We walk out into the cold as if we were simply another pair of contented theatregoers, and I can’t resist asking.

‘Did you enjoy that?’

‘I did. Very much.’

‘Really? Very much?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you hate the theatre.’

‘I think… I think I thought I hated the theatre. It was, it was a prejudice I hadn’t examined properly.’

‘You want to be careful.’

‘Why?’

‘If you start examining your prejudices carefully there’ll soon be nothing left of you.’

He smiles pleasantly and we walk on. We’re looking for a cab, which is what we always do after a night in the West End—Tube in, treat ourselves coming home—and I suddenly feel the need to see a yellow taxi light right this second, because I’m tired, and disoriented, and the thought of having to battle on escalators with a lot of drunks fills me with dread.

And then something odd happens, and it becomes clear that something odd has happened to David, that the change in him is a result of something other than introspection and self-will. What happens is this. We pass a homeless kid in a doorway huddled up in a sleeping bag and David feels in his pockets, presumably for some change. (Let me be fair to David: he always does this. He does not, miraculously, Have Views on the homeless.) He doesn’t find anything, and he asks me for my purse, with many apologies, and another explanation as to why he thought he had his wallet with him when he didn’t. I don’t think about what I’m doing—why should I?—and give it to him, and he proceeds to give the kid everything that’s in there—about eighty pounds in notes, because I went to the cashpoint today, and three or four pounds in change. As far as I know, we’re left with nothing.

‘What are you doing?’

I snatch the notes from the kid’s hands. A passing couple holding a programme from the Stoppard play stop when they see me taking money from a homeless person, and I want to tell them I’m a doctor. David takes the money off me, gives it to the boy again and tries to hustle me along the street. I resist.

‘David, what are you doing? We haven’t even got the Tube fare home.’

‘I kept a fiver back.’

‘I wanted to get a taxi.’ The couple is still watching me, and I don’t like the whine in my voice.

‘I’ll bet this chap would love to get a taxi,’ says David with a maddening sweetness in his voice. ‘But he can’t.’

‘Well, where’s he going to go in a bloody taxi?’ I shout. ‘He hasn’t got anywhere to go. That’s why he’s sleeping here.’ I don’t understand why I’m like this, but then, I don’t understand why David’s like that.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ says the male half of the theatre couple.

‘My husband’s just given away everything we own,’ I tell him.

‘That is just not true,’ says David. ‘Our house? The money in our joint account? The money in our savings account? We won’t even notice this tomorrow.’

Two or three other people have gathered to watch, and I realize that this is an argument I can’t win—not here, not now—so we walk towards the Underground station.

‘You can’t go round giving eighty quid to homeless people!’ I hiss.

‘I am aware that I cannot go around giving eighty quid to every homeless person. I just wanted to do it that one time. See how it felt.’

‘And how did it feel?’

‘Good.’

I don’t get any of this. ‘When were you ever interested in being good?’

‘I wasn’t talking about being good. I was talking about feeling good.’

‘Well… Get drunk. Get stoned. Have sex. Don’t give all our bloody money away.’

‘I’m tired of all those things. I was stuck. I need to do something different.’

‘What’s happened to you? What happened when you went away? Where did you go?’

‘Nothing bloody happened to me.’ The old David, back with a bang. ‘Just because I wanted to see a play and gave a few quid to a street kid? Jesus.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry. I know my behaviour must seem confusing.’

‘Will you tell me what’s been going on?’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

We reach Leicester Square Tube station and try to put the five pound note into the ticket machine, but it’s too crumpled, and the machine spits it out again. We take our place in the queue behind two hundred Scandinavian tourists and three hundred British drunks. And I still want to be in a taxi.

On the way back—no seats on the Tube, not until we get to King’s Cross, anyway—David becomes absorbed in the theatre programme, almost certainly in an attempt to deflect further questions. We pay the babysitter by raiding the emergency fund in the kitchen jar, and then David says he’s tired and wants to go straight to bed.

‘Will you talk to me tomorrow?’

‘If I can think of anything to say. Anything to say that will make sense to you, anyway.’

‘What are our sleeping arrangements, anyway?’

‘I’d like you to sleep with me. But no pressure.’

I’m not sure I do want to sleep with David, because of Stephen, and because of being in a mess, and all that stuff, but it’s not just David I don’t want to sleep with. There’s this other man, too, the one who likes the theatre and gives money away and tries to be nice to people, and I’m not sure I want to sleep with him either, because I don’t really know him, and he is beginning to give me the creeps. To dislike one husband may be regarded as unfortunate, but to dislike both looks like carelessness.

But be careful what you wish for… I didn’t want David to be David any more. I wanted things to be structurally the same—I just didn’t want that voice, that tone, that permanent scowl. I wanted him to like me, and now he does. I go upstairs to our bedroom.

You may not want to know about how lovemaking got underway in the old days—the pre-Stephen, post-kids old days, rather than the old-old days, when lovemaking meant something different—but I’m going to tell you anyway. We would both be reading in bed, and if I fancied sex, my hand would wander idly down towards his crotch, and if he fancied sex his hand would wander idly over towards one of my nipples (invariably the right nipple, because he sleeps on my left and it was clearly easier for him to reach across me than to go for the near side, which would involve an uncomfortable bend of the arm). And if the other party was in the mood, it would carry on from there, and books, magazines or newspapers would eventually be placed on the appropriate bedside tables. And OK, you wouldn’t want to see characters re-enacting this routine in a porn video, unless you actively dislike porn videos, but it worked for us.

Tonight, however, is different. I reach for my book and David begins kissing the back of my neck tenderly; then he pulls me over and attempts to give me a big swoony kiss on the mouth, like a horizontal (and, let’s face it, slightly overweight) Clark Gable. It’s as if he has been reading an article in a woman’s magazine of the 1950s about reintroducing romance into marriage, and I’m not at all sure that I want romance reintroduced into my marriage. I was happy enough with David’s button-pushing routine, which at least had the virtue of efficiency; now he is looking at me as though this were our first time in bed together, and we were about to embark on the most memorable interior journey of our lives.

I push him away a little so that I can look at him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I want to make love to you.’

‘Yes, well, fine. Get on with it. There doesn’t have to be all this fuss.’ I can hear how I sound—like Joyce Grenfell in 9½ Weeks—and I hate it, because I’m not some sexless bluestocking lie-back-and-think-of-England type. But the truth is that we’d have been finished by now if this was the old David. I’d have come, he’d have come and the lights would be off.

‘But I want to make love to you. Not just have sex.’