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I don’t see what we have to gain by keeping our relationship a secret! I have no intention of doing so any longer! When she accused him of threatening and blackmailing her, he had thought: I shouldn’t be upsetting and frightening her.
    He had apologised.
    He had stopped laying out their future. Realised that he had to take a different tack, talk about love. Of course! She was a woman, after all. Like other women, she needed to feel wanted. She needed to know what he had always assumed was understood: that he was choosing her. He wanted her . He couldn’t offer her much in the way of financial security or social standing, but then she was pretty well off anyway.
    He had to be tender now and rational later. Henrik wasn’t a calculating person, but this was what his relationship with Rebecca had done to him.
    ‘ I want you, Ann-Marie. I’m ready to make a commitment. I’m by no means perfect, but . . . Blah, blah, blah . . .’
    He’d really gone for it tonight, cut straight to the chase. In his mind it had sounded honest. Disarming. Like someone who has learnt what he wants and is ready to fight for it. In Henrik’s mind, his words had sounded really good, almost like a film script.
    As the words ‘I’m by no means perfect’ came out, it did indeed sound like a film. A film with a banal, clichéd script, dashed off on a Monday morning. A script written by a spotty intern. He was suddenly painfully aware of how he must have looked in her eyes. The charming, scatty boy was beginning to look pathetic. He was trapped. Trapped in his relationship with Rebecca. Trapped in the person he had gradually become: the person who, compared with the oh-so-capable Rebecca . . .
    ‘What’s to say you wouldn’t feel the same about me?’ Ann-Marie had broken in, her voice thin, already weak. ‘What’s to say that you wouldn’t start comparing yourself to me and my achievements, and that you’d end up feeling inferior again? What if you didn’t like that either?’
    And he had forced himself to laugh, as if to suggest that her comment had been meant as a joke. Said that of course he had no interest whatsoever in measuring achievements within a relationship. It was Rebecca who weighed every success and failure along the way, to his detriment.
    ‘I’m not afraid of strong women,’ he had said firmly. ‘In fact, I’m clearly drawn to them.’
    And this might have been demonstrably true, but it was wrong, and it was doubly wrong to start talking about Rebecca, even if it was Ann-Marie who brought her up. What’s Rebecca got to do with this? He’d fallen, head-first, into the trap with his sad clichés. My partner doesn’t understand me, boohoo, she’s so perfect, she castrates me with her perfection . . .
    He wasn’t pleased with how his declaration had gone. And, on this occasion, Ann-Marie hadn’t really argued with him, in spite of the fact that he was taking her for granted in what he was saying. And he didn’t believe for a moment that it was because she accepted him as he was, warts and all.
    No. She was withdrawing from him; when he touched her she flinched.
    He thought it had a lot to do with all the gossip, the talk. It didn’t particularly bother him. In some twisted way it made him feel important. And it was something of a turn-on, forbidden fruit and so on. But Ann-Marie worried about what people thought. Whispers and giggles had given way to frowns and moral outrage. He could see that she wasbeginning to wonder whether it was worth it. Whether he was worth it.
    Well, he would just have to make sure that it was worth it for Ann-Marie.
    He had to turn the situation around. He needed her, after all.
    The bathroom lock clicked – why the hell had she locked it? OK. He stretched his legs out in front of him. It was time to win or to disappear. He would round things off, tidy things up before he went home. Make everything right for their next meeting; he would play his trump card. The only thing his relative