That night I have a huge row with David, and the next day Stephen turns up at work, and all of a sudden I’ve spilled the half-full glass all over myself.

The row isn’t worth talking about, really: it’s just a row, between two people who actually don’t like each other enough not to row. It begins with something about a plastic bag with a hole in it (I didn’t know it had a hole in it, and I told David to use it to… Oh, forget it); it ends with me telling David that he’s a talentless and evil bastard, and with him telling me that he can’t hear my voice without wanting to throw up. The Stephen thing is altogether more serious. Monday morning is a drop-in surgery, and I’ve just finished seeing a chap who has suddenly become convinced that he has cancer of the rectum. (He doesn’t. He has a boil—a result, I would imagine, of his somewhat cavalier approach to personal hygiene, although I will spare you any further details.) And I go out to the reception to pick up the next set of medical notes, and I see Stephen sitting in the waiting area with his arm in what is very clearly a home-made sling.

Eva, our receptionist, leans over the desk and starts to whisper.

‘The guy in the sling. He says he’s only just moved into the area and he has no proof of residence and no medical card and he only wants to see you. Says someone recommended you. Shall I send him packing?’

‘No, it’s OK. I’ll see him now. What’s his name?’

‘Ummm…’ She looks at the pad in front of her. ‘Stephen Garner.’

This is his real name, although I wasn’t to know that he’d use it. I look at him.

‘Stephen Garner?’

He jumps to his feet. ‘That’s me.’

‘Would you like to come through?’

As I walk down the corridor, I’m aware that several people in the waiting room are bearing down on Eva to complain about Mr Garner’s queue jumping. I feel guilty and I want to get out of earshot, but progress to my surgery is slow, because Stephen, clearly enjoying himself greatly, has also developed a limp. I usher him in and he sits down, grinning broadly.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I ask him.

‘How else was I supposed to see you?’

‘No, you see, that was the message I was trying to convey by not returning your calls. I don’t want to see you. Enough. I made a mistake.’

I sound like me, cool and slightly stroppy, but I don’t feel like me. I feel scared, and excited, and much younger than I am, and this emergent juvenile finds herself wondering whether Eva noticed how attractive Mr Garner is. (‘Did you see that guy in the sling?’ I want her to say at some point in the day. ‘Phwooar.’ And I’d only just restrain myself from saying something smug.)

‘Can we go for a cup of coffee and talk about this?’

Stephen is a press officer for a pressure group which looks after political refugees. He worries about the Asylum Bill and Kosovo and East Timor, sometimes, he has confessed, to the extent that he cannot sleep at night. He, like me, is a good person. But turning up at a doctor’s surgery feigning injury in order to harass one of the doctors… That’s not Good. That’s Bad. I’m confused.

‘I’ve got a room full of patients out there. Unlike you, all of them, without exception, aren’t feeling very well. I can’t skip out for a coffee whenever I feel like it.’

‘Do you like my sling?’

‘Please go away.’

‘When you’ve given me a time when we can meet. Why did you leave the hotel in the middle of the night?’

‘I felt bad.’

‘What about?’

‘Sleeping with you when I’ve got a husband and two kids, presumably.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘Yes. That.’

‘I’m not leaving until we have a date.’

The reason I don’t have him thrown out is because I find all this curiously thrilling. A few weeks ago, before I met Stephen, I wasn’t this person who makes men feign serious injury in order to grab a few precious seconds of time with me. I mean, I’m perfectly presentable looking, and I know that when I make an effort I can still extract grudging admiration from my husband, but until now I have been under no illusions about my ability to drive the opposite sex demented with desire. I was Molly’s mum, David’s wife, a local GP; I have been monogamous for two decades. And it’s not like I’ve become asexual, because I have had sex, but it’s sex with David, and attraction and all the rest of it no longer seems to apply: we have sex with each other because we have agreed not to have sex with anyone else, not because we can’t keep our hands to ourselves.

And now, with Stephen begging in front of me, I do feel a little bit of vanity creeping in. Vanity! I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror in my surgery, and for a moment, just a second, I can see why someone would go to all the trouble of putting his arm in a sling. I’m not being monstrously vain, after all: I’m not saying that I could see why someone would want to throw themselves off a cliff, or starve themselves to death, or sit at home listening to sad music and downing a bottle of whisky. The sling must have taken him all of twenty minutes to knock up, and that’s presuming a certain degree of incompetence; throw in the drive from Kentish Town and we’re talking about a maximum of forty-five minutes of inconvenience, very little expense and absolutely no pain. It’s hardly Fatal Attraction, is it? No, I have a sense of proportion about this, and though it would be preposterous to presume that I’m worth much more than a fake sling, I do suddenly have the sense of being worth that much, and this is an entirely new and not altogether unwelcome feeling. If I were single, or had recently embarked on the latest in a long string of relationships, I would think that Stephen’s behaviour was pathetic, or threatening, or annoying, at least; but I’m not single, I’m a married woman, and as a paradoxical consequence I tell him that I’ll meet him for a drink after work.

‘Really?’ He sounds amazed, as if he knows he’s overstepped the mark, and no woman in her right mind would agree to a date in these circumstances; for a moment, my new-found sexual confidence takes a knock.

‘Really. Ring me on my mobile later. But please go, and let me see someone who has something wrong with them.’

‘Shall I take the sling off? Make it look as though you’ve cured me?’

‘Don’t be stupid. But maybe you could lose the limp on the way out.’

‘Too much?’

‘Too much.’

‘Right-o. See you later.’

And he strides cheerfully out of the room.

With a choreographer’s sense of timing, Becca walks in seconds later—she must have pushed past Stephen on her way.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she says. ‘I owe you an apology.’

‘What for?’

‘Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can’t sleep so you end up writing out recent conversations you’ve had? So they look like a play?’

‘No.’ I love Becca, but it has begun to occur to me that she might be potty.

‘Well, you should. It’s fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.’

‘You should get the person you had the conversation with to come round and read their part out loud.’

She looks at me, and makes a face, as if I am the potty one.

‘What would be the point of that? Anyway. You know the last time we went out for pizza?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was, you know, writing out the conversation. And I remembered all that stuff about your brother. But—don’t laugh, OK—did you say something about having an affair?’

‘Shhh! Shhh!’ I push the door shut behind her.

‘My God! You did, didn’t you!’

‘Yes.’

‘And I just ignored you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Katie, I’m so sorry. I wonder why I did that?’

I make a face to show that I cannot help her.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes. Just about.’

‘So what’s going on?’

It’s interesting, listening to the tones in her voice. And there are tones plural there. There’s the girly-golly-gosh, I-want-to-hear-all-about-it tone, of course, but she knows David, she knows Tom and Molly, so there is caution there, too, and concern, and probably disapproval.