I survey my husband with disgust.

I am staring into the eyes of the man who only two years ago asked me to marry him, who told me he loved me, led me up the aisle, promised to be faithful, found and furnished a wonderful apartment for us to begin our new life together.

I am staring into the rotten soul of the man who recently told Nicole that he loved her, that I nag and pester him, that our marriage is dead. The man who scooped her off her feet in order to market her paintings in Paris.

I am staring into the heart of the man whom I am supposed to trust above all others. But what does he do? He attempts to tangle me in riddles of lies.

And now?

I find him wearing her expensive watch before my very eyes.

He's flaunted Nicole in front of methat was bad enough. He's slept with her in our spousal bed. That's worse, although I wasn't at home at the time.

But this?

It's almost as if he's laughing at me right to my face.

How much am I supposed to take?

I storm into the kitchen, grab Sylvana by the arm, haul her out of the apartment, shove her in my MG and drive her straight to Ronan's surgery.

Standing in witness to Chi Chi, Sylvana is suitably impressed.

So impressed, in fact, that she makes an immediate offer for the painting. However, I politely decline her offer as being derisorily low, reminding her that the value of an artwork lies in proportion to its archetypal, underived uniqueness. And I calmly point out to her that this Chi Chi masterpiece hanging incinerated on the wall is unrivalled as an artistic experience because it is telling us something important about nihilism in the late postmodern era. masterpiece hanging incinerated on the wall is unrivalled as an artistic experience because it is telling us something important about nihilism in the late postmodern era.

Sylvana strokes her chin as if she's beginning to be duly impressed by my reasoning.

"Where would we hang it?" I giggle.

Sylvana suggests my cloakroom.

I suggest her toilet for thematic reasons.

When it comes to art, Sylvana and I are notoriously incompatible. She seems to appreciate clashing colours and of course she has an aversion to subtle meanings. For example, if a painting has red in it and the room has red in it then in her book it's okay to hang the painting in the room. Now I'm not saying that Sylvana has to be a culture fruitie like Ronan, but on her theory you'd easily end up with, say, Caravaggio's Last Supper Last Supper hanging over your bed because it matches the curtains, while you're not very reverently munching your partner underneath the sheets. hanging over your bed because it matches the curtains, while you're not very reverently munching your partner underneath the sheets.

We exit the surgery and say goodbye, Sylvana ordering me to call her after I've broken the gospel to Ronan.

When I get back home he's not there. I assume he's defuming himself on the moonlit pier, as husbands are wont to do; you know, furiously walking off their frustration at being wrong.

When I walk into the kitchen there's a letter on the table with my name written on the envelope. The fun evaporates like a ghost. I tear it open.

Julie, I've changed my mind about Paris. I'm going tonight instead. Perhaps in the meantime you'll manage to work out your frustrations. R.

I dash to the phone in the hall and call him. He's powered off. I call Nicole. She too is powered off.

Furious, I race back down to my car. Sylvana will know what to do. She will tell me to dump him for ever.

And you know, maybe this time I might just listen.

Tuseday, 21 June, evening

Sylvana and I, flattened out on our sunloungers on the roof of my new penthouse apartment under a cerulean blue sky.

We're all but naked-assed, besmirched in Ambre Solaire gunk, slotted with waspish black UV-protected shades to negate the sun God sent us this day in a blinding blaze of glory, beating down upon us like a deafening cymbal roll.

There's not a cloud in sight, it's a smelting, sweltering, glorious, almost vindictive mid-summer heat.

That doesn't mean I don't feel suicidal: let's just get that clear.

On the other hand, nor do I have any immediate plans to descend the spiral staircase of my new apartment and slash my wrists in the bathtub. I want a halfway-decent suntan first.

"Have some more champagne," she suggests, holding out the bottle for me.

"No thanks, Sylv," I reply. "I'll stick to the banana milkshake: it's cooler."

Another reason I decline the champagne is that in this heat it tastes like radiator water in mid-winter, with bubbles.

Talk about a house-warming. It's a penthouse meltdown.

Champagne.

She bought it specially for me. It's her present to celebrate my new-found freedom. She thinks I have irrevocably decided to dump Ronan from my life. Why else, she reasons, would I go to the trouble of renting a new apartment using funds from the sale of my husband's Porsche? She simply cannot understand why any wife, having pulled off such an outrageous feat, might subsequently decide to return home.

She did inquire at one point whether this apartment was merely a ploy to win Ronan back. Of course I denied it vehemently. Returning reluctantly to her House and Home House and Home, she announced she was relieved that I had decided henceforth to debar myself from future marital enslavement.

With my straw, I suck my banana shake in a most ignorant and gross fashion. I must try to forget Ronan. I must simply soak up the sun and Sylvana's company, and try to pretend I've never met him. Here, there are no reminders.

"Ladies," Sylvana drawls, "don't suck milkshakes."

"You needn't lecture me me about sucking things, Sylv." about sucking things, Sylv."

