In a blink – one blink of hers: he saw her take it – the fancy had left him. Of course she didn’t know. She didn’t even know how she felt about her own first significant scholarly achievement. He’d felt relief at this, but it possessed a deflated quality, as if it had come at the expense of a buoyancy that might have lifted them up and off the cliff together, floating out over the mouth of the river, over the sandbars, the basking seals.

By asking him about his book, she was embarking upon one of her most familiar offensives. He had recognised it immediately. She was exercising her right, now that she had at long last finished her own work, to nag him about his; and if he refused to be nagged, if he was grumpy about it, then she would exercise her right to intervene in that very grumpiness, to try and shame him out of it, the way he had tried to shame her out of her own procrastination. Seeing this, he had refused to answer, and they had turned back and retraced their steps in silence, each dwelling on the hurt they had sustained, a terrible pressure growing between them. As soon as they reached the flat, she had gone straight to the bathroom for a handful of tissues and blown her nose. Then, still clutching the tissues as if they were a crumpled flower, she had appeared in the living room doorway and said, ‘Why can’t you just be happy for me?’

Why not indeed? Hadn’t he been begging her for months, for years, to finish the book? It was natural for her to expect him to be glad when it finally happened. But her book – the need for her to finish her book – had been a mainstay of almost their whole relationship, a project that they were in some sense engaged to execute together. Wasn’t it also natural for him to feel bereft?

Too late, he’d said, ‘Why don’t we go out for dinner? To celebrate?’

‘I can’t,’ she’d said, with furious satisfaction.

‘Why not?’ he’d asked, stupidly, then knew. What else would she be doing? ‘You’re going to see Caro. Of course you are.’

And then he felt sorry – foolish, even – for not making more of a fuss, because he knew that Caro was going to do exactly that, especially if she learned that David had failed to rise to the occasion. He pictured the two women, without him, lifting giddy glasses of champagne, toasting his absence as much as Claire’s success.

‘Cancel,’ he’d said, ‘cancel and come with me.’