‘Massive night at the bar,’ Andy goes on, slumped on our sofa in his dressing gown. ‘Everyone all charged up, free drinks all night, things got out of hand …’ So what better way to round things off than to ‘find himself’ in someone else’s room, rather than in his own? An easy mistake to make, when blundering drunkenly along the corridors. Thank God for the eminent Dr Estelle Lang – whom he’d ‘barely known really’ – who had pulled him in, removed all his clothing and had frenzied sex with him until it was time for him to stagger, limping, down for breakfast.

Of course, I am making that bit up. Andy just blurts out the bare details – that it ‘sort of’ happened, though he was so horribly drunk he can hardly remember anything at all. In fact, it might not have happened that night. He’s really not sure. ‘And then,’ he continues, but only because I force it out of him, ‘we met up, just for coffee, to talk about stuff, and we slipped into this thing, Christ knows how it even started. I’m so sorry, Viv …’

His dressing gown is now belted tightly. That’s a relief. I don’t think I could bear to glimpse his sorrowful wandering penis right now. As for this celestial Estelle, I gather that she is based in Edinburgh, and that’s where these subsequent meetings took place. It was easy for him to get away with it. It’s a fifty-minute train journey from Glasgow, and he’s often invited to lunches, presentations and the occasional evening with his old medical-school mates; events I’ve been happy for him to go to without me tagging along.

Sometimes, he stays overnight in Edinburgh, supposedly at a friend’s place. ‘Can’t face rushing for the last train,’ he told me last time.

The lying shit.

‘I’ll do anything to make things right,’ he says now, wringing his hands as if trying to squeeze all the badness out of himself. He is crying, and I am crying, and we go on like this, shouting and snotting and repeating ourselves, winding up exactly where we started hours before.