“Why did you marry him?”
“The question no woman ever wants to be asked. But since you do. I had been married once before, at what might be an early age, but what was probably typical of the early sixties. And what I took from that marriage was a list of conditions. A checklist of that with which I would not up-put. I would not marry a boozer. I would not marry a slob. I would not marry a man who could not cook. I would not marry a man who could not support me and my, theoretical, children. If he was good in bed, that was a bonus. If he was good at DIY – jackpot. Neither was essential.”
“And Roger?”
“And Roger met none of those conditions. So I married him anyway.”
“And . . . amor vincit omnia . . . and amor is plain fucking wrong. Roger was a crap husband. When I left him he became a friend. Not a great friend, not even a good friend, but . . . a friend. And now . . . I have lost him.”
What had I lost?
A friend?
Had it ever occurred to me to think of him as a friend?
A grotesque, upper-class, right-wing English Tory . . . a fat, rude, greedy drunkard . . . who despised everything I stood for . . . without despising me.
A friend I had abandoned and left to die alone . . . sprat, twat, dupe . . . betrayer.