‘So they say . . .’

She leaves a meaningful pause. And so do I. I look out of the window. I feel so unshockable now; you have to be so certain of something to be shocked. I wonder what was I so certain about.

‘Take me back,’ she says, crossing her legs, ‘to that morning when Karl first told you he was unhappy.’

I admire that businesslike streak in a woman: no apologies. She’s a survivor. But I can’t help feeling a little hurt again; I thought we had established an intimacy.

‘Did you see my mother?’ I ask.

She ignores me. ‘And for clarification’s sake, when did this happen?’ she asks. I sigh. I try and remember.

‘It was the end of April sometime,’ I say. It must have been a Sunday morning because the papers were sprawled over our bed, which means Karl had already been out, but he’d had a bath, made some coffee and brought it up. He was naked, a towel wrapped around his waist, when he dropped the bombshell of his unhappiness as nonchalantly as he did the sugar lump into my mug.

You’re unhappy? I’d said to him. I was truly surprised, because it’s the sort of thing you hope you’d notice in a spouse. It seemed to me that if Karl was unhappy, he’d done a pretty good job of covering it up. Yes, he said. I’ve been unhappy for years. But he didn’t sound unhappy, or angry or sad. In fact he was calm, almost perky. But on he went: I feel like I’ve lost myself, he said.

I look out of the window at the dark low blanket of cloud. It’s suffocating.

You silly idiot, Karl: we’ve all lost ourselves is what I was thinking, but I didn’t say it. After you become a parent, that’s just what happens, isn’t it? You have to shed the skin of your old self, your old ways. You have to abandon that self. It’s just called growing up.

But again and again I’ve asked myself how on earth I did not see his unhappiness. Sometimes I think it’s because it wasn’t there. He made it up and it has now become part of the narrative I tell myself to make sense of things. What I cannot understand is how I got from that conversation on the bed with Karl to this conversation in this place with Dr. R. I look back at her. She’s waiting for me to continue.