It transpired that Sinead and Ted worked together, toiling shoulder to shoulder in the department of agriculture. At their Christmas party, as they had drunkenly jived to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, their eyes had met and that was it – love.

Ashling entertained a strange suspicion that Sinead’s advent signalled the beginning of the end of Ted’s stand-up career. But as he’d only ever become a comedian to get a girl, perhaps he wouldn’t mind. He certainly didn’t seem upset.

‘Tonight? You want to go out again?’ Clodagh asked. ‘But you were out last night and the night before and Wednesday night.’

Patiently Marcus explained, ‘I’ve got to keep an eye on the new comics out there. This is my career, I have to go.’

‘Which is more important to you? Me or your career?’

‘You’re both important.’

Wrong answer.

‘Well, I won’t be able to get a babysitter, it’s too short notice.’

‘OK.’

And that, Clodagh thought, was that. Until at nine o’clock Marcus stood up and said, ‘I’ll be off. It’ll be a late one, so I’ll go home instead of coming back here.’

Clodagh was astonished. ‘You’re going?’

‘I said I was.’

‘No. You said it was OK that I couldn’t get a babysitter. I thought you meant you weren’t going to go without me.’

‘No, I meant I was going to go without you.’

‘Ashling, I’ve something to tell you,’ Ted said.

‘What?’ It was a freezing January evening and Ted and Joy had showed up deputation-like, with sleet on their collars.

‘You’d better sit down,’ Joy advised.

‘I am sitting down.’ Ashling thumped the couch she was on.

‘That’s good. I don’t know if you’re going to be upset,’ Ted said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve worried about whether or not you should be told.’

‘Tell me!’

‘You know Marcus Valentine.’

‘I might have heard of him. Duh, Ted, please.’

‘Yes, sorry. Well, I saw him. In a pub. With a girl. Who wasn’t Clodagh.’

All was still, then Ashling said, ‘So what? He’s allowed to be seen in the company of another woman.’

‘I take your point. I take your point. But is he allowed to stick his tongue down her throat?’

A strange expression lit Ashling’s face. Shock – and something else. Joy glanced at her anxiously.

‘You’ve met the girl,’ Ted elaborated. ‘Suzie. I was talking to her at a party in Rathmines one night and I left with you. Remember?’

Ashling nodded. She remembered a neat, pretty little redhead. Ted had called her a comedy groupie.

‘So I, er, asked around,’ Ted went on.

‘And?’

‘And he’s sticking more than his tongue into her, if you take my meaning.’

‘Oh, my good God.’

‘For a freckly bastard he sure is a big hit with the goils,’ Joy observed drily.

‘Oh my good God,’ Ashling repeated.

‘Don’t go all compassionate and start to feel sorry for Clodagh,’ Joy begged. ‘Please don’t go rushing round there to hold her hand.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Ashling said. ‘I’m fucking delighted.’

‘I’m coming over to get my stuff,’ Marcus said.

‘It’ll be ready,’ Clodagh confirmed heatedly.

Fuming, she banged around the house, shoving his personal effects into a black bin-liner. She couldn’t believe how quickly it had all splintered. They’d gone from mutual obsession to near-hatred in a matter of weeks, eddying in a downward spiral from the moment it had stopped being just about sex and started being about real life.

She’d thought she loved him, but she didn’t. He was a boring bastard. The boringest of boring bastards. All he wanted to talk about was his act and about how none of the other comedians were as good as him.

And he needed so much attention. She found it distasteful the way he resented it whenever she focused on Craig and Molly. Sometimes it was just like having three children.

Not to mention that bloody novel he’d started. Garbage! Unbelievably depressing. He took criticism so badly, even constructive suggestions. All she’d said was that maybe the woman in it could set up her own business, baking cakes or making pottery, and he’d gone mad.

And lately he wanted to be out every night. Simply refused to understand that she couldn’t keep leaving her two children. It was hard to get babysitters. It was even harder to afford babysitters on what Dylan was giving her. But more than that, she didn’t want to be out every night. She missed Craig and Molly when she was away from them.

Staying in at home was nice. There was no shame in watching Coronation Street and having a glass of wine.

And the sex. She no longer wanted to do it three times a night. She shouldn’t be expected to. No one did after the first crazy passion had passed. But he was still on for it, and it was exhausting.

But all that was small potatoes compared to the bombshell he’d just hit her with – that he’d ‘met someone else’.

She was boiling with anger and deeply humiliated. Especially because in some remote corner at the back of her head she’d always entertained a suspicion that she was doing him a favour, that it was the luckiest day of his life when she’d fallen out of a stultifying marriage and into his arms. She minded desperately that she’d been dumped. It hadn’t happened since Greg the American jock had lost interest in her a month before he went back to the States.

She was shoving the last pair of underpants into the bag when the doorbell rang. She marched out, opened the door and thrust the bin-liner at Marcus. ‘Here.’

‘Is my novel in there?’

‘Oh yes, Black Dog, the masterpiece, is in there all right. Bin-liner’s the right place for it,’ she said in an undertone, which wasn’t really an undertone at all.

His thundery face indicated he’d heard and he prepared to retaliate.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he threw over his shoulder as he turned to go, ‘she’s twenty-two and she’s had no children.’ He accompanied this piece of information with a wink. He knew Clodagh had a thing about her stretch marks.