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SHE (softly, as if in an aside): What is your wife like?

HE (purposefully): Beautiful. I'm a man who's happy with his wife.

(Pause.)

SHE: So am I. I'm a woman who's happy with her husband.

(This exchange charged with real emotion, which the ensuing moment covers.)

HE: You were bored in a way that makes men want to know a woman.

Whenever you felt uncomfortable, you let your discomfort rain down on me in the form of aggression and recriminations, you poured it over me rather than hold back, as if every uncomfortable feeling which my behaviour produced in you was my fault and my problem, never yours. And I let it happen, tha…

‘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…