They don’t have the same need for closeness. Having the same need for intimacy or distance is important. He wants to be closer than she does. He believes that the person who wants to be the closest, the most intimate, is the person who loves the most, she disagrees, but she can’t get her point across to him. She is as close to him as it is possible for one person to be to another without morphing, without losing herself, becoming dependent, although dependency is tempting. But she must have space. He strives for symbiosis and she feels its attraction, but soon needs to get back out, to the others. She needs other people. She loves him, but she looks forward to travelling with other people, without him. It is nice to be with other people when she knows she has him, her beloved in her heart, who is waiting, to have him to return to, to be away in the knowledge that he is there, at home, waiting while she is away. She can travel to another continent and feel her love for him, look forward to coming back to him to tell him what she has been doing in his arms. She has to travel, to go away so that she can come home again.

‘I want you with me everywhere,’ he says, ‘on all my trips,’ he says. ‘Everywhere,’ he says reproachfully as if it makes him better than her, his love greater than hers.

When she is out running on her own, she listens to her Walkman. If she is running with Arnold, she doesn’t, he gets annoyed if she does. Even though they don’t talk while they run, she can’t listen to it because it takes her to a place where he isn’t, where she can lose herself in something he can’t hear and she disappears to him. He will race ahead of her to demonstrate what he thinks of her Walkman, and she will turn it off and accelerate to catch up with him and she will shout:

‘I’m not listening to it anymore! Look, Arnold!’ she will call out, showing him her earphones hanging loose around her neck. She experiences a silent, undefined failure to thrive. Thoughts are stirring, thoughts are stirring inside Ida.

[...] Ida is right there and yet he touches the other woman, but in the same way, which makes it worse. Love is only possible where there is innocence, a tiny little bit of innocence, a little bit of trust. The knowledge that you can’t be substituted, that you are not replaceable or interchangeable, that the hands of the beloved and a stranger can’t be the same, that they can’t touch a stranger in the same way they touch someone familiar and loved, that hands, when they can choose, will always choose the beloved. They are quiet in the taxi on their way home. The experience turns them on. They have sex all night and in the morning, it turns them on, but makes them sick, they can’t go to the seminar they are meant to attend. Arnold can, Ida can’t, she is unable to get up, Ida is sick, they have to call and say so: Ida is sick, it is true, she can’t get out of bed. Turned on by it all night, perhaps he thinks they both are, but she is alone.

[...] He can come with any woman and it will feel pretty much the same, she already knows that. It is like that for everyone, she already knows that too. Except it is not like that for Ida, but she doesn’t say so. No one must know what it is like for her. He must not know how alone she is. They drink. That helps. Soon they laugh it off. We learn, we grow, they tell each other. We’re pioneers, rule-breakers, we embrace the darkness and we learn, we grow, they tell themselves and each other, we seek knowledge all the time. Anyone afraid to tremble is a coward, they say. But they are not cowards and that is why they are trembling now.

Do you feel freer now? No. More intimate? Perhaps it glues them together. They suture their bodies together with a sharp needle. They get to know each other’s bodies better, each other’s desires and responses. They look deeply into each other, they learn as much as is possible, they watch each other with strangers, in ever new situations, anything you can imagine, isn’t that a good thing? His hand cupping another woman’s breast. As it has cupped countless women’s breasts, also while they have been together. That is just how real life is. It is just the real world.

A wagtail lives behind her garden wall. It flies around, constantly busy, but they never see another one, no mate, no chicks.

‘A divorced wagtail,’ Arnold says and tilts his head. ‘Poor thing. Never leave me. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill myself!’

No matter how open he pretends to be, he is never entirely open. No matter how vulnerably he presents, he is never completely vulnerable. No matter how desperate he seems, he is never truly desperate. He calls to say that he is going to kill himself, but he is one of those people who never will. He might appear needy, but he has his own campfire, he can survive anything. She is the one who might perish.

Who doesn’t want an adventure? Familiarity is all well and good, but predictable and humdrum in the long run. Who doesn’t dream about a life with no bills, no laundry, no mortgages or kids? Arnold does! A purely erotic space with a postgraduate or an undergraduate who admires him, her tutor, her professor, to be irresistible for a few hours, wise, fiery, invent yourself and present yourself at your most advantageous to this semi-stranger who swallows you raw. Who doesn’t need to be worshipped and admired like that? Arnold does! [...]

This is the end. There is no mistaking it. But I’m not going to milk it, wallow in it, it bores me already, it seems so infantile, so banal, that even the pain it caused seems infantile, banal, embarrassing, a source of shame; with the little bit of common sense still active in her brain Ida realises how banal it is, yet still it hurts, perhaps it hurts even more because even the most stupid, most infantile action can cause pain, but I won’t wallow in it because I, too, know shame, even now as I sit here writing down only the most important insight: the pain was so all-consuming that only one remedy would do. End it so it can’t happen again. The only remedy that will help: making that decision. She has no choice, her entire body is telling her that it is over, it is enough, now it is just a question of survival, she will never, ever sleep with him again.

An avalanche has started where she is. She is caught up in an avalanche.

It is over. From now on it is a question of getting through it. Exist in it and survive. Rest, at times she finds it impossible to get up. Trust those who say that it will pass. It is impossible to believe, but some people say that the same thing happened to them and that time really is a great healer. Though that seems inconceivable right now. When she is able to get out of bed, she goes to another library to find better books about the grieving process, which could help her, surely there must be something. What can you do to accelerate it? Can you do anything at all to speed it up? Acknowledge your loss and mourn it. She lies on the sofa, acknowledges her loss and mourns it, screams over it, if it doesn’t ease she will kill herself, except he isn’t worth so great a sacrifice.

‘It will pass!’ says everyone she asks, she asks everyone, she asks the librarians, women in shops, the off-licence where she buys wine, shoppers in the queue at the supermarket, taxi drivers, they all say that it will pass, but can she trust them? How can it hurt so much now and not hurt in a few months, what if it goes on for ever? She calls the Samaritans at night and sobs. It’s all right, they say, just let it out, your calling us is a good sign. She starts to believe that it will pass. That it really is a matter of getting through it.

‘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! Did he think that that would be her response, to fight to win him back and then gloat over the undergraduate: Look, I won! And while the battle is ongoing, the feted and desired Arnold Bush can stroll through the university corridors with a hard-on. Is that what he thought?

‘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 endure everything?