We were married in her college chapel a little more than a year after graduation.

Ours was a stable marriage for many years, at least on the surface. We had no children because Mary felt, and I have never disagreed with her, that we needed to invest in our careers first, and only when these had achieved a certain momentum, in our family. But time has marched on, and we still have no children.

She rose effortlessly through the pay grades in her bank; for Mary, there was never a glass ceiling. I made my reputation as a fisheries scientist and although as the years went by I fell far behind Mary in my earning power, I knew she respected me for my integrity and growing reputation as a scientist.

And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I daresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it-the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for.

Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’

I don’t know when we started drifting apart.

When I told Mary about the project-I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen -something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off-I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful.

Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping. I think what she really thought was that I was about to make the most gigantic fool of myself: to become linked forever with a project derided by the scientific community as fraudulent and unsound, to be marked forever as a failure who had been turned from the path of virtue by the lure of unlimited budgets, to appear on her personnel record as a black mark. ‘Mary Jones is a sound enough colleague. It is unfortunate that her husband turns out to be a publicity-seeking scientific charlatan. That could have negative public relations implications for the bank. Perhaps we’d better pass her over this time.’

Yes, that’s why I have to write about Mary. When they pushed me into working for the sheikh, they pushed me out of the far side of my marriage. She saw an opportunity in Geneva and, with characteristic ruthlessness, she took it. Or perhaps that had been the plan all along, and she decided that the moment had come to do something about it.

And I could like it, or lump it.

And yet I write as if I did not love her. I must have loved her, because when she went I felt so empty.

Our marriage is not over, it has just become an email marriage. We communicate regularly. She has not asked for a divorce, or suggested we sell the flat or anything like that. There she is in Geneva, and here I am in London, and we have no plans to meet in the near future. I feel as I write this that my life has no meaning now. And if it has no meaning then perhaps everything over the last forty-odd years has been a waste of time. As I write this entry in my diary, I myself feel like a diary which has been left out in the rain, from which the moisture has washed away the cramped inky writing, the record of thousands of days and nights, leaving only a blank and sodden page.

Interrogator:

Describe the circumstances of Mr Peter Maxwell’s interview with Sheikh Muhammad.

Dr Alfred Jones:

It wasn’t so much an interview. This is what I’d call an interview, with all these endless questions you chaps want to ask. I don’t know what good it will all do.

Interrogator:

Of course we’d like to conduct these interviews in a friendly and cooperative way, Dr Jones. But we can do this all quite differently, you know.

Alfred Jones:

Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t cooperate, but let me tell you about it in my own way. It was quite a long time ago now, you know. I can’t always remember every little detail.

Interrogator:

You tell it any way you want to. But miss nothing out.

Alfred Jones:

I’ll do my best. As far as I remember, after the sheikh arrived he and Peter Maxwell had a private conversation. I wasn’t included. This was political stuff, I imagine, and I was simply a humble fisheries scientist. I was left to myself for an hour or two. As far as I remember, I went up to my room and wrote up my diary, which you have already helped yourself to. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote but I know I was feeling fairly depressed. It was a gloomy day and I was feeling wretched. My wife hadn’t exactly walked out on me, but it felt as if she had.

Even Harriet wasn’t considered important enough to be included in that part of the proceedings, although she was around. She was up at Glen Tulloch before Maxwell and I got there.

Interrogator:

Harriet? You are referring to Ms Chetwode-Talbot?

Alfred Jones:

Of course. Then we were called into the sheikh’s office and I was given to understand that I was expected to make a formal report to the sheikh on the progress of the Yemen salmon project to date. I wasn’t looking forward to it. A few days before, I’d received some email correspondence from my boss David Sugden which indicated a fundamental obstacle. David had told me he would manage the supply side of the project, that is, the supply of live Atlantic salmon. Of course, as usual, he hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. He had no idea where we were going to get the salmon from at all.

Interrogator:

So you went into the sheikh’s office? Who was present at this meeting?’

Alfred Jones:

Yes, we went into the sheikh’s office and sat down around a long mahogany table. It was more like a dining-room table than an office table, and the only thing at all office-like in the room was a large desk with a plasma screen on it in one corner of the room. Malcolm the butler served us all with tea in china cups and then withdrew, and the sheikh gestured to me to start talking. So I did my best to bring him up to date. Peter Maxwell told us he was there as an ‘observer’. He had apparently already told the sheikh of the prime minister’s support and enthusiasm for the project, but he repeated this for the benefit of Harriet and me, and the sheikh murmured some word of thanks. Then Maxwell sat back in his chair looking bored and impatient while I made my report.