“Well, yes, of course,” said Polly, “and it’s the duty of every consumer to confront and minimize that exploitation…”

Jack laughed. It was a laugh with a sneer at the back of its mind. “Confront and minimize? That’s for wimps. It seems to me that the only truly moral thing a person could do in these sad circumstances is kill himself.”

Got it! The knife was finally hooked.

Slowly, gently, with infinite care, Peter reeled in his prize, inch by inch hoisting the wire retriever back up through the grid, watching his beloved blade ascend.

Then he had it. It was in his hand once again where it belonged. He sat on the wet kerb and studied it, carefully closing its blade and cradling it in his hands as if it were a tiny pet. Then he tried the catch. It worked perfectly; the blade sprang out of the hilt as if it were alive, snapping into place with the usual satisfying click. Peter’s little pet was clearly none the worse for its time in the underworld.

Another car came round the corner, but Peter did not bother to move this time. He remained where he was, kneeling in the gutter. Now that he had his knife back he felt invulnerable.

In the chilly atmosphere of the formal but faded grandeur of her dining room, Nibs held her knife also. It was a cheese knife, but she was gripping it just as hard as the Bug gripped his.

The full story of her husband’s most recent philandering, or as much of it as he had felt forced to tell her, had made grim listening. The dessert had been delivered and she had pushed hers away untasted; he’d eaten his, of course – he could always pig down pudding – and now the cheese had arrived. Nibs took a little English red Leicester but she couldn’t eat it. They were both drinking quite hard and a third bottle of wine had been opened, but neither of them felt at all drunk.

“So I suppose you want me to stand by you,” said Nibs.

“I want you to forgive me.”

Nibs was not in a forgiving mood. Her fate was sealed. She knew that, but she was not under any obligation to be magnanimous about it. She was doomed to become one of the “women who stand by her man”. They were a common type these days; you saw the famous ones on the television all the time. Politicians’ wives, pop stars’ wives – sad, trembling, red-eyed victims whom the press had hounded from their hiding places, baited onto their doorsteps and forced by circumstance to lie through their teeth before a baying mob. The clichés never varied.

“My husband and I have talked things over and decided to put this incident behind us… We remain very much in love… Miss so-and-so is no longer a part of my husband’s life,” etc., etc.

All this actually meant was that the poor woman had nowhere to go, her position, her possessions, her children, her life in general, all being tied up with the mumbling apologist to whom she was married. He had taken her youth and her potential and now she had no obvious life options of her own. Nowhere to go except her doorstep, to assure the world that she was standing by her husband.

Nibs knew that she too would stand by her man. It was true that she was an accomplished professional woman in her own right. She would not be entirely lost on her own. None the less, after twenty-five years and with children still in their teens, her life was inexorably tied up with her husband’s. Her career had always been just a little bit secondary to his; his business had become her business too, she’d worked hard for it. His status was hers. Like many a woman before her, Nibs was caught between a rock and hard place and the hard place was her husband’s dick. She did not like being betrayed, but on the other hand she did not wish to have to rebuild her life from scratch just because she was married to a man who couldn’t keep it to himself.

“I’ll stand by you,” she said, “but I’m not going to lie for you.”

“I wouldn’t ask that,” he replied.

But they both knew that in the end if she had to she would.

It occurred to Polly that although they had been talking for nearly an hour she still knew almost nothing about Jack’s life. She realized with a tinge of resentment that she seemed to have been giving most of the information.

“So how about you?” she asked “Are you in a relationship?”

“No, I’m married.”

It was a joke, the sort of sexist little put-down in which Jack specialized. Normally Polly despised men who put their wives down behind their backs. She heard that stuff a lot. Scarcely a month went by without some married man or other telling her what a mistake he’d made with his life and how all he wanted was to be able to give his love to someone who would appreciate it. Experience had taught Polly to react to that sort of thing with nothing but feelings of sisterly solidarity.

This time, however, she scarcely noticed Jack’s blokey humour. The knowledge that he was married had taken her completely by surprise. There was no reason for it to have done so, of course. Jack was an establishment man in an establishment job, he was almost bound to be married. She felt deflated. She knew she had no right to feel that way, but none the less she did. The truth was that deep deep down, without acknowledging it even to herself, Polly had been toying with the exquisitely exciting possibility that Jack might have come back for her. From the first moment she had heard his voice over the answerphone something in her most private self had hoped that he had come back to stay. It was nonsense, of course, a ridiculous notion, and she knew that now for sure. He was married, he had a life. All he had come back for was some easy sex. Perhaps not even that, perhaps he had been motivated by nothing more than curiosity.

“Oh yeah, I’m married all right,” Jack mused into his bourbon. “But whatever we had died a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Polly said, although she wasn’t particularly.

Jack performed his favourite shrug. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Literally nothing. I can’t remember the last time we made love. She has a Dutch cap which ought to have been an exhibit in a museum of gynaecology. The spermicidal cream is years past its fuck-by date.”

“So why haven’t you left her?”

“I don’t have the guts.” Which was a silly thing to say to Polly.

“You had the guts before.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?” Polly asked angrily.

“We were together three months, Polly! We weren’t married! Did you ever try to leave someone you’ve been with for years? It’s like trying to get off the Time Life mailing list. I torment myself. Would she kill herself? Who would get custody of the credit cards?”

“Oh, come on, Jack!”

Polly may not have seen Jack for a long time, but she knew him well enough not to buy this type of bullshit. If Jack wanted something he was not going to let any finer emotions or sensibilities stand in his way. He never had.

“OK, OK,” Jack conceded. “The truth is I can’t leave her because I can’t risk damaging my career. I’m near the top now, Polly. I mean real near. I’m tipped to be the man. Unfortunately the army is about a hundred years behind the rest of the world on social matters. They like you to be married and they like you to stay married.”

Polly could hardly believe that it still mattered, that being a divorce could still be a bar to promotion.

“Oh yes, it can be, Polly, in the army it can. More so now than a few years ago, the pendulum’s swinging back. Can you believe it? I had to leave you for my career and now I can’t leave my wife for the same reason. If I wasn’t such a big success I might almost think that I’d fucked up my life.”