Like, stupidly, I'm supposed to know there's a kitchenette.

But she's impervious. In fact, she's hyperventilating. She falls back against the desk, grasps it with one hand, holds her other hand against her chest, gasps for breath, crying, make-up streaking down her face.

I have my arm round her now, I'm telling her to calm down, that it'll be okay. Nicole is shaking her head, she's saying no, no, something to the effect that it will not be okay, that this is going to ruin her, that Ronan will be devastated.

I lean over and grab several of Ronan's posies for her and she takes them and holds on to them for dear life. She's trying to get the words out, but it's like they're blocked, like there's an expanding balloon of air inside her chest squeezing out the words in short, whispered, unintelligible gasps.

I'm getting upset myself. I don't believe it, there are tears in my own eyes now. I have to get her out of here. I lower my hand to the small of her back and gently urge her to stand up from the desk, which she does. I support her as I lead her out of Ronan's office. She strains her neck backwards towards her Chi Chi, as if to reassure herself that her worst nightmare has come true.

I push her through to the kitchen and put her sitting at the table and I put the kettle on and, while we're waiting for it to boil, I'm standing with my back to her, staring at it, with Nicole sobbing quietly behind me. Oh Jesus...oh God, what have I done to her?

I make her a mug of tea, laced with milk and sugar. I make it too full, though: her hands are shaking so much that her mug is clattering against the hard surface and in record time there's this small tea lagoon shimmering like jelly on the table surface, expanding like a blister. As she sips I rest my hand lightly on her shoulder.

Soon she begins to calm down a little. She's still shaking, but now it's more a period of calm followed by a nervous shudder, followed by a longer period of calm followed by a slightly briefer nervous shudder.

"What are you going to do?" I ask her after some time.

"It's his wife," she croaks.

"What?"

"His wife did that."

Pause.

"How can you be so sure?"

"Who else could have done it? She must have found out. Now she knows about me and Ronan."

Sniff sniff.

"I doubt his wife would have done a thing like that."

"It would be just like her. You don't know what she did on Saturday."

"What?"

"Ronan told me that she smashed their fish tank and all the fish went all over the place. Including the ones I gave him."

"That's unfortunate."

"She's a psychopath."

I shrug. "Yes, in all likelihood she's a bit of a head case. But still, does that mean she did this to the painting? I mean..." I point at the back door to the garden "...did you see the hole in that window over there?"

She turns to look at the kitchen door to the garden, the one I smashed a hole in. "What does that prove?"

"It proves that there was a break-in. It was hardly his wife: she's bound to have a spare key. No. I'd say it was Harry. He probably followed you at some stage."

This suggestion of mine is made in a casual tone of voice.

"Harry would have smashed the whole surgery. I know him."

I cocked up. I bloody cocked up. I could have taken the lump hammer and turned Ronan's surgery into a bombsite. Then it would have been Harry. But no, because I show laudable restraint and spare his surgery, I end up the culprit. It's most unfair.

"You'd better call Ronan to tell him," I suggest, ultra-sly.

She makes a quick movement and pulls out her mobile. She presses a number. Then she suddenly presses off. "I can't." She shakes her head, eyes closed.

"Why not?"

"It might wreck the whole deal."

"Of course it will wreck the whole deal, Nicolethat's the whole point."

She starts wailing now.

"So you must tell him. You can't let him go to Paris and negotiate for you over Chi Chi when it doesn't exist any more. You'll make a liar of him." when it doesn't exist any more. You'll make a liar of him."

"Thanks for being so wonderfully optimistic." She weeps.

"I'm only being practical."

"I can't just wreck the whole deal."

"But what does it matter, Nicole? Isn't love the important thing? Surely Ronan will understand? He loves you, doesn't he?"

"I don't know," she moans.

"Call him."

"I can't..."

She gets up and runs from the kitchenette. "We must go to Paris. We must. I'll tell him about this when we return. We still have the other paintings. They're my only hope."

I've driven Nicole and a baleful-looking Max to a B&B in Dalkey, into which she has just booked herself by mobile phone.

While she's checking in with the large, discreet, smiling lady of the house, I open the cat box in the car as requested by Nicole and viciously shake Max out on to the front seat like he's a rattlesnake. After some impressive soft-landing techniques and oily cat gymnastics, Max rights himself and pounces over the headrest on to the luggage in the back seat, from which relatively safe location he bares his teeth at me. In fact, it's such a foul grimace, so filled with humming evil and baleful nastiness, that it makes you think this cat has a serious problem with trust. There's some latent repression going on, I sense, and it's quite clear this cat requires immediate counselling.

I slam the door, making Max jump. I enter the B&B and make my way up the stairs to Nicole's room at the top rear of the house, case in hand.

