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lasted seven years, and he justified its ending by saying he had never really loved her but had been trapped into marriage by her spiderish act of keeping him for too long at a distance. What held them together was at best infatuation rather than love, luckily broken on her taking umbrage – a real North Country set-to there – at his affair with Diana.
    Calling for another bottle, he remembered that his love for Diana began with crashing sexual magnetism at one of dear old Charlotte’s lunch parties. What love didn’t start in a similar manner, he would like to know. Unhappily for both, his affair with Diana turned into something they mistook for love. In those heady days he prided himself that, like Bismarck, he was able to learn from other people’s mistakes, with the result that he never saw the big ones coming.
    Unable to be apart from each other, in those dangerous weeksafter Angela had gone, and when their affair seemed to be ending, he made the biggest blunder of his life and, as soon as the divorce came through, asked her to marry him.
    Fireworks, he recalled, Catherine wheels and exploding rockets replaced the umbrella of nuptial starshells. Who would have realised that their allotted bliss had been used up already during their passionate affair? In little time at all they were unable to tolerate each other. They endured for a while through misplaced pride or obstinacy, so that after a year they were like siamese twins and couldn’t live without each other. Neither could they live with each other, which galled them so much that they could only sit back appalled and hope the other would leave first.
    Because the other – whoever it was at some vindictive Jason and Medea moment – was unable to act due to the potency of the original infatuation, their sterile marriage went on for almost three years. Tom hoped to find her gone on getting back from the office. After he had left for work Diana prayed he wouldn’t come home again. Tom knew that if he returned exhausted from work to find she had flitted he would cut his throat. Diana realised that if he didn’t show up at the expected time she would hang herself.
    Tom was aware that such a perfectly balanced emotional pendulum was diabolically organised by something more powerful than either, and might keep them close forever. Diana assumed that, though able to walk out at any moment, she couldn’t unless he went first.
    The hour Tom felt most able to light off was between eleven o’clock and midnight, but by then he was too half seas over to crawl on hands and knees to the car. He could do nothing more than find the route to bed, though mumbling his absolute determination to scarper at the first blink of dawn. He would be at Heathrow in no time, and a few hours later Diana would get a telephone call from as far off as Lisbon or St Petersburg. Before being released on his alcoholic decline into sleep he would even pencil a reminderand leave it under the alarm clock on the bedside table, telling himself: ‘Leave her definitely today,’ but on waking with a fuddled mind, and hollow for breakfast, his only thought was to eat and get away early for work.
    He surmised that such a marriage must have been brewed up in Antarctica, while Diana placed the destructively spewing volcano of Krakatoa at the geographical centre. The fact of their mismatch was all they could agree on, though to say so was unnecessary. Foreseeing far more anguish if they separated, it was only possible to stay together as if observing someone else’s marriage, while realising too late that they were looking in on their own, and were humiliatingly bound by it. Whatever emotional profit there was in being taken beyond the limits of a tolerable existence, which someone like Norman Bakewell might have seen as a positive advantage for his writing, was not enjoyed by either.
    The wineskin of torment burst for Diana when Tom made the situation remorselessly clear to her one evening, after the meal,