‘He seems to have sucked everything out of you.’

‘Yes, he did. Every bad thing. I could almost see it coming out of me, like a black mist. I didn’t realize I was so full of all this stuff.’

‘And what makes him so special? How come he can do it and no one else could?’

‘I don’t know. He just… He just has this aura about him. This’ll sound stupid, but… He touched my temples again, when I was talking to him, and I just felt this, this amazing warmth flood right through me, and he said it was pure love. And that’s what it felt like. Do you understand how panicky it made me feel?’

I do understand, and not just because David is an unlikely candidate for a love bath. Love baths are… not us. Love baths are for the gullible, the credulous, the simple-minded, people whose brains have been decayed like teeth by soft drugs, people who read Tolkien and Erich Von Daniken when they are old enough to drive cars… let’s face it, people who don’t have degrees in the arts or sciences. It is frightening enough just listening to David’s story, but to undergo the experience must have been terrifying.

‘So now what?’

‘The first thing I thought afterwards was that I had to do everything differently. Everything. What I have been doing isn’t enough. Not enough for you. Not enough for me. Not enough for the kids, or the world, or… or…’

He grinds to a halt again, presumably because even though the laws of rhetoric and rhythm require a third noun, the reference to the world has left him with nowhere to go, unless he starts babbling about the universe.

‘I still don’t understand what you talked about for two days.’

‘Neither do I. I don’t know where the time went. I was amazed when he told me it was Tuesday afternoon. I talked about… about you a lot, and how I wasn’t good to you. And I talked about my work, my writing, and I found myself saying that I was ashamed of it, and I hated it for its, I don’t know, its unkindness, its lack of charity. Now and again he made me… God, I’m embarrassed.’ A sudden thought—it may or may not be a fear, I’ll have to think about that another time—comes to me.

‘There’s nothing funny going on, is there?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re not sleeping with him, are you?’

‘No,’ he says, but blankly, with no sense of amusement or outrage or defensiveness. ‘No, I’m not. It’s not like that.’

‘Sorry. So what did he make you do?’

‘He made me kneel on the floor and hold his hand.’

‘And then what?’

‘He just asked me to meditate with him.’

‘Right.’

David is not homophobic, although he has expressed occasional mystification at gay culture and practices (it’s the Cher thing that particularly bewilders him), but he is certainly heterosexual, right down to his baggy Y-fronts and his preference for Wright’s Coal Tar soap. There is no ambiguity there, if you know what I mean. And yet it is easier for me to imagine him going down on GoodNews than it is for me to picture him kneeling on the floor and meditating.

‘And that was OK, was it? When he asked you to meditate? You didn’t, you know, hit him or anything?’

‘No. The old David would have, I know. And that would have been wrong.’ He says this with such earnestness that I am temporarily tempted to abandon my own position on domestic violence. ‘I must admit, it did make me feel a little uncomfortable at first, but there’s so much to think about. Isn’t there?’

I agree that yes, there is an enormous amount to think about.

‘I mean, just thinking about one’s own personal circumstances…’ (‘One’s own personal circumstances’? Who is this man, who talks to his own wife in his own bed in phrases from ‘Thought for the Day’?) ‘…That could occupy you for hours. Days. And then there’s everything else…’

‘What, the world and all that? Suffering and so on?’ It is impossible not to be facetious, I am beginning to find, with someone from whom all trace of facetiousness, every atom of self-irony, seems to have vanished.

‘Yes, of course. I had no idea how much people suffered until I was given the time and space to think about it.’

‘So now what?’ I don’t want to go through this process. I want to take a short cut and go right to the part where I find out what all this means for me me me.

‘I don’t know. All I know is I want to live a better life. I want us to live a better life.’

‘And how do we do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

I cannot help but feel that all this sounds very ominous indeed.

Stephen leaves a message on my mobile. I don’t return the call.

I come home the next night to the sound of trouble; even as I’m putting the key in the lock I can hear Tom shouting and Molly crying.

‘What’s going on?’ David and the kids are sitting around the kitchen table, David at the head, Molly to his left, Tom to his right. The table has been cleared of its usual detritus—post, old newspapers, small plastic models found in cereal packets—apparently in an attempt to create the atmosphere of a conference.

‘He’s given my computer away,’ says Tom. Tom doesn’t often cry, but his eyes are glistening, either with fury or tears, it’s hard to tell.

‘And now I’ve got to share mine,’ says Molly, whose ability to cry has never been in any doubt, and who now looks as though she has been mourning the deaths of her entire family in a car crash.

‘We didn’t need two,’ says David. ‘Two is… Not obscene, exactly. But certainly greedy. They’re never on the things at the same time.’

‘So you just gave one away. Without consulting them. Or me.’

‘I felt that consultation would have been pointless.’

‘You mean that they wouldn’t have wanted you to do it?’

‘They maybe wouldn’t have understood why I wanted to.’

It was David, of course, who insisted on the kids having a computer each for Christmas last year. I had wanted them to share, not because I’m mean, but because I was beginning to worry about spoiling them, and the sight of these two enormous boxes beside the tree (they wouldn’t fit under it) did nothing to ease my queasiness. This wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be, I remember thinking, as Tom and Molly attacked the acres of wrapping paper with a violence that repelled me; David saw the look on my face and whispered to me that I was a typical joyless liberal, the sort of person who would deny their kids everything and themselves nothing. And here I am six months later, outraged that my son and daughter aren’t allowed to keep what is theirs, and yet still, somehow, on the wrong side, an agent of the forces of darkness.

‘Where did you take it?’

‘The women’s refuge in Kentish Town. I read about it in the local paper. They had nothing there for the kids at all.’

I don’t know what to say. The frightened, unhappy children of frightened, unhappy women have nothing; we have two of everything. We give away some, a tiny fraction, of what we have too much of. What is there for me to be angry about?

‘Why does it have to be us who gives them something? Why can’t the Government?’ asks Tom.

‘The Government can’t pay for everything,’ says David. ‘We’ve got to pay for some things ourselves.’

‘We did,’ says Tom. ‘We paid for that computer ourselves.’

‘I mean,’ says David, ‘that if we’re worried about what’s happening to poor people, we can’t wait for the Government to do anything. We have to do what we think is right.’

‘Well, I don’t think this is right,’ says Tom.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s my computer.’

David merely flashes him a beatific smile.

‘Why isn’t it just their bad luck?’ Molly asks him, and I laugh. ‘Just your bad luck’ was, until relatively recently, David’s explanation for why our kids didn’t own a Dreamcast, or a new Arsenal away shirt, or anything else that every other person at school owns.

‘These children don’t have much luck anyway,’ David explains with the slow, over-confident patience of a recently created angel. ‘Their dads have been hitting their mums, and they’ve had to run away from home and hide, and they haven’t got their toys with them… You have lots of luck. Don’t you want to help them?’