It's a twin room. I can't help imagining whom she's twinning with. Or perhaps it's the only room available. It's pretty with its frilly silvery duvets, its white bedside tables and white dressing-table with a vase of red carnations on top, and its silver floral mirror and the jolly blue curtains on the slanted roof window.

She sits down beside a little table by the window and presses the knob of the small electric kettle. Then she slumps her jawline into the palms of her hands and sits quietly, rocking gently in her seat.

I walk to the window and stare at the scenic view of Dalkey Island a few hundred metres over the greyish, choppy sea. It is hilly and green, and dominated by its round, squat Martello Tower.

We don't speak. The kettle comes to the boil and together we make two cups of tea. She thanks me sadly when I offer her a tiny cream container. She looks totally juiced up, like she did when I took her to hospital, only worse, if you subtract the face, which is showing signs of healing.

I sip my PG Tips in silence. Me sitting on the outer bed crumpling the nice fluffy duvet surface, Nicole on the chair with her legs crossed, cupping the teacup in her palm. Her make-up is still blotched but she doesn't seem to care. She's in a daze, gazing towards the open window, adrift-looking, raftlike.

Her cup is still full; it must be going cool.

Suddenly she turns towards me and starts to say something but doesn't succeed, then she bursts into tears.

I put down my cup, go over to her, kneel down beside her, put my arm round her and tell her not to worry, that it'll all work out for the best in the end. And I actually believe this to be true. Without Ronan. She is lovely in her own waysurely she will find happiness in life?

"I'm sorry," she burbles, grabbing my hand, her face caved in and crumpled like a piece of wrinkled dough.

"It's okay," I assure her.

She's sniffing a lot. "I know you mean well, Julianne, but it's not really okay."

Saying this seems to calm her somewhat.

"But what's not okay? What's the matter?"

She starts telling me about her life.

She says, in effect, that it has been for years one unmitigated relationship Titanic Titanic after another. "I've been dumped more times than a bin," she mourns. after another. "I've been dumped more times than a bin," she mourns.

"You mustn't say those things about yourself."

"Harry would have dumped me if I hadn't done it first."

"You don't know that."

"I do, Julianne. It's the story of my life."

Sometimes, she says, she thinks Ronan likes her more for her body than for herself. She actually says that. She says she's been far too trusting of men in the past. She doesn't know if she can really trust Ronan, but she loves him like she's never loved another man before.

She says she doesn't know how she ended up with Harry. She says she wasted four years of her life with him. That he treated her abysmally. He gradually made her drop her old friends one by one. He dumped on her in public, and she cooked and cleaned and gardened for him in private.

But it went deeper: she couldn't remember the number of times he threatened to feed the contents of her aquarium to Max. Not out of any particular love for Max, naturally, but to save on catfood. At other times, he would enjoy sharing his boot with the cat's visage.

His boot cruelly extended to include her: he constantly criticized her piano playing and her singing, and generally told her that she was no good. And if all this resulted in him losing his temper, his solution was simply to hit her.

"How," she wonders, "is a person supposed to live with that?"

"It can't have been easy, Nicole."

Nicole bites her lip and nods tightly, and her face crumples up into a fresh paroxysm. There's something so lost and troubled about her that my heart almost hurts.

"Why is my life such a mess?" she asks, sobbing.

"But there's...good things in your life..."

"I can't see any."

"What about..."

"What?"

Her car? But it's only a car.

Her cat? No, she wants to dump Max on someone else.

Ronan? Yes, it appears that the best thing in her life right now is Ronan. QED: her life must indeed be a relentlessly wet and slimy muck pit.

"You've got great virtues, Nicole."

"I don't see how."

"It's clear for all to seeyou have an attractive personality."

"Oh God, I know what that that means." means."

"I don't mean that, Nicole. I happen to know for a fact that men would find you very attractive."

Pause.

"What makes you think I'm...attractive?" she says, blinking curiously at me.

Incredible. This new phenomenon in my husband's life has me singing her praises like she's the greatest motherfucking babe in the universe.

"Trust me on that."

But she shakes her head. "I don't think I am."

This self-deprecation actually annoys me. I hate it when women run themselves down like this, even if it's true.

I turn away. "I mean, Ronan thinks you are."

"You're the only one I can tell about Ronan. I don't trust my father or my stepmother or my friends enough to tell them. They wouldn't understand. I've told one of my brothers all right, the one who lives in Amsterdamthat's Joel. He's really lovely, but it's here I need him."

She sips her tea, which must be cold by now, but she appears not to notice because she immediately takes another sipmore of a gulp if you ask meas if she's suddenly discovered a great thirst.

I take out my cigarettes.

She's got no one. Except me.

And Ronan.

Great.

Talk about being burdened on all sides. I'm a grief sponge on the one hand and a dumpee wife on the other.

Fantastic.