Even worse was Caro’s effect on Claire’s research. The monograph was so close to completion now, and so dreadfully overdue, that sometimes, when David caught Claire watching Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix, he wanted to shake her. Couldn’t she see it was nearly done? That the press, the department, wouldn’t wait for ever? Nobody took this long to convert their thesis into a monograph. If she didn’t get it out in time for the REF, she’d be moved to a teaching-only contract: the death knell of research careers. These long lunches with Caro, the drinks after teaching, were further distractions. Even worse, Caro’s endless patter about hybridity and intersectionality and fluid gendering and whatever else was making Claire ashamed of her project, which seemed stolid and old-fashioned by comparison. She had become prone to fits of despair in which she threatened not to finish at all, to mothball the book and start something else more cutting-edge.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he would say. ‘You’re being cutting-edge about Lady Mary Shepherd. Nobody’s written about her before.’

‘But that’s exactly the problem,’ Claire would protest. ‘Why am I writing about someone that nobody else is interested in?’

‘What do you think ‘cutting edge’ means?’

Eventually he would be able to console her. Sniffling, she would get back to work. But for how long? Soon there would be another bento box with Caro. More talk of collaborative installations. He wished Claire were not so credulous. More robust. At the same time, though, didn’t he wish she were readier to take impressions from him? Everyone thought she was so timid – so sweet. Only he seemed to know about the rank stubbornness that ran through her like the wire in a twisty tag; how, despite her professed reservations about the book, she fought him bitterly on every point he dared to question; on the very urgency of finishing it at all.