I became aware of Kit looking at me and let the song drift from my attention. ‘Congratulations, mate,’ I said, with a decent impression of cheer. ‘You’re a lucky man.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Jamie.’ He turned his face to the water as if overcome by the force of my goodwill; as if I had made all of this happen. The river, for once, looked almost wholesome, a body of fresh water, its temperature agreeable and currents benign.

But, you only had to take a few steps forward and the way the sun flashed off the vertical silver surfaces of Canary Wharf could blind a man. Knock him right off his feet.

19

September 2019

The routine of our annual late-summer holiday with my father was well worn. We always collected him from his place near Winchester and took the express ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg, then on to somewhere in Normandy or Brittany. We always agreed how fantastic it was to be childfree and able to travel in term time to beautiful places rendered insufferable in August in the presence of screaming kids (we always agreed this before we picked up Dad, who we knew privately regarded our not having children as a tragedy).

‘Imagine the traffic in school holidays!’ Clare said, word perfect, as the A3 slid by without a single snarl-up.

‘I know. Horrific.’

‘I much prefer September weather, anyway.’

‘Best of both worlds,’ I agreed.

So far, so familiar, but she surprised me then by straying from the next part of the script – the financial savings to be made by avoiding August – and plunging into heavy silence. My eyes were on the road, on the incessant lane-changing of a van just ahead, but after a while I glanced across and saw she was glaring at the dashboard. ‘What’s up? You look annoyed.’

‘I was just thinking about Melia and Kit. The wedding.’ Ah. As I mentioned, following occasions of high excitement, Clare was more prone than most to the forces of anti-climax and so I’d been expecting this downturn in mood. For my own part, in order to conduct myself on the holiday with appropriate cheer – in order to save my sanity, frankly – I’d chosen to regard the Ropers’ nuptials as a hallucination.

‘I mean, they’re the ones always arguing,’ Clare said. ‘We thought they were close to splitting up, didn’t we?’

They’re the ones: she meant in comparison with us.

‘Maybe all that volatility is just passion,’ she added, glumly. ‘I thought millennials didn’t have sex. That’s what I read in the Telegraph.’

I laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because what you just said was funny! Why should you care about it, anyway? It was their decision to get married.’

She turned defensive. ‘It’s tradition after a wedding, isn’t it, to question your situation? Your choices.’

I indicated to exit the A3, inhaling for exactly the length of time my foot eased the brake. I knew I had no chance of closing the lid on this, the criticism of me about to spill out. I couldn’t regard my relationship with Clare as a hallucination, too.

‘It’s been rough for me, you know, Jamie,’ she said, all fired up.

‘What has?’

‘Supporting you.’

‘Supporting me? I don’t see why it should be rough on you.’ On the roundabout, some twat tried to undertake and my mood turned incautious. ‘You don’t need my salary, you could live exactly as you are without any contribution from me. It’s me who’s taken the risk and downgraded myself.’

I shut up, at risk of protesting too much. She was quite right to doubt us, she just didn’t yet know why. I saw suddenly that the number plate on the car in front had the same first three letters as ours. What were the odds?

‘I wasn’t talking about financial support,’ Clare said, coolly. ‘The wedding made me take stock, that’s all.’

I experienced a rush of fear. ‘You don’t mean you want to get married?’ My confidence wavered. ‘You want to split up?’ For a moment, I wondered if we’d reach France. I had a sudden urge to follow our matching number plate wherever it took us.

‘Neither of those,’ Clare said. ‘I just think something needs to change.’

Well, it was too late for children, our biological own at least. I prayed she wasn’t going to suggest adoption or surrogacy or something that involved official examination of my habits.

‘I’d like a bit more honesty,’ she said. ‘I can’t plan otherwise.’

I noted the singular. Was she subconsciously framing her future in terms of independence or was guilt making me oversensitive? She’d literally just denied wanting to separate. I glanced at the satnav’s predicted time of arrival. We were six minutes from my father’s house.

‘Honesty is good,’ I said, with as much commitment as I could bring to such humbug. ‘But maybe we need to park this for now and concentrate on the trip.’

She nodded. ‘You’re right. Let’s get the holiday out of the way and then see where we are.’

As she reset her mood, I felt the imminent clutch of a gloom of my own. I hadn’t liked that exchange one bit. What was she withholding? A secret affair of her own? (No partner could have been less mistrustful than me.) It struck me that I was totally at her mercy – hers and Melia’s – robbed of my autonomy by these two women.

Wouldn’t that be the definition of irony? To be ditched by both of them.

Irony or just deserts, one of the two.

*

The Channel crossing was smooth, the onward journey by car soothingly familiar. The blue autoroute signs, the scalding coffee from petrol station vending machines, the big-sky promise of breathing space, of emptiness.

I was pleased we were basing ourselves in Brittany this time and not Normandy. The Normandy beaches are vast and beautiful, but to step onto them is to pass through the ghosts of war. I didn’t want to think of stolen lives that holiday; I didn’t want to reflect on my own rank ignobility.

We’d stayed a few times in Richard’s ‘cottage’, a blue-shuttered farmhouse surrounded by wildflower meadows and pine woods, meticulously renovated and decorated by his wife, Agnès. We were instantly at home there, our groove easily got back. One thing I would say about Clare and me: we wanted the same thing out of our holidays, the same thing every day: sleep, walk, swim, cook, eat, drink. My father was no trouble; he partook of all of the above with the exception of the walk, and he’d always loved Clare. All things considered, we were happy holiday makers – at least, at first.

‘This is so inspiring. I think gardening will be my new thing,’ Clare said, over lunch on the fourth or fifth day. All meals were taken on the canopied stone terrace, surrounded by a botanical garden’s worth of hydrangeas, whose blues perfectly complemented the hue of the local rosé and made me remember the colours Kit and Melia had worn the first time I met them.

‘Who’s looking after that big house of yours?’ Dad asked.

‘A lovely local girl called Delilah,’ Clare said. ‘She’s just left university and she’s working on a screenplay, so it will be somewhere quiet for her to write for a couple of weeks. It was Jamie’s idea.’

Delilah, I thought, rolling my eyes. Writing a screenplay. Though I’d suggested a house sitter, it had certainly not been my idea to offer the house to the daughter of a wealthy friend of Clare’s. My first choice would have been Regan, who was now sharing a single room in South Croydon with a friend of a friend who worked nightshifts at the hospital, hot-bedding, basically. But I still hadn’t revealed that I lived in a house designed to accommodate a large family and their staff, and so had dithered over the proposal and, instead, a local rich kid moved from her parents’ luxury crib in Greenwich to ours, a few miles downstream. In any case, it was becoming clearer by the day that Clare made the decisions about ‘our’ house, not me.