He felt hot: scorched, almost, as if he’d looked down into a smoking pan. ‘Monstrous’ did not seem too strong a word. It was monstrous to acquiesce to someone’s wishes like that, knowing what you knew, knowing that they would regret it. Monstrous to crow about it afterwards. Almost more monstrous to write it down so frankly; to be able to see so clearly what you had done wrong. She’d used this B., not for sex, but for the experience of being in control: to see how it felt. She’d stolen something from him that he’d never get back. It was not dissimilar to what the teacher had stolen from her. So she hadn’t only learned abjection from her earlier life. She’d learned manipulation too.

He returned, he could not help it, to the part about B.’s penis, its being improbably large. Improbable compared to what? To whose? He thought of the Soho sex shop where they had bought Claire’s vibrator; of the display of toys, mounted and lit like a seventeenth-century armoury. Claire had pointed to one of the dildos, half-laughing, and said, ‘My God, that’s huge’, and a thrill of angry embarrassment had run through him. What she’d said was true: the navy blue dildo was ridiculously, injuriously huge, clearly a fantasy object. But the comment, made carelessly in public, had bothered him nonetheless. It bothered him that it bothered him, and silently he had blamed Claire for this too: for revealing in him a weakness.

He opened the bedside cabinet and took the vibrator out. A thin layer of dust clung to the tacky surface. Behind the vibrator lay a pack of wet wipes in individual sachets, like the sort they dispense on planes after a meal. Almost none of them had been used. He took out one of the wipes – a strong scent of lemons rose from its wetness – and used it to clean the vibrator off. The purple surface glistened; there were depths to it, artificial ones, jewelled somehow. The texture reminded him of the rubbery bouncing balls he’d liked when he was a child.