He liked to think he was attracted to a certain academic ferocity in a woman, a hard-won independence. He had male colleagues who wanted, pathologically needed, to mould their partners’ intellects after their own, but he wasn’t like that. And if his and Claire’s disagreements had been scholarly in the main, he felt sure that they would have been all right. But many other battlegrounds erupted too, as if to force him into this posture he wanted to reject. If he said, very delicately, that Claire’s jumper was shapeless and unflattering, then she would deliberately keep wearing it, punishing him for having the temerity to comment on her clothes – as if he was some rank-and-file overbearing boyfriend, not an ally trying to protect her from the consequences of her low self-esteem. She had a small tattoo of a unicorn on her ankle, which she went to great lengths to cover in the summer, but which she would not consider, not for a second, getting removed. And she neglected her personal hygiene. She’d go three, four days without having a shower, until he was forced to round on her and say, ‘Can’t you smell yourself? Can’t you take responsibility for your own body?’ It was maddening. She laid herself wide open to someone like Caro, inadvisedly, confusingly open; and yet she was completely closed to all benevolent influence from him, her partner, who loved her, who had her best interests at heart.

The showering, he’d noticed, had improved since Caro arrived. Every time Claire set off for one of those lunches, her hair was fluffy, freshly washed. Her nails were trimmed. He ought to have been glad of this: he was always hoping she would spruce herself up. But then he would watch her choose one of those mannish shirts she had started buying, white twill or grey denim, watch her button it up to the neck, and feel uneasy. It wasn’t even that Claire was copying Caro’s style, with her fake fur and her blue tights, but rather that Claire was dressing how she imagined Caro might want her to: complementing rather than competing. Was there something flirtatious in it? Not that he thought Claire and Caro were sleeping together – but he wondered if Claire had thought about it. Caro would have. Why not? Here she was, hundreds of miles from home, the new face in her department, single, and by her own admission ‘sexually rapacious’. Who else was she going to audition? To seduce? Claire was beautiful to David, an Augustan plaster cameo – dark hair against a pale, high forehead; delicate eyebrows with a distinctive semicircular shape; deep-set eyes; the strong, steep slope of her nose – but she could also be beautiful to others, if she let it show. Was that what she thought she was doing?