Unfortunately, in my hour of woe, Sylvana takes this as a cue to initiate one of her favourite conversations. "Did you know, Julie, that Polynesian women are prohibited from eating bananas for certain clearly denned cultural reasons?"

I think about this for a sec.

"Sylvana, what am I supposed to do with that interesting piece of information?"

"What I'm trying to say, Julie, is that now you will no longer have him to service you, you may wish to turn your attention to something more, well, mechanical."

"What could be more mechanical than a man?"

"You know what I mean."

Truth is, Sylvana is obsessed by those plastic bedtime bananas with mobile heads and batteried bodies. She's always telling me she'll lend me her buzzing implement whenever I get lonely. I generally reply that I am perfectly fulfilled by my electric toothbrush.

"The little mechanic without overalls that you speak of, Sylvana, has a few serious flaws."

"Go on. Annoy me."

"It is constitutionally incapable of buying you flowers, or calling you on your birthday, or bringing you on trips, or telling you I love you."

"The one I purchased in New Orleans last year told me he was crazy about me."

"Yes, but that's why you purchased it."

"Well, I figured it might have other things going for it as well. Considering the box's assurance that it vibrated at a frequency of five hundred megaherz."

"Surely, Sylvana, if men are an irrelevancy, then their substitute is doubly so?"

I yawn lazily under the absurd heat.

"Listen, honey," she says, raising her shades from her nose. "We're talking here of a man without a brain, without sweaty armpits, germs, smells. Without balls. Writhing helplessly, so to speak, in the palm of your hand."

"You should go into tele-sales."

"Thank you."

Her shades slot back on to her nose and she collapses again on her chaise. Just to annoy her, I continue rudely to suck my banana shake.

"Julie, I appreciate that your banana milkshake is phallus in glacier form, but could you perhaps lower the distortion level?"

I grab the bottle of factor twenty Ambre Solaire, photostable, hypoallergenic, anti Uva-Uvb, anti cell-ageing, water-resistant, active moisturizing, Laboratoires Gamier, Paristalk about overkillsplurge a pool of white puree into my palm and start rubbing it on my left arm.

"Julie?"

"What?"

"I never thought you'd do it."

"Do what?"

"Move place."

"I never thought I'd do it." never thought I'd do it."

"Permanently."

"Quite."

I splurge the cream on to my right arm now, then my neck and chest, belly, face, legs, feet, toes. In four minutes flat I'm waxed yet again up to the eyeballs like a globule of succulent tar. When I'm finished, Sylvana takes the bottle from me and starts smearing it on to her own arms and shoulders. I sit back, close my eyes and try again to forget.

Now you can hear her sunlounger creaking under the weight as she stretches over to the fruit bowl containing an assortment of fresh cherries, grapes, sundried tomatoes and Belgian chocolates, which when I last checked were bleeding on their black paper trays into dark molten puddles. Now you can hear the sounds of Sylvana munching something.

I open my eyes again. "Remember, Sylvana, this place is a secret, okay?"

It would be so humiliating if the world got to find out that I'd moved out of home, only to do a U-turn and move back in again.

"Right. But you do plan on staying here, don't you?"

"I'm not ready to let the world know," I reply evasively.

The world.

I dread the thought of work tomorrow. Only in the Law Library will I have to face the questioning glances, the narcotic female stares, the intrusive requests after my health. If someone dares to ask me if I am okay, I swear I will steal a judge's hammer and murder them with it.

Here in my 'new apartment', at least, I can put the world into brackets. I am incognito. Safe. My hideaway, north of the city, is discovery-proof. I will not be bothered on the street or in the supermarket. No nosy inquiries about my marriage. No one to stick their pincers into me and tug at the weak, bruised, bulbous parts of myself. I can think in peace. Get myself back into working order in peace. Fortify myself against him.

For war.

I dread the thought of Mother. She is so inquisitive she should be locked in solitary. There's only so much stretching her curiosity can take before her discreet wonderments turn into hellish interrogations. How to deal with her?

"Don't let the world know, then, for the moment. And whatever you do, don't see that woman again, promise?"

"Okay."

"Just forget about everything, Julie, and soak up the sun."

"Sylvana."

"Yes?"

"I love you."

I close my eyes again.

And yet even she doesn't really understand. No one really understands. Nicole now. She's probably the only one who comes close to grasping what it's like to feel the way I'm feeling right now. There's something touchingly pathetic about that.

I am alone. When Sylvana leaves tonightand she will leave if I have to force her toI will be even more alone.

There doesn't seem to be much meaning in things any more.

Life seems like a barren wasteland. A dark, stinking pit. An ocean bereft of shorelines.

If there is a God, why did he create love when it causes such pain?

38 38.

In the last thirteen hours, things have happened in my life that most respectable people would regard as scandalous. Things that would make men tremble to the roots of their toes. Things that would make me me tremble to the roots of my toes if it weren't for the nail varnish. tremble to the roots of my toes if it weren't for the nail varnish.

But let me tell you about my new apartment first.

I fell in love with it at first sight, even though it was just supposed to be a holding cell.