These successive disillusionments did not deliver him anywhere, the great wheel did not revolve, but with every new confession he had a sense of getting closer to what was really there. He was convinced that she’d lied, not from malice, but from fear. She had been afraid of accepting this historical version of herself. David, to his surprise, had found himself equally resistant. He could not accept the updated, the corrected, the ‘true’ Claire that she was showing to him. Not that he didn’t believe that she’d had many partners, many unsuitable ones. He was sure she had. And not that he struggled with it for personal reasons, vain petty jealousies or puritan idealisations. He didn’t. What he couldn’t accept was her absorption of this history into the depth of her being; the way she allowed it to twist her sense of herself. He believed – he had told her as much – that she had not been herself when those things occurred.

For example: she cared about words, their precision. She agonised over sentences. It took her an hour to write a postcard on holiday. When David used a word that offended her – cunt, for example – she scowled at him. She distanced herself. She was embarrassed by dirty talk. So how could ‘nail’ have persuaded her to yield? Only if she wasn’t being herself. She would not have known it at the time, but she must know it now. To yield had been an act of self-deceit. Why else, when she wrote in the notebook, had she held the word aloft with quotes, as if with a pair of tongs? They seemed to signal her awareness of the horror of the word, and her need to disown it – to give it back to the man who had given it to her.

Even as he mulled over the nailing, David felt something strenuous and deliberate in his reflections, and knew that he was still distracted by thoughts of himself; by the possibility that Claire could have written about him in this way. Was he really so narcissistic? Was he really just dwelling on the confession Claire had chosen to make, her choice – or rather the man’s choice – of words, in order to prove to himself, or to some invisible bank of spectators, that he was not simply rushing through the notebook in search of his own image? Or could some benevolent reason be found for this preoccupation: an eagerness to know how he came across to her, how their life seemed to her, in case there were obvious problems he could address?

He turned to the entries she had written most recently, hoping to discover there something about himself on which he would be able to prove the nobility of his intentions.