Tycoonery. Roger Smith

she bore me two sons, who then, I regret to say, and if you will forgive the pun, bored me. They were noisy and artful and refined blackmail into an art form. Needless to say, Madeline used them as weapons against me. I remember once when Toby was four: he had taken to blowing down a piece of bent gas pipe, producing a sound not dissimilar to a bugle. In one of my sporadic efforts to simulate the interest of a father, I said, ‘Do you want to play the trumpet when you grow up?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said without a trace of even juvenile irony, ‘I want to do everything.’ Frankly, I found his Oedipus complex tiresome. For all I cared, he could have his mother, lock, stock and barrel.

      It was little erosions like this that prompted me finally into some form of action. Academia I couldn’t stand, its enclosed and vicious pretentiousness, the anxiety states that shook me nightly and that Madeline in her wisdom would cite as only further proof of my lack of devotion to her.

      And then one morning I woke up early with the kind of throbbing erection that I hadn’t experienced for years, and it was with some sense of horror that I realised that I would like to direct it between the thighs of almost any woman in the world other than the one beside me. I packed my bags and left, gave up my lectureship, took a room and lived on the dole, which I have been doing for the last five years.