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‘You never listened,’ he says on her answering machine. ‘You never took on board the things I struggled with in our relationship, which I tried to discuss with you repeatedly, but you just carried on doing what you always did.’

Does he mean that she should have stopped travelling, stopped spendi…

He tries letters, but he writes the way he speaks and she can’t answer him. It would take a novel to explain to him what it was like for her, a completely different story to the one he would have written, she can feel it the few times she talks to him on the phone, before she gives up. He gets irri…

‘Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says. ‘What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.’ The Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and Victor Andreasen, the editor-in-c…

‘You may think you loved me,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘but you never loved me, you never loved me as I really am.’

Should she love his infidelity? Would hers not be a true love unless she also loved his infidelity and his need to control? Is it a weakness of her love that she can’t end…

‘You’re not fighting for our relationship,’ he says on her answering machine. He had thought, perhaps he had expected her to fight, is that why he did it in the first place? To trigger her competitive instinct, to ensnare her? A rival, an undergraduate, now let’s see who ends up with Arnold Bush! D…