I believe I slept rather well, though I couldn’t swear to it; I have no memory of it, which both inclines me toward that conclusion and precludes certainty.

The doubt was compounded, this morning, by the fact that the room had moved. Not all of it — the walls have so far resisted my wife’s ambitions — but the bed now addresses the window from the left rather than the right, so that the light arrived on the wrong cheek and the door stood where I expected the wardrobe. For the space of perhaps four seconds I lay in a room I did not recognise, in a posture I could not account for, having slept a sleep I could not confirm, and I will admit that I considered, with some seriousness, the possibility that I had died in the night and been issued inferior accommodation.

Then I heard her downstairs, talking to something, and was restored to my life.

This is the fourth such rearrangement since Lent. I have stopped asking after the reasons, partly because the reasons are never structural and always emotional — the bed was “tired” of the east wall — and partly because to ask is to invite a forty-minute defence that ends, invariably, with my agreeing. After twenty-six years a man learns that his wife does not move the furniture against him; she moves it the way the sea moves the shore, without malice and without consultation, and the only dignified response is to learn the new coastline each morning and be grateful the bed is still in the building.

She called up to ask whether I had fed Bartholomew. I do not know who Bartholomew is. I have never known. There is a roster of names in this house that expands faster than my capacity to attach them to bodies, and Bartholomew has joined it without my ever being introduced. He may be a cat. He may be the new and aggressive houseplant on the landing. He may, for all I can prove, be a man in town whose marriage is failing and over whom she lies awake. I called down that I had, which was a lie, and a safe one, because whatever Bartholomew is, my wife will already have fed him twice.