My sister kissed my husband in front of thirty people at her own anniversary party and called it a joke. Her husband had a wrapped present in his hands and an envelope she had never opened.

He watched for, he says, about a minute.

And then he got in his own car and drove home and ate his dinner and said nothing. To me, to Tobin, to anybody, for eight weeks — including the entire weekend at Harrow Rise.

He let me spend that dinner party being needled by a woman he knew was having an affair with the brother of the man sitting opposite, and he smiled into his glass.

And when I asked him, at eleven o’clock at night in the spare room, why he was letting her behave like that, he said I’ll have a word with her.

Why he said nothing.

Because if he told me about the car park, I would have asked the obvious question, which is: why is she like this with you?

And the honest answer, which he gave me in our kitchen on the eleventh of June with his hands flat on the table, is that he had enjoyed it.