He stopped, sat on a rock, put his head in his cupped hands, breathed deeply a couple of times, then looked up. ‘Surely it’s obvious?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Right, this is why. You are the most precious person in the world to me and Shay Delaney treated you like muck. When you told me about the abortion and all, I wanted to kill him. Then we got married, and it was fine when we were in Chicago, but then we moved home… every time Delaney’s name got mentioned you went white.’

Really? I hadn’t realized his effect on me was that evident.

‘Yes, really’ Garv confirmed my unspoken query. ‘And any time we drove past his mother’s house, you turned and looked.’

Really? I had no knowledge of that either. Well, now that he mentioned it, maybe I did sometimes. Not every time, just sometimes.

‘I used to go the long way round just so we wouldn’t pass his old house. I felt like we were never going to be free of the fucker. Please try and imagine it the other way round – if every time some old girlfriend of mine was mentioned, one I’d ditched you for, I went funny. You wouldn’t like it, would you?’

‘Stop trying to blame me.’

‘Then there’s a thing in the paper about Dark Star Productions, then four days later you leave me, and the next time I hear from you, you’re on your way to Los Angeles.’

‘I didn’t leave you because of reading anything about Dark Star Productions,’ I said furiously. ‘I left you because you were having a fucking AFFAIR. And you didn’t even try to stop me –’

‘Well, I’m doing it now,’ he said grimly.

‘All you did was say you’d pay the mortgage, then you helped me PACK, for God’s sake.’

‘I did try to stop you. I’d been trying to talk to you for days, but you ignored me or came home too drunk for there to be any point. The day you left I was all out of fight and I’d figured that you were going to leave me anyway.’

‘How d’you reach that conclusion?’

‘I suppose things had been desperate for so long. And you wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘You wouldn’t talk to me! It was your fault.’

‘I was hoping we could try and get beyond all that. Could we not just say that neither of us were perfect…’

‘Speak for yourself. I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I was shaking with anger. ‘So let me sum up what you’ve told me – you had an affair, but it was OK because it was all my fault.’

Then Garv did something he didn’t do often – he lost his temper. He seemed to swell with it. His muscles were taut and his eyes were livid blue as he brought his face close to mine.

‘That’s not what I said.’ He bit the words out. ‘You KNOW what I said. But you don’t want to hear it, do you?’

I looked at my watch and said coldly, ‘I have to go.’

‘Why?’

A pause. ‘I have to meet someone.’

‘Who? Shay Delaney?’

‘Yeah.’

Garv went the colour of chalk and my anger got wiped away, to be replaced with the deadness I remembered from the first weeks of separation.

‘Garv, why did you come here?’

‘To try to persuade you to come home in the hope that we might rebuild us.’ He smiled a little twist of a smile. ‘Looks like I’ve had a wasted journey.’

‘You were unfaithful to me. How could I ever forgive you? Or trust you again?’

‘Oh, God.’ He rubbed his hand over his eyes. I thought for a moment he was going to cry.

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said. ‘Was she beautiful, this Karen?’

‘Maggie, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t about that…’ He was in agony.

‘Just a simple yes or no,’ I cut in. ‘Was she beautiful?’

‘She was attractive, I suppose,’ he admitted miserably.

‘Oh yeah?’ I grinned and he watched me warily. ‘Well, I bet she wasn’t as attractive as the girl I got off with.’

It took a moment. I could almost see the words being processed, then understanding dawn and when it did, he laughed out loud. ‘Really?’

Garv was the only person – other than Emily – who knew how the girls in the porn films had affected me.

‘Good for you,’ he said. Then a little more sadly, ‘Good for you.’

In a gesture that belonged to another life, he touched my head and hooked my hair behind my ears, first one, then the other. Then he noticed my red, flaking arm. ‘Christ, your poor arm,’ he said unhappily. Surprisingly, it seemed natural to hug one another and as I turned my face into his shoulder, he smelt of something that I couldn’t identify. A huge sadness was mushrooming inside me, filling me up so I couldn’t breathe.

‘We really messed things up,’ I choked into his T-shirt.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. We were just unlucky.’

47

This time Shay was waiting for me, smiling a slow, lazy smile as he watched me walk across the lobby. When I saw him, a thought flickered just beneath the surface, but I pushed it away and smiled back at him.

‘Let’s have a drink at the bar,’ he said.

But the bar at the Mondrian was no ordinary hotel bar, devoid of character and atmosphere. It was the Sky Bar, hang-out of celebrities and beautiful people. Open to the warm, night sky and set around a luminous, turquoise swimming pool, a sexy decadent atmosphere was created by the scattering of huge silk cushions and low-slung day beds. The only lighting was from flame torches, which cast a mysterious glow and made everyone dewily beautiful.

FBI types in shades and walkie-talkies manned the reception desk – Fort Knox probably has less security – and only when Shay had produced his room key were the pearly gates opened.

We wandered amongst the silver, six-foot-high pot-plants looking for a seat, but all that was left was an enormous, white, satin mattress. Gingerly we placed ourselves upon it and one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen took our drinks order.

Then Shay and I were alone, sitting on a mattress, looking at each other.

‘I was afraid you were going to cancel me again tonight,’ I blurted, out of need to say something.

‘Look, I told you, last night was work, I couldn’t help it,’ he said, so defensively that for the first time I wondered if he was lying. And he’d tried to get out of meeting me tonight. And when he’d rung last night he’d been hoping to get the answering machine…