not about him. Had he come to the notebook only to look for himself, not for Claire? And yet his neck was burning, as if he had been exposed somehow, as if he and this character G. – whom he’d never heard about before – were not entirely separate men. He too had been drawn into the boisterous drinking of male students, had been sick and then drunk water and then kept going, down the glittering streets towards the girls; but he would not have told the girls about it, not even later on. He would have been ashamed. That was what you got for sleeping with someone who fancied themselves a comedian: the amount of self-loathing they felt would always dwarf any loathing they could provoke in others, an imbalance which had few consolations, but did at least leave them free to reveal their most awful indiscretions for effect.

David was aware of something hysterical in his rush to judge this man, a kind of desperate warding-off, but this awareness did not stop his gaze from flinching towards the facing page, where he found another block of text, this time much shorter.

Someone whose name I never found out, who I met in a club xxxxxxx and went home with. He was rolling drunk, and he told me he’d like to ‘nail’ me, so I let him, and it took him thirty seconds, and that was that.

The word ‘nail’, scare-quoted like that, stood proud of the text. It was a brutal, a terrible word. He had no doubt it was the right one. He had no doubt that the memories were real. She was getting it all down, the partners she had had before David, more than six of them, many more, who formed what she had described to David, in a wincing, ironic way, as her ‘chequered past’, after they had been together for more than a year. He had rushed to reassure her that he did not mind: neither the fact of the previous lovers, nor her having lied to him at first. Their relationship had been a succession of lies and revelations of this type. He’d felt like he was getting to know Claire vertically; that he was continually falling through a series of layers, each giving way in staggered succession, like the floors of a fire-gutted building. She had only slept with six people; no, she had slept with dozens. How many? She wasn’t sure.