What was my fantasy of John? Meeting him, pursuing our relationship – it all seemed preordained. I loved John and, most of the time, early on, felt that he loved me too. But the beginning of our relationship also felt like a negotiation, like a setting-out of terms, which, being young and in awe, I had eagerly agreed to. I did not yet know that their flouting was something that I could – and would – be pulled up on.

‘I never want to be one of those couples,’ he had said, ‘arguing on the corner.’ Meaning: Never dispute me in public.

‘I need my space, a lot of alone time.’ My needs will supersede yours.

I met his friends. I met Jude, his older sister. We went to dinner, to events: gallery openings, screenings, book launches. The adult life I had envisioned began to take shape, all at once. Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life. He had immediate and extended family, people he had known since childhood, school, university. I was surprised to discover that he found it all quite stifling. My own upbringing had been rootless, what with our various moves and my mother’s long and definitive estrangement from her relatives. I suppose you could say that I was unencumbered – I think that might have been John’s word.

I think I agree with John’s speculations on infidelity as a self-fulfilling prophecy, incidentally – only, it seemed to me that John had always been the one to accuse himself. He behaved as someone pinioned from the outset. He had the posture, from the moment I met him, of a man who viewed himself as terminally hard done by. Once his worries about the judgements of his ex Isobel had worn off, I’d inherited the position of arbiter as his self-generated need for condemnation tracked over to me. There was little I could have done to dodge it, to shirk the role I’d been attributed against my will. This desire for castigation was something John experienced both in his personal relationships and in the professional realm. ‘Of course, no one wants to hear what I think,’ he would often say, all evidence to the contrary, when we were discussing a catalogue introduction he’d just finished, an interview he’d given – ‘I’ was not a pronoun here but a name, and the name was his. This was, further, a clipped phrase that signalled the end of an exchange, and as such doubled as a notice that I had said the wrong thing, something to displease him. It might be more generous to say that I’d inadvertently grazed an insecurity, that John was, at the heart of it all, a deeply insecure person.