‘I know who it is,’ he says calmly. ‘Stephen introduced himself.’

‘Oh. Right.’ I want to ask whether Stephen gave both his name and his position, as it were, but the atmosphere gives me all the answers I need.

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ says Stephen. I look anxiously at David. ‘Both of you,’ Stephen adds, although if this is meant to reassure me somehow, it fails. I don’t want to talk. I want David and Stephen to go into a room, come out and tell me what to do. I’d do it, too—anything they came up with, as long as I didn’t have to sit at the kitchen table with the two of them. David ushers Stephen past him, and we go and sit down at the kitchen table.

David offers Stephen a drink and I pray he doesn’t want one. I get an awful vision of what life would be like while we were all waiting for the kettle to boil, or while David was rummaging through the freezer drawers trying to find the ice tray, and then bashing away at it for ten minutes.

‘Can I just have a glass of tap water?’

‘I’ll get it.’

I jump up, grab a glass from the dishwasher, rinse it, fill it from the tap without letting the water run cool, and plonk it in front of him. No ice, no lemon, certainly no grace, but the hope that this might expedite things is dashed by David standing up.

‘How about you, Katie? Cup of tea? Shall I make a pot of real coffee?’

‘No!’ I shriek.

‘How about if I put the kettle on, just in…’

‘Sit down, please.’

‘Right.’

He sits down, and we stare at each other.

‘Who wants to kick off, then?’ David asks, relatively cheerily. I look at him. I’m not entirely sure that he is responding to the gravity of the moment. (Or am I being melodramatic, maybe even self-aggrandizing in some way? Maybe there is no gravity here. Maybe out in the world people do this all the time, hence David’s breeziness. Am I taking it all too seriously, as usual?)

‘Maybe I should,’ Stephen says. ‘Seeing as how I’m the one who’s called the meeting, as it were.’

The two men smile, and I decide that my instinct just now was correct: I’m taking things way too seriously, and clearly this sort of thing does happen all the time, and my discomfort is indicative of a disastrous and embarrassing twentieth-century squareness. Maybe Stephen calls round to see the husbands of the women he has slept with on an almost weekly basis. Maybe… Maybe David does, which is why he seems to know what to do and say, and how to be.

‘I just kind of wanted to see where we were at,’ says Stephen pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry not to call first or anything, but I left a couple of messages for Katie, and she didn’t return them, and so I thought, why not take the bull by the horns sort of thing?’

‘Horns being the operative word,’ says David. ‘Seeing as I’m wearing them.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The horns. Cuckold. Sorry. Stupid joke.’

Stephen laughs politely. ‘Oh, I see. That’s quite good.’

‘Thank you.’

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s nothing to do with current North London sexual mores that I know nothing about, and maybe it’s nothing to do with GoodNews and his effect on David; maybe it’s just because I am simply not exciting enough for anyone to get worked up about. OK, I’m just about attractive enough for Stephen to want to sleep with me, but when it comes to jealous rages and dementedly possessive behaviour and lovelorn misery, I simply haven’t got what it takes. I’m Katie Carr, not Helen of Troy, or Patti Boyd, or Elizabeth Taylor. Men don’t fight over me. They saunter over on a Sunday evening and make weak puns.

‘If I can interrupt for a second,’ I say tetchily, ‘I’d like to speed things up a bit. Stephen, what the hell are you doing here?’

‘Ah,’ Stephen says. ‘The 64,000 dollar question. OK. Deep breath. David, I’m sorry if this comes as a shock, because you seem a decent sort of a guy. But, well… I’ve come to the conclusion that Katie doesn’t want to be with you. She wants to be with me. I’m sorry, but those are the facts. I want to talk about what… you know, about what we’re going to do about it. Man to man.’

And now, when I hear the ‘facts’ as presented by Stephen, my bleach-drinking view of marriage mysteriously evaporates. In fact, it has now transformed into a bleach-drinking view of Stephen, and I panic.

‘That’s nonsense,’ I tell anyone who will listen to me. ‘Stephen, you should stop now and go, before you make an idiot of yourself.’

‘I knew she’d say that,’ says Stephen with a sigh and a sad, I-know-you-so-well smile. ‘David, perhaps you and I should talk privately.’

The outrageous cheek of this enrages me—‘Sure, yes, right, I’ll leave the room, and you tell me who I should be with when you’ve sorted it out’—but the truth is that I am tempted to leave, of course I am. I don’t want to live through the next few hideous minutes of this conversation. I remember feeling the same way when I was giving birth to Tom: at one point, bombed out of my head on gas and air and then an epidural, I somehow became convinced it was the maternity room, rather than the baby, that was responsible for the pain I was in, and that if I left it then I could cop out of the whole thing. Not true then, and not true now—the agony has to happen regardless of where I am.

My snapping at Stephen seems merely to have emboldened and relaxed him.

‘David,’ he says, ‘this might hurt, but… I know from having talked to Katie over the last couple of months that… Well, there are a lot of things that aren’t right.’

David gently interrupts before Stephen has a chance to enumerate all the problems he thinks we have. ‘Katie and I have talked about that. We’re working on it.’

I can’t help but love David at this moment. He’s calm when he has every right to be angry with everything and everyone, and as a result I feel, for the first time in a long time, that we are a unit, a couple, a marriage, and that marriage is, after all, something we should all aspire to. At this precise moment I’m happy to be in a marriage, to be two against one, to combine with my partner against this destructive and dangerous outsider with whom I happen to have had sex. The alternative is three-cornered anarchy, and I’m too scared and too tired for that.

‘There are some things you can’t sort out,’ Stephen says. He won’t make eye contact with any of us; he’s staring into his glass of water.

‘Like?’

‘She doesn’t love you.’

David looks at me, requiring some sort of reaction. I settle for a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes—a suitably ambiguous response, I hope, to what is, after all, a very complicated issue (two seconds ago I loved him, twenty minutes ago I hated him, earlier in the afternoon I wasn’t bothered one way or the other, and so on and on, right back to the college disco, probably)—but neither the headshake nor the eye rolling seem to do the trick, because both of them are looking at me now.

‘I never said that,’ I throw in hopefully.

‘You didn’t have to,’ says Stephen, and I can’t deny that whenever I did speak about David, no one listening could have claimed that I was besotted with him. ‘And then there’s the sex…’

‘I definitely never said anything about…’

‘You did, actually, Katie. You said something about the difference between art and science, and that you preferred art.’

Oh. Oh dear. There was no way that was a lucky guess. I hadn’t realized that I’d ever voiced my art versus science theory, but I must have done.

‘I never said I preferred art.’

‘You said you were a scientist by profession and you didn’t need science in bed.’

Now he comes to mention it, I do remember saying something like that, but it was intended to make Stephen feel better about, you know, nothing happening from my side. Ironic, then, that it has come to be used as a weapon against David, who did make things happen from my side. (If you’re interested, there is another layer of irony here, because David is a great anti-science man, and constantly bangs on about the superiority of the arts over science, and how all scientists are idiots and so on and so forth. So first of all, in this particular situation, he’s swapped camps and become a scientist, his own worst enemy, without knowing it. And, then, having swapped camps and actually achieved more than the artist—although maybe that’s just me speaking as a scientist—he’s attacked for it.)