[...] She had imagined the end of a marriage, she said, to be a slow disentangling of its meanings, a long and painful reinterpretation, but in her case it hadn’t been like that at all. At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind. He had perched beside her in his suit on a counsellor’s sofa for the mandatory number of sessions, looking discreetly at his watch and occasionally assuring everybody that he wanted only what was fair, but he might as well have sent along a cardboard cut-out of himself, for he was clearly elsewhere in his mind, galloping towards pastures new. Far from a reinterpretation, their ending had been virtually wordless. Shortly afterwards he had set up house with the daughter of an aristocrat – the Earl of somewhere – who was now pregnant with their first child.