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made as if to leave the room, but returned to me in a fury. ‘Ask yourself why I should bother to stay with you, June. Look at you. You’ve let yourself go. For someone who spends so much of my money on clothes, you’re in a terrible state. The more time I spend with Hilary, the less I want to spend with you. Look at this house. Every square inch filled up with dolls and dogs and lamps and crap you stick on my account for the sake of shopping, just because you couldn’t have a baby. I daren’t turn around for fear of breaking something, all these bloody bows and ribbons hanging down.’ I knew what he meant. The place was like Elton John’s bedroom. ‘You’re frightened of leaving a blank space anywhere. They had more room to manoeuvre on board the bloody MIR space-station, for Christ’s sake.’ He waved his hands hopelessly at me, then at the room. ‘I can’t live with all this – upholstery.’
    He didn’t understand because we had never properly talked about the problem. For years Gordon had kept quiet and paid the bills, and I had turned a blind eye to his perambulations, but now the unspoken truce between us evaporated in a raising of war standards. Except that I couldn’t fight back. I had nothing to fight with. I had never won an argument with a man in my life. All I did was provide my husband with an apparently reasonable excuse for ending a ten year marriage.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    He shook his head in disgust, slammed the door and was gone. I watched him from the lounge window, growing smaller and more feeble with each passing moment. He hopped over the low brick wall to Hilary’s house like Atlas released from his burden of the world. I had never seen such a look of relief on a man’s face. I had never seen him hop before.
    My fingers closed around my charm bracelet, an adornment to which I took pride in adding pointlessly expensive dangly-baubles. The latest was a miniature version of the Qu’ran encrusted with 18 carat diamonds. To understand how pointless my purchase of this item is, you have to remember that I’m Church Of England.
    It’s not about buying expensive things, it’s about wielding power. Although it’s probably not as much fun if you’re over a size 12, and the assistants in Gucci are as intimidating as bouncers, which, let’s face it, is what they are.
    Gordon came back at eleven o’clock. Clearly, he was unable to make the jump to staying out all night. We slept at opposite edges of the bed, like children who had fallen out over a board game.
    The next day I went shopping again.
    And that was how things continued for most of the month, while the rainy gales of a London autumn scoured the streets and slapped leaves over the car, and the house grew so cold that only our anger could startle it back to life.
    Gordon stayed out, and my spending increased. But the pleasure it gave me gradually disappeared. Drug addiction would have been a healthier option; at least I’d have lost weight and got regular sex from strangers.

 
     
    CHAPTER SIX
    Cancelled
     
     
    W HEN YOU’VE HEARD that Lady Gaga song about telephones for the fortieth time on tinny shop speakers it becomes inaudible, like the wheels of a train or aircraft engines. As the song finished, I reached the end of the floor and snapped a vacant sales assistant, who had been leaning on the counter studying the ends of her hair as if noticing them for the first time, out of her reverie.
    She asked me how I would like to pay. I whipped out my Visa card and placked it onto the counter with a sound like the snap of a gynaecologist’s glove coming off. The assistant rang everything up, then waited, tapping at the sides of her loose perm and staring into the middle distance in what was clearly an intermittent attack of mental aphasia. She glanced down at the till readout and winced.
    ‘Do you have alternative credit?’ she asked, returning it. ‘You might want to call your bank about this one, it’s probably just