David spends the night on the futon in the spare room; I have to help him to take his clothes off, so I’m bound to end up thinking about needs and wants and rights and duties and men with boils in their rectums, although I don’t get anywhere. And then I go to bed and read the paper, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has written about divorce, and the grass-is-greener syndrome, and how he wouldn’t wish to deny anyone the right to end a brutal and degrading marriage, but… (Why is every newspaper full of stuff about me me me? I want to read about train crashes I haven’t been in, unsafe beef I won’t eat, peace treaties in places I don’t live; instead my eye is drawn to stories about oral sex and the breakdown of the contemporary family.) So I’m bound to end up thinking about brutal and degrading marriages, and whether I’m in one, and however hard I try to kid myself—ah, but the meaning of these words ‘brutal and degrading’ it’s different in our particular postal district, he calls me a silly bloody woman, he creates bad atmospheres when my family visit, he is consistently negative about things I hold dear, he thinks old people should stay in the seats specially designated for them on buses—I know, really, that I’m not. I’m neither brutalized nor degraded by my relationship with David; it’s just that I don’t really like it very much, and that is a very different kind of complaint.

What is the point of an affair, when it comes down to it? Over the next three weeks I have sex twice with Stephen, and I don’t come on either occasion (not that coming is everything, although it sort of would be in the long run); we spend time talking about childhood holidays, my kids, his previous live-in relationship with a woman who moved back to the States, our shared antipathy to people who don’t ask questions… Where does any of it get me? And where do I want to get anyway? It’s true that I haven’t talked to David about childhood holidays recently, for obvious reasons, but is that what’s really missing from my marriage—the opportunity to look into the middle distance and wax lyrical about the joys of Cornish rock pools? Maybe I should try it, just like one is supposed to try weekends away without kids and saucy underwear. Maybe I should go home and say, ‘I know you’ve heard this before, but can I repeat the story of how I once found half-a-crown under a dead crab that my dad had told me not to touch?’ But it was a dull story the first time, made palatable only by David’s endless fascination for absolutely anything that had happened to me before I met him. Now I would be lucky to get away with a sigh and an inaudible obscenity.

You see, what I really want, and what I’m getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David’s picture of me is complete now, and I’m pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn’t even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so it’s beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favourite book is Middlemarch, and I just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet.

I decide to tell my brother about Stephen. My brother is younger than me, no kids, no relationship at the moment; I’m almost sure that he won’t judge me, even though he loves Molly and Tom and has even been out for a drink and the odd meal with David when I haven’t been around. We’re close, Mark and I, and I vow to trust what he says, respect his instincts.

What he says is, ‘You’re off your fucking head.’ We’re in a Thai restaurant in Muswell Hill, around the corner from where he lives, and the starters haven’t even arrived yet; I wish I’d saved the difficult part of the evening for later. (Except I didn’t think it would be difficult. How come I got that wrong? Why did I think my brother would shrug all this off? I’d imagined this whispery, jokey, conspiratorial chat over a cold beer and some satay sticks, but now I can see that this was a bit off the mark, and that my brother would be no sort of brother at all if he smiled and shook his head fondly.)

I look at him and smile feebly. ‘I know that’s what it must look like,’ I say. ‘But you don’t really understand.’

‘OK. Explain.’

‘I’ve been so depressed,’ I say. He understands depression. He’s what passes for a black sheep in the Carr family: a chequered employment history, unmarried, pills, therapy.

‘So write yourself a prescription. Go and talk to someone. I don’t see how an affair is going to help. And a divorce certainly won’t.’

‘You’re not going to listen, are you?’

‘Course I’ll listen. Listening isn’t the same as cheering you on, though, is it? You can get one of your girlfriends to do that.’

I think of Becca, and I snort.

‘Who else have you told?’

‘No one. Well, someone. But she didn’t seem to hear.’

Mark shakes his head impatiently, as if I am speaking in feminine metaphors.

‘What does that mean?’

I gesture helplessly. Mark has always envied my relationships with people like Becca; he would find it hard to believe that she simply smiled at me indulgently, as if I were a stroke victim babbling nonsense.

‘Jesus, Kate. David’s a friend of mine.’

‘Is he?’

‘Well, all right, not, like, my best friend. But he’s, you know, he’s family.’

‘And that means he’s got to stay family for ever. Because he’s your brother-in-law and you went out for a curry a couple of times. No matter what he does to me.’

‘What has he done to you?’

‘It’s not… what he’s done. Nobody we know does things. He’s just… He’s always down on me.’

‘Diddums.’

‘Jesus, Mark. You sound like him.’

‘Maybe you should divorce me, too, then. You can run away from everyone who doesn’t thoroughly approve of you every second of the day.’

‘He’s breaking my spirit. He’s grinding me down. Nothing’s ever right, I don’t make him happy…’

‘Have you thought about counselling?’

I snort, and Mark realizes that this is David we are talking about, and makes a Homer Simpson ‘Doh!’-type noise, and for a moment we are brother and sister again.

‘OK, OK,’ he says. ‘Bad idea. Shall I talk to him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I don’t say anything; I don’t know why not. Except that I didn’t want anything to leak out of this conversation into the real world. I just wanted my brother to come into this little weird bubble I’m in for an evening. I wanted empathy, not action.

‘What would make a difference to you?’

I know the answer to this one. I’ve thought about it, and I’m word-perfect.

‘I don’t want David to be David any more.’

‘Ah. Who do you want him to be, then?’

‘Someone different. Someone who loves me properly, and makes me feel good, and appreciates me, and thinks I’m great.’

‘He does think you’re great.’

I start to laugh. It’s not an ironic laugh, or a bitter laugh, although surely if there was ever a moment that justified bitter laughter it would be now; it’s a belly laugh. This is one of the funniest things I have heard for months. I am not sure of many things at the moment, but I do know, with every atom of my being, that David does not think I am great.

‘What? What have I said?’

It takes a while to compose myself. ‘I’m sorry. Just the idea that David thinks I’m great.’

‘I know he does.’

‘How?’

‘Just… You know.’

‘No. I really don’t. That’s the whole point, Mark.’

It’s true that I don’t want David to be David any more. I want things to be structurally the same—I want him to have fathered my children, I want him to have been married to me for twenty years, I don’t even mind the weight and the bad back. I just don’t want that voice, that tone, that permanent scowl. I want him to like me, in fact. Is that really too much to ask of a husband?