My friend said, ‘Pick on someone your own size.’

And then I met Louise.

If I were painting Louise I’d paint her hair as a swarm of butterflies. A million Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does, it’s the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn’t rustle but her flesh has the moonlit shade of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadorned.

At first it didn’t matter. We got on well as a threesome. Louise was kind to Jacqueline and never tried to come between us even as a friend. In any case, why should she? She was happily married and had been so for ten years. I had met her husband, a doctor with just the right bedside manner, he was unremarkable but that is not a vice.

‘She’s very beautiful isn’t she?’ said Jacqueline.

‘Who?’

‘Louise.’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose she is if you like that sort of thing.’

‘Do you like that sort of thing?’

‘I like Louise yes. You know I do. So do you.’

‘Yes.’

She went back to her World Wildlife magazine and I went for a walk.

I was only going for a walk, any old walk, nowhere special walk, but I found myself outside Louise’s front door. Dear me. What am I doing here? I was going the other way.

I rang the bell. Louise answered. Her husband Elgin was in his study playing a computer game called HOSPITAL. You get to operate on a patient who shouts at you if you do it wrong.

‘Hello Louise. I was passing so I thought I might pop in.’

Pop in. What a ridiculous phrase. What am I, a cuckoo clock?

We went down the hall together. Elgin shot his head out of the study door. ‘Hello there. Hello, hello, very nice. Be with you, little problem with the liver, can’t seem to find it.’

In the kitchen Louise gave me a drink and a chaste kiss on the cheek. It would have been chaste if she’d taken her lips away at once, but instead she offered the obligatory peck and moved her lips imperceptibly over the spot. It took about twice as long as it should have done, which was still no time at all. Unless it’s your cheek. Unless you’re already thinking that way and wondering if someone else is thinking that way too. She gave no sign. I gave no sign. We sat and talked and listened to music and I didn’t notice the dark or the lateness of the hour or the bottle now empty or my stomach now empty. The phone rang, obscenely loud, we both jumped. Louise answered it in her careful way, listened a moment then passed it over to me. It was Jacqueline. She said, very sad, not reproachful, but sad, ‘I wondered where you were. It’s nearly midnight. I wondered where you were.’