I don’t want a baby, Florence. I want to sit here and read. I want to go out for a drink. I want to listen to my hi-fi. I want to take the night train. I want to work as late as I want and spend my pay cheque on a sharkskin suit. I want to fuck you on the beach and take you to Australia, throw massive dinner parties and even do the dishes myself. I want to lie on the floor with the cats and listen to you play the piano and keep out of the way as your patients come through the door, I want to go to the theatre and the movies and out for lunch, and laugh at your jokes and your politics, and love you all the time. And you want to break all that, and you’re not even giving me a choice in the matter, and you’re pretending everything is fine. You say you want to build a new world but you just want to destroy the old one.

Henry is hosting his office poker game tonight, and they seem more than usually loud and swaggering, smoking around the table like something out of a movie. I hear Henry telling them about me as I walk out, hear him say consciousness, hear him say raising. How will I tell Henry my news, Henry who knows I have someone, and who is taking it exactly as I knew he would, like a little boy who has to be at the centre of everything, all the time, who wants to benefit from the liberations of the past few years without actually sacrificing anything for them, who likes to talk to his friends about his wife’s feminism, feminism, what a dirty word, like a disease I caught, to laugh about it with them, I hear them as I’m at the piano and he thinks I’m too involved in the music to hear what they’re saying, they’re joking about my feminism, he doesn’t understand it can liberate him, too.

I tell Max about the baby. I think he should know. I’ve been offered a teaching job in London, he says. Just for a year. I think perhaps he hasn’t heard me; I say it again. I heard you. Come to London with me. I’m not going to London. Is it mine? It could be mine. Come to London and have the baby there and it will be ours. I will take care of you and the baby. Begging, almost. I’m not going to London. And it could be Henry’s. And what about your wife? Max makes a sound. She is with someone else now.

There’s no time to think; there is too much else to consider. A new life in London, with Max, a baby, him all to myself. All to myself? Do I want all of him, all the time? Do I want to wake up with him every day? Listen to him chew his food every night? Fight with him about money? Raise this child with him? Something tells me he wouldn’t even stick around for all of that. He is too generous with himself, with his time, his thoughts, generous in the sense of being unable to restrict himself to just one person. For all his faults, Henry would assume his responsibility.

I shake my head. You don’t want me, not full-time. You only want me because I’m not entirely yours. Because I’m needed elsewhere.

That’s not true, says Max. I want you all to myself. I need you here. Or, rather, in London. But he himself sounds unconvinced.

I’m sorry. I’m not going.

And that is how I know it will come to an end, when he leaves for London. But we still have time. And when the nausea is elsewhere, my pregnant body wants him so badly that I wonder if he is indeed the father, that my body has recognised him, or if this is simply my desire leading me astray, as usual.

Since that day at his apartment, we have found each other as often as we can. He comes over right from work, or in the middle of the night. The house is a mess, dust everywhere, the kitchen barely usable, we fuck in the ruins of what used to be my apartment, and then we get takeaway. Some days Clémentine comes and spends the evening with me, and goes home, and a little while later Jonathan turns up on my doorstep. Then he, too, is gone by morning. It’s so absurd, I really should move in with them. One weekend he tells Clémentine he’s going out of town, but he spends the entire weekend in my apartment. Miraculously, she doesn’t drop in. That it is all very complicated doesn’t dampen our desire. Obviously, obviously, it only builds up the need to see each other. I don’t understand why it should be this way for him, he says so little about his own life, but I feel the urgency between us. It is like something we both need to go through, to reach the other side of. I know there will be a time after this, when I will again live in the after. But we aren’t there yet. I hope, in having him again, to make the after more bearable, this time.

He comes, every night. He doesn’t text me during the day or give me any notice. I text him if it’s not a good night. If David is in town. He always comes even if just to tell me he can’t come, that Clémentine is staying home. Usually this is just after she has come over herself, so I already know, and he’s come straight from work. I don’t want to ask too many questions, about how this works for him, or for them, lest I should lean on it too heavily, and make it collapse. I try to remain open, open to whatever there is, in this strange parabola in my life, this pocket, in which so much is held.

His hand in mine again is like the closing of a gap in the floorboards I’ve been stumbling over for years.

Being with Jonathan doesn’t entirely feel like infidelity to David – in a way, it feels like fidelity to some younger version of myself. And yet I’m also meeting a new self in this infidelity, and she is the one I want. Far from feeling guilty or shameful I feel myself, I feel calm.

I have decided not to talk about Jonathan any more to Esther. I am cutting off the chain of associations, because if I try to account for what is happening, anywhere I start might take me further than I intended. And even if I invent a neat explanation for what happened, the part of me that loved him won’t let me reduce it like that. Any summary of Jonathan will sound lifeless and exterior. I will sound like I don’t know what I’m doing, worse, like I don’t know what I know.

Is it a problem of telling? What should I tell? What can I tell? Who can I tell? What can be told? What account could I give that would stand up to it? What form could it take? What order could I give that wouldn’t force it into disorder?

When it comes to the ethical ramifications of desire, Lacan thinks: no. You don’t give in. You’ll just want something else later, so why indulge something that could prove harmful to other people? But I think it’s reinforcing an imprisoning structure to phrase it in terms of giving in or not giving in. You’re only creating more desire by making something forbidden. We need desire to live, but there are different kinds, and it’s the forbidden kind Lacan worried about, without realising it was his own moralising that was feeding it.

Yeah. That’s what I remember you saying. Basically telling my father, with me right there, that you don’t believe in monogamy.

But I do. I did. It’s just that I see it as something you practise, rather than some kind of law, which you can violate, and for which you should be punished.

But you’re not practising it now.

I’m not.

My father, Jonathan says, is a womanising bastard. I love him but it’s true, he’s a bastard. He doesn’t see it that way, he says he loves easily and well, but he’s a serial cheater. He cheated on my mother, he cheated on my stepmother, he cheated on his first wife, and he invented a whole intellectual framework to justify it. He’s slept with his students his whole career. He’s completely unethical.

I let this sink in. But I’m not sure that what I’m doing – what we’re doing – is unethical. My instinct is that it isn’t. That something about living ethically together is bound up in not judging our desires, or controlling and punishing them. But maybe that’s just me justifying it.

So you think it has to be justified.

I’m not sure. Do you?

I’m not sure either.

Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love. I get out my phone and look up the etymology. See? it’s an Old French word, that has to do with a lack of faith. But I have so much faith. I am full of faith.