When David’s office door is closed it means he cannot be disturbed, even if his wife has asked him for a divorce. (Or, at least, that’s what I’m presuming—it’s not that we have made provision for precisely that eventuality.) I make myself another cup of tea, pick up the Guardian from the kitchen table and go back to bed.

I can only find one story in the paper that I want to read: a married woman is in trouble for giving a man she didn’t know a blow-job in the Club Class section of an aeroplane. The married man is in trouble, too, but it’s the woman I’m interested in. Am I like that? Not outside in the world I’m not, but in my head I am. I’ve lost all my bearings somehow, and it scares me. I know Stephen, of course I know Stephen, but when you have been married for twenty years, any sexual contact with anyone else seems wanton, random, almost bestial. Meeting a man at a Community Health forum, going out for a drink with him, going out for another drink with him, going out for dinner with him, going out for another drink with him and kissing him afterwards, and, eventually, arranging to sleep with him in Leeds after a conference… That’s my equivalent of stripping down to my bra and pants in front of a plane full of passengers and performing a sex act, as they say in the papers, on a complete stranger. I fall asleep surrounded by pieces of the Guardian and have dreams that are sexual but not erotic in any way whatsoever, dreams full of people doing things to other people, like some artist’s vision of hell.

When I wake up David’s in the kitchen making himself a sandwich.

‘Hello,’ he says, and gestures at the breadboard with the knife. ‘Want one?’ Something about the easy domesticity of the offer makes me want to cry. Divorce means never having a sandwich made for you—not by your ex-husband, anyway. (Is that really true, or just sentimental claptrap? Is it really impossible to imagine a situation where, some time in the future, David might offer to put a piece of cheese between two pieces of bread for me? I look at David and decide that, yes, it is impossible. If David and I divorce he will be angry for the rest of his life—not because he loves me but because that is who and how he is. It is just about possible to imagine a situation in which he would not run me over if I was crossing the street—Molly is tired, say, and I’m having to carry her—but hard to think of a situation where he might offer to perform a simple act of kindness.)

‘No thanks.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘Suit yourself.’

That’s more like it. A slight note of pique has crept in from somewhere, as if his strenuous attempts to make love not war have been met with continued belligerence.

‘Do you want to talk?’

He shrugs. ‘Yeah. What about?’

‘Well. About yesterday. What I said on the phone.’

‘What did you say on the phone?’

‘I said I wanted a divorce.’

‘Did you? Gosh. That’s not very friendly, is it? Not a very nice thing for a wife to say to her husband.’

‘Please don’t do this.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Talk properly.’

‘OK. You want a divorce. I don’t. Which means that unless you can prove that I’ve been cruel or neglectful or what have you, or that I’ve been shagging someone else, you have to move out and then after five years of living somewhere else you can have one. I’d get going if I were you. Five years is a long time. You don’t want to put it off.’

I hadn’t thought about any of this, of course. Somehow I’d got it into my head that me saying the words would be enough, that the mere expression of the desire would be proof that my marriage wasn’t working.

‘What about if I… you know.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

I’m not ready for any of this. It just seems to be coming out of its own accord.

‘Adultery.’

‘You? Miss Goody Two Shoes?’ He laughs. ‘First off you’ve got to find someone who wants to adulter you. Then you’ve got to stop being Katie Carr GP, mother of two, and adulter him back. And even then it wouldn’t matter ‘cos I still wouldn’t divorce you. So.’

I’m torn between relief—I’ve stepped back from the brink, the confession of no return—and outrage. He doesn’t think I’ve got the guts to do what I did last night! Worse than that, he doesn’t think anyone would want to do it with me anyway! The relief wins out, of course. My cowardice is more powerful than his insult.

‘So you’re just going to ignore what I said yesterday.’

‘Yeah. Basically. Load of rubbish.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’

There is a certain group of people who will respond to one of the most basic and pertinent of questions with a mild and impatient blasphemy; David is a devoted member of this group. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I said what I said yesterday because I wasn’t happy. And I don’t think you are either.’

‘Course I’m not bloody happy. Idiotic question.’

‘Why not?’

‘For all the usual bloody reasons.’

‘Which are?’

‘My stupid wife just asked me for a divorce, for a start.’

‘The purpose of my question was to help you towards an understanding of why your stupid wife asked you for a divorce.’

‘What, you want a divorce because I’m not happy?’

‘That’s part of it.’

‘How very magnanimous of you.’

‘I’m not being magnanimous. I hate living with someone who’s so unhappy.’

‘Tough.’

‘No. Not tough. I can do something about it. I cannot live with someone who’s so unhappy. You’re driving me up the wall.’

‘Do what the fuck you like.’

And off he goes, with his sandwich, back to his satirical novel.

There are thirteen of us here in the surgery altogether, five GPs and then all the other staff that make the centre work—a manager, and nurses, and receptionists both full– and part-time. I get on well with just about everyone, but my special friend is Becca, one of the other GPs. Becca and I lunch together when we can, and once a month we go out for a drink and a pizza, and she knows more about me than anyone else in the place. We’re very different, Becca and I. She’s cheerfully cynical about our work and why we do it, and sees no difference between working in medicine and, say, advertising, and she thinks my moral self-satisfaction is hilarious. If we’re not talking about work, though, then usually we talk about her. Oh, she always asks me about Tom and Molly and David, and I can usually provide some example of David’s rudeness that amuses her, but there just seems to be more to say about her life, somehow. She sees things and does things, and her love life is sufficiently chaotic to provide narratives with time-consuming twists and turns in them. She’s five years younger than me, and single since a drawn-out and painful break-up with her university sweetheart a couple of years back. Tonight she’s agonizing about some guy she’s seen three times in the last month: she doesn’t think it’s going anywhere, she’s not sure whether they connect, although they connect in bed… Usually, I feel old but interested when she talks about this sort of thing—flattered to be confided in, thrilled vicariously by all the break-ups and comings-together and flirtations, even vaguely envious of the acute loneliness Becca endures at periodic intervals, when there’s nothing going on. It all seems indicative of the crackle of life, electrical activity in chambers of the heart that I closed off a long time ago. But tonight, I feel bored. Who cares? See him or don’t see him, it doesn’t make any difference to me. What are the stakes, after all? Now I, on the other hand, a married woman with a lover…

‘Well if you’re not sure, why do you need to make a decision? Why don’t you just rub along for a while?’ I can hear the boredom in my voice, but she doesn’t detect it. I don’t get bored when I see Becca. That’s not the arrangement.