Either you go and clean my mother's apartment right now, my husband said, or tomorrow I file for divorce — six months out of work, living on my salary, saying it with a beer in his hand. I didn't argue. I took the keys and walked out. What was behind his mother's door turned that threat around on him inside forty minutes.

Raisa asked me once whether I felt any way about that. About having been handed the keys.

I said the only thing I have ever felt about it, which is that he gave them to me in front of twenty people in order to break me, and that I have never once had to defend how I got in.

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PART 5 — THE COUCH

It finished in the December.

The apartment on Fenwick Row was mine from before and stayed mine and was never seriously in play once the earnings picture came out.

There was no maintenance. He had asked for twelve months minimum and he got nothing, and Raisa says that outcome had less to do with the money than with the resignation letter, because a court can forgive a man for being unemployed and cannot forgive a man for arranging it.

There was an equalisation payment that went the other way — to me — reflecting a proportion of eight months of undisclosed trading. It is not a large number and I have not spent it.