Carelessness! David and Claire’s intimacies were now so few and far between that each separate event was etched on him as deeply as an injury: he could at any given moment remember the last time he had seen his girlfriend’s pale, mole-dotted breasts, or touched the softness of her sex. Now, for example, as he knelt beside the bed with the notebook in his hands, he knew absolutely that the last time they made love had been in the Christmas holidays, when they both returned from their respective family visits suffused with the relief that, however much they disappointed one another, at least they weren’t bound by blood. Their arrangements were elective, and in that new appreciation of choice they had gone almost merrily to bed together. He came desperately, triumphantly, and as they collapsed against each other in the high bed he’d trembled with surging healthiness, a sense of having been restored, and a painful, tender hope that perhaps, this time, they might have turned a corner. The feeling had been so strong that he’d let himself get carried away. Huddled under the duvet, in the nest of warmth their efforts had made, he’d said, without thinking, ‘Doesn’t this feel good? Don’t you feel better? I feel so much better’, and instantly she had tensed against him, her back locking up, as if he’d said, ‘See? I told you so!’

That had been on December the twenty-eighth. Now it was the twenty-first of February. Nothing had changed how he wanted it to change, though he could not say it hadn’t changed at all. She wouldn’t talk about it. She seemed to want to claim that she had nothing to say; but the problem was itself evidence of a powerful and complicated inner life, one on which he had little purchase, but which he could not help suspecting was somehow within reach. She teased him with it: teased him with the evidence and never the explanation. Of course she said things – she knew she couldn’t get away with saying nothing – but what she said was always beside the point. She would tell him she didn’t not want sex, she just didn’t want it as often as him. She would say that sex was very mental for her, which meant that when she was deep in her research she had no resources to spare. She would say it was emotional, too. If she and David were not communicating well, if she didn’t feel close to him, then it became impossible for her to venture safely into those turbulent affective waters.