It was absurd. My God, even as we were having the conversation I could hear Ness’s reactions in my head when I told her, how she would cover her mouth and yelp. What a peculiar concept: permission from your spouse to have sex with someone else. I knew other people did it, you hear of it all the time, but no one we knew, not in our lovely little community. It would be a little bit ‘out there’. But Karl understood me; I was an artist. Artists aren’t doctors, teachers, accountants, lawyers, plumbers or therapists. We don’t have routines. We don’t sit on packed trains. We don’t have regular salaries or know when bank holidays are. We confuse the paper-pushers; we slip through bureaucracy without ticking their boxes. We spoil their systems. Our signatures are never asked for on passport applications because we aren’t credible. There’s nothing respectable about us. We aren’t important. We are part of the brigade swimming upstream, taking risks, getting humiliated or riding high so that others have culture in their lives, books to read, paintings to hang, evenings with box sets. And to create we have to live.

‘“Don’t you want to feel alive again?” he said. Oh, how I yearned for it, Dr. R. “Yes, Karl, I do.”

‘So there I was, free to contact Johnny if I so chose. In actual fact, I didn’t even know if he was with anyone since our last contact, whether he was remarried with children by now. Yet knowing that I could make love to someone else, anyone else, that I could go out and explore the world again, was like opening all the windows in a stuffy house and letting in a summer breeze. I felt elated.

‘“But home is sacred, right?” I said to him. “What happens away stays away. Nothing must affect the kids.” He was standing up now and I was looking at the back of him as he pulled up the sash window and let the fresh air in.’

For a while afterwards we sat there on the bed staring at each other and then all of a sudden we burst out laughing, so much so that Annie came in to see what all the fuss was about and started bouncing up and down on the bed. I felt closer to Karl than I ever had done. It was tangible, our love. It was unconditional, beyond possession, beyond ego: it was real love. And the weight of unspoken resentment and the next forty years of pretending had vanished. It was extraordinary. We were giddy with it. We were pioneers stepping into a brave new world, hand in hand.

I feel giddy now, as I recall it. We did indeed touch a transcendence, albeit briefly. And it was beautiful.

‘What happened next, Connie?’ Dr. Robinson says.