‘Who?’ says David, with slightly too much aggression, thus revealing himself immediately as the source of the leak.

‘Joe Salter.’

‘Who the hell’s Joe Salter?’

‘This kid at school.’

‘What’s it got to do with him?’

Tom shrugs. He’s not interested in Joe Salter. He’s interested in whether David and I are splitting up. I can see his point.

‘Of course we’re not getting a divorce,’ I say. David looks at me triumphantly.

‘Why did Joe Salter say you were, then?’ Tom asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But if we’re not, it doesn’t really matter what Joe Salter says, does it?’ I had never heard Joe Salter’s name until three minutes ago, and I’m sick of him already. I have a very strong mental image of a smug, malevolent little blond boy, angelic looking to everyone but his classmates and, now, David and me, all of whom have had a glimpse into his stinking, poisonous soul. ‘I mean, we know more about it than he does. And we’re staying married, aren’t we, David?’

‘If you say so.’ He’s really enjoying this, and I can’t say I blame him.

‘Will you ever get divorced?’ asks Molly. Jesus. I can now see, for the first time, just how many worms a can holds, and why it’s not a good idea to open one under any circumstances.

‘We’re not planning to,’ I tell her.

‘Who would we live with if you did?’

‘Who would you want to live with?’ asks David. This is not a question you will find recommended in even the most brutal childcare books.

‘Daddy!’ says Molly. And then, as an afterthought, ‘But not Tom.’

‘Tom can go and live with Mummy, then. That’s fair.’

‘Daddy’s joking,’ I say to Tom quickly, but I suspect the damage has already been done: David has alienated brother from sister, daughter from mother and son from father in the time it takes to eat a bowl of Golden Grahams. And I’ve just promised not to divorce him. ‘Doh!’ as my brother and my son and Homer Simpson would say.

At my insistence, David comes to the surgery at lunchtime and we go to a greasy spoon around the corner, to talk about what was said at breakfast. David is unrepentant. (Or should that be: David is Unrepentant. Like James Bond is 007.)

‘If we’re not getting divorced, what harm can it do? It’s a purely hypothetical situation.’

‘Come on, David. You can do better than that.’

‘Than what? What was I doing?’

‘Setting traps.’

‘What, the “if we’re not getting divorced…” bit, you mean? That’s a trap?’

‘You want me to say “Ah, but we might be…” And then you’d hammer me for being inconsistent, and telling you one thing and the kids another.’

For some time now I have looked on David’s verbal landmines with some contempt, so clunkingly obvious are they (and it should come as no surprise that the author of The Green Keepers is as clunkingly obvious in conversation as he is in prose). But clearly I’ve been getting sloppy, because David seizes on my last remark with an alacrity that suggests he’d been hoping I’d say precisely that.

‘Hold on, hold on. What did you tell me when you called me from Leeds?’

‘I didn’t… Well, I did, but I just wanted…’

‘No. What did you say?’

‘You know what I said.’

‘Say it again.’

‘You don’t have to do this, David. You know what I said then, and you know what I said to the kids this morning.’

‘And that’s consistent, is it?’

‘I can see that from your point of view it might appear inconsistent.’

‘And what about from yours? Because, really, I’m interested. I want to know how asking for a divorce and then saying you don’t want one appears anything but.’

‘None of this is the point.’ And I really mean that. I want to find out how he could ask our daughter to choose between one parent and another, and why he was so unthinkingly cruel to Tom, and why he’s been telling the parents of small boys called Joe Salter, or friends of the parents of small boys called Joe Salter, or even small boys called Joe Salter, about our marital difficulties. It’s fair enough that I should want to know these things, just as it is fair enough that he should want to know why I told him I wanted the marriage to end, apparently out of the blue; but we only have a lunchtime to talk. And suddenly it seems that a lifetime wouldn’t be long enough, let alone a lunchtime, because if a breakfast conversation can be broken down into this many tiny pieces, none of which can be put back together, then how many tiny pieces could we extract from the last quarter of a century? He said and I said and he said and I said and he thought and I thought and he thought and I thought and he did this and I did that and… It shouldn’t be like this. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. If it had been what we thought and what we did, there wouldn’t be anything to argue about, because we had thought and done it together, but the only thing we have managed to do together is create an enormous mess, and I just can’t see how…

‘David, I just can’t see how we’re going to get out of this mess.’

‘What are you talking about now?’

I try to get the words out—the words I have used once, and retracted only this morning—but luckily they won’t come, and instead I burst into tears, and sob and sob and sob, while David leads me out of the café and into the street.

It could well be that I am going mad; or, on the other hand, that I am simply confused and unhappy; or, on the third hand, that I know exactly what I want but cannot bring myself to do it because of all the pain it would cause, and the tension between those two states of being makes me want to explode. But when David touches me in that way, with tenderness, with love and concern, it all dribbles away to nothing, and I just want to be with him and my kids for the rest of my life. I don’t want to touch Stephen, I don’t want to row about what David may or may not have said to other people, or what he certainly said to Molly and Tom. I just want to do my job during the day, watch dinosaurs in the evening, sleep with David at night. Nothing else matters. All I need to do is hold on to this feeling, and I’ll be fine.

We go and sit in the car for a little while, and David lets me cry.

‘I can’t let this go on,’ he says.

‘It won’t. This is the end of it.’

‘Do you want to tell me what’s been going on?’

Typical David. Typical man. Something has to have been ‘going on’ for someone to be in this kind of state… Except, of course, he’s right, and something has been going on, something that has, without any shadow of a doubt, contributed to my recent unhappiness. Suddenly, what with the dinosaur decision, and David being nice to me, and this conviction I have that the tears mark the end of all this, it seems very clear to me what I should do and say.

‘David… I’ve been seeing someone.’

I tell him because I know I’m not seeing someone any more, and because I know in my own head what I want, and because I know that this will communicate itself to David. It doesn’t occur to me for a moment that for David my confession marks the beginning of something, not the end of something, and just because he has known me for twenty-five years it doesn’t mean that he knows me or understands me now. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, ‘Can you come straight home tonight?’

‘Yes. Sure. Of course. We’ll talk about it then.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about. But I want to do something about Molly’s eczema, and I need you to look after Tom.’

I play a game with myself, just to see what it feels like. The game goes like this: I am not sitting in the kitchen of the marital home watching my son doing his homework, but in the kitchen of a small flat nearby. In the game, this is where I now live, after my separation. Molly is not here because at the moment she is refusing to talk to me; she blames me for what has happened (David must have given her a very skewed account of events), and every time I try to talk to her she turns her back. David’s terrible joke about dividing the family down the middle has turned out to be a prosaic and obvious prediction.