I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face.

‘You shit.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘You told me you weren’t having sex with him any more.’

‘I thought it was unfair. I didn’t want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left.’

‘I suppose that’s why you’ve never bothered to tell him that he doesn’t know how to make you come.’

She didn’t answer. She was crying now. It was like blood in the water to me. I circled her.

‘How long is it you’ve been married? The perfect public marriage. Ten years, twelve? And you don’t ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he’ll find it distasteful. Let’s hear it for sexual confidence.’

‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing me away. ‘I have to go home.’

‘It must be seven o’clock. That’s your home-time isn’t it? That’s why you used to leave the practice early so that you could get a quick fuck for an hour and a half and then smooth yourself down to say, “Hello darling,” and cook dinner.’

‘You let me come,’ she said.

‘Yes, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there.’

‘I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do.’

She looked at me. ‘Drive me home will you?’

I still remember that night with shame and rage. I didn’t drive her home. I walked with her through the dark lanes to her house hearing the swish of her trenchcoat and the rub of her briefcase against her calf. Like Dirk Bogarde she prided herself on her profile and it was lit to suitable effect under the dull streetlights. I left her where I knew she’d be safe and listened to the click of her heels dying away. After a few seconds they stopped. I was familiar with this; she was checking her hair and her face, dusting me from coat and loins. The gate squeaked and closed metal on metal. They were inside now, four-square, everything shared, even the disease.

As I walked home, breathing deeply, knowing that I was shaking and not knowing how to stop it, I thought, I’m as guilty as her. Hadn’t I let it happen, colluded with the deceit and let all my pride be burnt away? I was nothing, a weak piece of shit, I deserved Bathsheba. Self-respect. They’re supposed to teach you that in the Army. Perhaps I should enlist. Would it recommend me though, to write Broken Heart under Personal Interests?

At the Clap Clinic the following day, I looked at my fellow sufferers. Shifty Jack-the-lads, fat businessmen in suits cut to hide the bulge. A few women, tarts yes, and other women too. Women with eyes full of pain and fear. What was this place and why had nobody told them? ‘Who gave it to you love?’ I wanted to say to one middle-aged woman in a floral print. She kept staring at the posters about gonorrhoea and then trying to concentrate on her copy of Country Life. ‘Divorce him,’ I wanted to say. ‘You think this is the first time?’ Her name was called and she disappeared into a bleak white room. This place is like the ante-chamber to Judgement Day. A pot of stale Cona coffee, a few scruffy leatherette benches, plastic flowers in a plastic vase and all over the walls, top to bottom, posters for every genital wart and discoloured emission. It’s impressive what a few inches of flesh can catch.