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concentrated, never not aware, as though the mind she was escaping from was always in the room waiting to escort her home again. So that in the end this state of possession was a sort of defiance – of herself not least. And, I liked to think, of me. She would close her eyes and let her head fall back – and I’d be gone from it.
    On summer evenings I allowed her to seduce me into gentler exercise. We walked in Regent’s Park – a home from home for both of us – not hand in hand, not like lovers but like old friends with catching up to do. We sat on benches and watched the ducks, we identified flowers, we got to know the men who fed the birds, the Sikh with his black bin liner filled with crumbs, the squirrel man who held his hands out like a scarecrow, showing the squirrels the nuts he ’d brought for them and for which, with only the quickest nervy look around them, they ran up him as though he were a tree. We observed other couples with tenderness as though we were past all that and fondly recalled ourselves in them. Sometimes I contrived to walk behind her – pausing to tie up a shoelace or throw litter in a bin – so that I could admire the strength of her legs and have a moment to myself to swoon over her. But openly I made no show of what I felt and did not press myself upon her.
    This role of friend to Marisa was one I found pleasurable – for Marisa was herself a vivacious talker once unloosed – long before we kissed, andregardless of what would come of it. Indeed, had Marisa offered the two men in her life the compromise of continuing to lie with the one so long as she was permitted to talk to the other, I for my part would have accepted it. Was I not, after all, destined to accept a much poorer bargain on the face of it when it came to Marius, a man with whom Marisa would both lie and talk?
    But Freddy was not framed as I am framed. Though the mere thought of eating out alone with his wife, discussing the nothing very much of their domestic life (and no third party to appreciate the vivacity of his talk), made him apoplectic, the thought of another man discussing anything with her made him more apoplectic still. You can hurt some men, it seems, by stealing from them what they are not aware they want.

    He visited me in the shop when he found out what had been going on, shouting, even before I’d come out of my office, ‘So these are the thanks I get.’ Most angry husbands would not have remembered their grammar. ‘This is the thanks’ is the usual locution. But Freddy was as punctilious in his usage as I am, and indeed as Marius would be, which must say something about Marisa’s preference for precise men.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘what it is I owe you thanks for.’ ‘For my wife for one thing.’
    ‘You haven’t given me your wife.’ ‘You’re damn right I haven’t.’
    ‘Then what are these thanks that you have come to collect?’
    ‘I haven’t come to collect anything. I’ve come to punch your nose.’
    Hearing the commotion, my staff emerged in no great hurry from their cubicles. Had Freddy wanted to make a fight of it he ’d have had them to contend with as well. Not a terrifying sight, four antiquarian booksellers in worn bookworm suits (ponytailed Andrew the most macho of the lot), and an easily upset secretary in an ankle chain – I will come to the ankle chain – but then Freddy wasn’t a terrifying sight either. And I knew hewould not make good on his threat to punch me on the nose. His hands were too important to him. Not because he feared particularly for his piano playing, which even he knew was execrable, but because he needed them in his profession as expressive television pundit.
    ‘It’s all right, go back to work,’ I told my staff. To Freddy I said, ‘We do no more than meet in restaurants some afternoons.’
    Not quite true, but true enough.
    He breathed through his nostrils at me, like a horse. I got the feeling that had I told him we no more than