It was cold, and my little blue-black Versace number didn't provide much in the way of warmth, so this had given me the perfect excuse to hug him and be hugged by him and have him put his jacket around me, which smelled of him.  My shoes stuck out of his jacket pockets.

'Stephen, you're a rich and handsome man, you're a nice guy, but life's too short, dammit.  What's wrong with you?' I balled a fist and thumped him gently on the chest. 'Is it me?  Am I so unattractive?  Am I too old?  That is it, isn't it?  I'm just too old.'

He grinned, face lit by the dully roaring yellow flames. 'Kate, we've been through this before.  You are one of the most beautiful and attractive women I have ever had the good fortune to meet.'

I cuddled into him, hugging him tighter, pathetically, adolescently delighted by what had to be an outright lie. 'Nothing about my age, then,' I muttered into his shirt.

He laughed. 'Look, you're younger than me and you certainly don't look your age anyway.  Satisfied?'

'Yes.  No.' I pulled back and looked into his eyes. 'So, what?  Can't you stand women who take the initiative?'

We had, as he'd said, been through all this before, but this too was a dance, something that had to be gone through.  The first time we'd been over this ground, four years earlier, I'd suggested he might be gay.  He'd rolled his eyes.

That was when I knew just how perfect he was, from the way he did that.  Because rolling his eyes in that way — even if it hadn't seemed like an impossibly cute expression in its own right — just made it so obvious that this had happened to him before, that women had accused him of being gay in the past, in their confused and wounded pride at being rejected, and he was getting fed up hearing it.

That was when I knew it really wasn't just me; it was other women too, very possibly all of them.  He really was faithful to his wife, and really not being either especially choosy or mildly sadistic.  Which, of course, made him perfect.  Because that's what we try to forget, isn't it?  If he'll cheat on her with you, he'll cheat on you with somebody else, by and by.

So finding a man like this was like hitting the jackpot, discovering the mother lode, closing the deal of your life…only to find the pot had already been cleaned out, the claim had been staked by somebody else and the papers had already been signed without you.

My girlfriends and I had been over this territory often enough, too.  By the time you got to our age all the good ones were gone.  But until you got to our age you couldn't tell which ones were the good ones.  What were you supposed to do?  Marry young and hope, I suppose.  Or wait for the divorcees and trust you got one who'd been a cheatee rather than a cheater.  Or lower your standards, or settle for a different type of life altogether, which revolved around you as an individual and not you as one half of a couple, and which was anyway what I'd always thought I'd wanted, until I'd met Stephen.

'No, I find it flattering when women take the initiative.'

'You just never give in.'

'What can I tell you?  I'm just a boring one-woman guy.' (Which meant, of course, as he was a very honest but also pretty smart guy, and he had chosen not to give me a straight answer, that he probably had strayed, once, and so knew what he was talking about, which only made me even more sad, because it hadn't been with me that he'd been unfaithful, and so I'd lost out not once but twice.)

'Everybody else is doing it, Stephen.'

'Hey, come on, Kate, what sort of argument is that?  Besides, I'm not them.'

'But you're missing out.  It's an opportunity.  You're…missing out,' I repeated, lamely.

'It's not some business thing, Kate.'

'Yes, it is!  Everything is.  Everything is trade, transactions, options, futures.  Marriage is.  Always has been.  I'm offering you a deal that would be great for both of us, where neither of us loses: pure gain, total satisfaction on both sides; a deal you're crazy to turn down.'

'I've got my peace of mind to lose, Kate.  I've got a whole guilt trip waiting for me if I did.  I'd have to tell Em.'

'Are you mad?  Don't tell her.'

'She might find out anyway.  She'd divorce me, take the kids —'

'She'd never know.  I'm not asking you to leave her or the children, I just want whatever I can get from you; anything.  An affair, a single night, one fuck; anything.'

'I can't, Kate.'

'You don't even love her.'

'I do.'

'No, you don't; you're just comfortable with her.'

'Well, you know.  Maybe that's what passion becomes, what it grows into.'

'It doesn't have to be.  How can you be so… determined, so ambitious in your business life and so meek in private?  You shouldn't settle for so little, or if you need that bland comfort bit, you should have the passion too.  With somebody else.  With me.  You deserve it.'

He let go of me gently, holding my hands in his and looking into my eyes. 'Kate, even with you I don't want to talk about Em and the children.' He looked embarrassed. 'Don't you see?  To me this is like having an affair; I get guilty just talking about this sort of thing with you.'

'So you've nothing to lose!'

'So I've everything to lose.  Believe me, this guilt is barely registering on my in-built guilt-o-meter, but it still troubles me.  If I climbed into bed with you it'd go off the scale.'

I sank back towards him, closing my eyes at the very thought. 'Believe me, Stephen, a lot would go off the scale.'

He laughed quietly and pushed me away again.  I didn't think you could push somebody away tenderly, but he did. 'I just can't, Kate,' he said solemnly, and the way he said it just had that stamp of closure over it.  We' d reached some sort of interim result, if not a conclusion.  I could still choose to pursue the matter, if I insisted, but only at the risk of seriously pissing him off.

I shook my head. 'Guilt-o-meter.  Really.'

'You know what I mean.'

'Yeah.' I sighed. 'I guess I do.'

He shivered in his white dress shirt. 'Hey, it's getting kind of cold out here, don't you think?'

'It is.  Let's go back.'

'Think I'll go for a swim before I turn in.'

'I'll come and watch.  May I?'

'Sure.'

Blysecrag's pool was only a little short of Olympic in size, buried underground at the end of a tangle of corridors and locatable principally by smell.  I went arm in arm with Stephen down the carpeted corridors.  The place was dark when we arrived and we had to search for the light switches, feeling round the walls until we found them and the lights flickered on, above and below the still water.  The walls were covered with trompe l'oeil paintings showing pastoral scenes set in a landscape more gently rolling than that surrounding Blysecrag, and partially obscured by white Doric columns spaced every few metres.  There were numerous tables, chairs, loungers and potted plants positioned near the walls on two room-long strips of Astroturf, and a bar at the far end of the huge space.  The arched roof was painted blue with lots of little white fluffy clouds.

I stood looking out over the calm blue surface while Stephen disappeared into the changing rooms.  People had been here earlier — the tiled floor was puddled, there were towels and bits of swimming costumes scattered around, and a welter of pool-side-safe plastic flutes stood or lay by champagne buckets on the tables or had fallen to the pretend-grass floor — but the place was quiet and empty now and the waters lay level, undisturbed by even the slightest ripple now that the recirculating pumps had been switched off.

I looked at my watch.  It was five fifteen.  Much later than I'd intended to stay up.  Ah, well.

Stephen appeared in a pair of baggy blue trunks, grinned at me and dived into the water.  It was a beautiful dive, creating what seemed like far too small a splash, just a few tiny waves and a larger swell that moved languidly out from his point of entry.  I watched his long tan body glide across the pale blue tiles on the pool's floor.  Then he surfaced, shook his head once and settled into a powerful, easy-looking crawl.