“Have you done them yet?” She nods toward the shelves full of albums.

“What?” I know what, of course.

“The Great Reorganization.” I can hear the capital letters.

“Oh. Yes. The other night.” I don’t want to tell her that I did it the evening after she’d gone, but she gives an irritating little, well-fancy-that smile anyway.

“What?” I say. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just, you know. Didn’t take you long.”

“Don’t you think there are more important things to talk about than my record collection?”

“Yes, I do, Rob. I’ve always thought that.”

I’m supposed to have the moral high ground here (she’s the one who’s been sleeping with the neighbours, after all), but I can’t even get out of base camp.

“Where have you been staying for the last week?”

“I think you know that,” she says quietly.

“Had to work it out for myself, though, didn’t I?”

I feel sick again, really sick. I don’t know how it shows on my face, but suddenly Laura loses it a little: she looks tired, and sad, and she stares hard straight ahead to stop herself from crying.

“I’m sorry. I made some bad decisions. I haven’t been very fair to you. That’s why I came to the shop this evening, because I thought it was time to be brave.”

“Are you scared now?”

“Yes, of course I am. I feel terrible. This is really hard, you know.”

“Good.”

Silence. I don’t know what to say. There are loads of things I want to ask, but they are all questions I don’t really want answered: when did you start seeing Ian, and was it because of the, you know, the ceiling noise thing, and is it better (What? she’d ask; Everything, I’d say), and is this really definitely it, or just some sort of phase, and, this is how feeble I’m becoming, have you missed me at all even one bit, do you love me, do you love him, do you want to end up with him, do you want to have babies with him, and is it better, is it better. IS IT BETTER?

“Is it because of my job?”

Where did that one come from? Of course it’s not because of my fucking job. Why did I ask that?

“Oh, Rob, of course it isn’t.”

That’s why I asked that. Because I felt sorry for myself, and I wanted some sort of cheap consolation: I wanted to hear “Of course it isn’t” said with a tender dismissiveness, whereas if I’d asked her the Big Question, I might have got an embarrassed denial, or an embarrassed silence, or an embarrassed confession, and I didn’t want any of them.

“Is that what you think? That I’ve left you because you’re not grand enough for me? Give me some credit, please.” But again, she says it nicely, in a tone of voice I recognize from a long time ago.

“I don’t know. It’s one of the things I thought of.”

“What were the others?”

“Just the obvious stuff.”

“What’s the obvious stuff?”

“I don’t know.”

“So it’s not that obvious, then.”

“No.”

Silence again.

“Is it working out with Ian?”

“Oh, come on, Rob. Don’t be childish.”

“Why is that childish? You’re living with the bloke. I just wanted to know how it was going.”

“I’m not living with him. I’ve just been staying with him for a few days until I work out what I’m doing. Look, this has nothing to do with anyone else. You know that, don’t you?”

They always say that. They always, always say that it’s nothing to do with anyone else. I’ll bet you any money that if Celia Johnson had run off with Trevor Howard at the end of Brief Encounter, she would have told her husband that it was nothing to do with anyone else. It’s the first law of romantic trauma. I make a rather repulsive and inappropriately comic snorting noise to express my disbelief, and Laura nearly laughs, but thinks better of it.

“I left because we weren’t really getting on, or even talking, very much, and I’m at an age where I want to sort myself out, and I couldn’t see that ever happening with you, mostly because you seem incapable of sorting yourself out. And I was sort of interested in someone else, and then that went further than it should have done, so it seemed like a good time to go. But I’ve no idea what will happen with Ian in the long run. Probably nothing. Maybe you’ll grow up a bit and we’ll put things right. Maybe I’ll never see either of you ever again. I don’t know. All I do know is that it’s not a good time to be living here.”

More silence. Why are people—let’s face it, women—like this? It doesn’t pay to think this way, with all this mess and doubt and gray, smudged lines where there should be a crisp, sharp picture. I agree that you need to meet somebody new in order to dispense with the old—you have to be incredibly brave and adult to pack something in just because it isn’t working very well. But you can’t go about it all halfheartedly, like Laura is doing now. When I started seeing Rosie the simultaneous orgasm woman, I wasn’t like this; as far as I was concerned, she was a serious prospect, the woman who was going to lead me painlessly out of one relationship and into another, and the fact that it didn’t happen like that that she was a disaster area, was just bad luck. At least there was a clear battle-plan in my head, and there was none of this irritating oh-Rob-I-need-time stuff.

“But you haven’t definitely decided to pack me in? There’s still a chance that we’ll get back together?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if you don’t know, that must mean there’s a chance.”

“I don’t know if there’s a chance.”

Jesus.

“That’s what I’m saying. That if you don’t know there’s a chance, there must be a chance, mustn’t there? It’s like, if someone was in hospital, and he was seriously ill, and the doctor said, I don’t know if he’s got a chance of survival or not, then that doesn’t mean the patient’s definitely going to die, does it? It means he might live. Even if it’s only a remote possibility.”

“I suppose so.”

“So we have a chance of getting back together again.”

“Oh, Rob, shut up.”

“I just want to know where I stand. What chance I have.”

“I don’t bloody know what bloody fucking chance you have. I’m trying to tell you that I’m confused, that I haven’t been happy for ages, that we got ourselves into a terrible mess, that I’ve been seeing someone else. These are the important things.”

“I guess. But if you could just tell me roughly, it would help.”

“OK, OK. We have a nine percent chance of getting back together. Does that clarify the situation?” She’s so sick of this, so near to bursting, that her eyes are clenched tight shut and she’s speaking in a furious, poisonous whisper.

“You’re just being stupid now.”

I know, somewhere in me, that it’s not her that’s being stupid. I understand, on one level, that she doesn’t know, that everything’s up in the air. But that’s no use to me. You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn’t seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn’t be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent. It would be musical differences. I would be leaving to pursue a solo career. I know how unbelievably and pathetically childish it is to push and push like this for some degree of probability, but it’s the only thing I can do to grab any sort of control back from her.

When I saw Laura outside the shop I knew absolutely, without any question at all, that I wanted her again. But that’s probably because she’s the one doing the rejecting. If I can get her to concede that there is a chance we’ll patch things up, that makes things easier for me: if I don’t have to go around feeling hurt, and powerless, and miserable, I can cope without her. In other words, I’m unhappy because she doesn’t want me; if I can convince myself that she does want me a bit, then I’ll be OK again, because then I won’t want her, and I can get on with looking for someone else.