Pause.

"Where were you when he told you?"

"Does it matter?"

"Nicole, all I'm asking you is: were you wearing any clothes when he told you he loved you?"

"Maybe."

"There's no maybe about it. Were you in bed with him when he told you, or were you not?"

All is still.

"Yes," she eventually admits in a very weak voice. "We were in bed together, but it was wonderful."

I sit back. "Doesn't count."

"Of course it counts."

I have offended her.

"It's his cock speaking, Nicole. And you ought to know that cocks are great liars: they will say anything to get their way."

"But we'd finished making love. I remember because he switched on his clock radio and this song came on and that's when he told me he loved me."

I put on this horrified expression. "Did you say his his clock radio?" clock radio?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean to say, Nicole, that you were actually making love to him in their marital bed?"

"She was away."

"And that makes it right?"

She's pouting. "He insisted I should stay," she says in the spoilt manner of a young girl.

"Yes, but in another woman's bed? God, Nicole, what are are you? You must feel really bad, breaking up a marriage like this." you? You must feel really bad, breaking up a marriage like this."

She starts crying. Oh, help me, Jesus.

Some minutes pass.

The crying is beginning to peter out. I glance over at her.

Her expression has turned into this vast, wet sulk. "She's a cow," she declares.

"Of course."

"She doesn't deserve him."

"Aha."

"She's demanding."

Demanding?

"Did he say why?" I wonder.

"You don't want to know."

"I do. I do want to know!"

"She just sounds a bit unbalanced, that's all."

"Unbalanced?"

"Oh..." she raises her eyes to heaven like she knows all there is to know about his wife and based on that she's not too impressed "...she's always pestering him about something or other."

"Like what?"

"Oh, you know." She waves her hand vaguely.

"What? " "

"She nags him."

I see. So I nag him. Anything else?

"I suppose she's possessive too, is she?"

"Yes. She tries to stop him going out. I don't know, she crushes him. She's the jealous type."

That's a horrible lie! I have never tried to prevent Ronan going out. And anyway, even if I havewe're married, aren't we? It's not about jealousy: it's about responsibility and making a relationship work. Now the bastard's making out I'm the Grand Inquisitor and his little side munch is buying the story wholesale.

"He said all that?"

She nods. "I know you probably think I'm terrible to be giving out about her like this, because I'm not exactly in the right, I suppose..."

"Bloody hell."

"...so I'll stop bitching."

"Bitch, for God's sake. Bitch away."

"It's not right."

"I can take it."

But she's clammed up. Her decision not to bitch straight to my face annoys me intensely. I want to grab her and knock her head against the hospital floor like a stubborn coconut, until she gives me a precise analysis of all the ways in which I constitute a bitch.

This isn't healthy.

I stand up. I don't think I can hold back the vomit much longer.

"I'd better go," I mumble, moving away.

She calls after me. She tells me, guilty-looking, that I'm really kind. She adds that she finds me refreshingly frank. She thanks me for everything. She scribbles her phone number on a piece of paper and holds it out for me, smiling weakly, head tilted, hair falling down untidily over her shoulder. As she gazes at me I am unexpectedly struck by how beautiful are the eyelids and eyelashes of her good, open right eye.

Her expression, however, is one of profound sadness.

I fully accept that she may be going through hell. That she is human and that she has the capacity to feel all the painful emotions a human being can feel. But there are limits: my intestines simply can't take it any longer.

I grab the note from her and rush off round the corner and into the ladies where there's a queue, so rather than be civil and wait my turn and splurge it all out over the floor in front of everybody, I simply walk to one side and, nice and casual, I vomit into the sink.

20 20.

I feel such a moron. feel such a moron.

I'm standing in the flowerbed just outside Sylvana's ground-floor apartment, having squashed underfoot possibly a heather plant and definitely a hydrangea. I'm peering in through the living-room window at the blue mermaid painting and the wine-tinted couch. The room is empty.

But through the semi-open fly window you can hear this sizzling noise and smell what's being sizzled: rashers and sausages. Sylvana is in her kitchen, cooking.

I slide my back down along the wall, until my bum rests against the damp, fertilized muck. Now I sit among the flowers, equally squashed. A human thing such as me is way harder to unsquash than a plant, so the vegetation will just have to put up with it.

The damp feels like it's rising into me, sticking to me, percolating, spreading. But as I'm stewing here in my own juice I can't think what I care about any more.

I need to talk to Sylvana, to tell her that she was right about Ronan all along and that things are way more serious than I realized. But I can't bring myself to ring her doorbell to let her know I am hereI feel that foolish. I'm afraid that if I go in there, a miserable suffering circus, she will simply say (in not so many words), "I told you so."

And yet I'll have to tell her some time. She will wriggle it out of me eventually, just like she wriggled Cherbury Court out of me. She should have been a dentist like Ronan; she'd have been great with a pair of pliers.

So I take the mobile from my damp pocket and input her number. I can hear its shrill noise through the window just above my head. A few seconds later, I hear footsteps passing through the hard floor of her front room. Then they stop.

"Yes?" comes her voice.

"It's me."

"What's new?"

"I met her."

"Who?"

"Nicole. This afternoon."

"You met her!" she shrieks through the window and my receiver. Getting Sylvana enthusiastic is, as a rule, like trying to explode a five-hundred-year-old oak tree with a gram of Semtex. But recent events have managed to dislodge her from her customary phlegmatic immobility.

"I bumped into her outside her house, bleeding."

"Is this your poetic way of saying you beat the crap out of her?"

"No. Harry did it for me. In fact, he did such a good job I had to take her to the hospital."

"Julieyou're speaking in riddles. Tell me what's going on."

So I tell her what's been happening in considerable detail. At one point, I can hear Sylvana dragging a chair out from under a table and sitting down. I am in the process of making her evening come alive. "She also told me all about myself," I add.

"What did she say?"

I light up a cigarette to calm me down. "Allegedly, I am a cow."

Pause.

"Okay, but that's Nicole speaking, not Ronan."

"You're crediting her with a brain, Sylv. Also, I am demanding."

"I see."

"Allegedly I am unbalanced."

Silence.

"I mean," says I, laughing despite myself, "the cheek!"

Sylvana doesn't laugh, though. "That creep has a nerve," she hisses.

"I pester him."

"You what?"

"I nag him. I crush him. I'm the jealous type."

I can't stop myself; I let out a sob.

"Julie, listen to me, darling. None of that is true. I know you as well as anybody and..."

"Not as well as Ronan and it's true for him."

"It's rubbish. Julie, where are you now?"

"Never mind."

"Of course I mind. You're my friend. Where are you?"

"It's academic."

"I'm worried about you. Will you come over to my place? No, on second thoughts, I'll come to you."