I got a can of spray paint and wrote SELF-RESPECT over the door.

Let Cupid try and get past that one.

Louise was eating breakfast when I arrived. She was wearing a red and green guardsman stripe dressing gown gloriously too large. Her hair was down, warming her neck and shoulders, falling forward on to the table-cloth in wires of light. There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag. I always expected her to wear her keys at her waist. She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.

I didn’t go in straight away, I stood lurking outside with my collar turned up, hiding to get a better view. I thought, If she calls the police, it’s only what I deserve. But she wouldn’t call the police, she’d take her pearl-handled revolver from the glass decanter and shoot me through the heart. At the post-mortem they’ll find an enlarged heart and no guts.

The white table-cloth, the brown teapot. The chrome toast-rack and the silver-bladed knives. Ordinary things. Look how she picks them up and puts them down, wipes her hands briskly on the edge of the table-cloth; she wouldn’t do that in company. She’s finished her egg, I can see the top jagged on the plate, a bit of butter that she pops into her mouth from the end of her knife. Now she’s gone for a bath and the kitchen’s empty. Silly kitchen without Louise.

It was easy for me to get in, the door was unlocked. I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. It’s odd being in someone else’s room when they’re not there. Especially when you love them. Every object carries a different significance. Why did she buy that? What does she especially like? Why does she sit in this chair and not that one? The room becomes a code that you have only a few minutes to crack. When she returns, she will command your attention, and besides it’s rude to stare. And yet I want to pull out the drawers and run my fingers under the dusty rims of the pictures. In the waste basket perhaps, in the larder, I will find a clue to you, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you. The compulsion to steal something is ridiculous, intense. I don’t want one of your EPNS spoons, charming though they are, with a tiny Edwardian boot on the handle. Why then have I put it in my pocket? ‘Take it out at once,’ says the Headmistress who keeps an eye on my conduct. I managed to force it back into the drawer, although for a teaspoon it put up a lot of resistance. I sat down and tried to concentrate myself. Right in my eyeline was the laundry basket. Not the laundry basket … please.