Beauty in a wife is so essential that if it does not exist, it must be invented. I became quite a bit better looking asa direct result of being Frank’s wife. I was his prize, and my body remodelled itself to fit the pedestal. My accent improved. My hair thickened. Can you imagine? To be prized when you have never even really been noticed before? Who’d have thought that clunky old heteronormative marriage could have such transforming power? There is no woman its inferno cannot fire from plain Jane clay into porcelain Venus. And no woman it cannot contain, no matter how ship-launchingly lovely she may be, for marriage is a gallery of possessions; a display case, with the wife at the centre. Other men will look, and covet, and plot, but they will factor into their considerations that the wife belongs to another man.Of course I could not be Frank’s prize without being his possession, but I loved that too. Beauty in the wife reinforces the marriage.

But beauty in the husband is a catastrophe. It’s a bomb rolling unexploded in the hull. The beautiful husband draws assaults on the marriage, and the assaults will not relent until either the marriage is extinguished or the beauty fades. Women, as Frank and I found, recognise no possessions of another woman, respect no marriage. The beautiful husband remains free and at large.

Frank’s catastrophic beauty came upon us so gradually, like a kind of weathering, or even a despoiling of the Frank I once knew, that I did not spot the moment of definitive change.But then, one day, he accompanied me to nursery to pickup our son Nicholas, and one of the other mothers stared at the baby, then at Frank, then sidled up to me to whisper,‘That’s your husband?’ and I realised something momentous had taken place. I was confused because my husband was still in my mind shy dreamer Frank of the Innisfree. That night I observed him critically as he undressed to come to bed.

He had definitely filled out; he had hardened round the eyes and jaw; confidence inhabited his movements. IfI squinted, he was still benign, still sweet to someone who had known the young man, but to someone who had not...I could see it now, the accumulation of masculinity, like a patina upon him. Instead of devotion, equality, fun – he radiated sex.

In that moment, as he casually threw his trousers over the chair, my husband Frank transcended us both, for now he held a monopoly over all the resources of the marriage. He occupied more space and seemed to have more weight than both of us put together. The beautiful husband recasts the physics of the marriage. He alters gravity.

Perhaps a different woman would be delighted to see her partner of many years in a new and ravishing light. ButFrank’s beauty did not ignite desire in me. It struck me dumb with fear.

Love does not alter when it alteration finds...

The words turned in my head.

But what does it do when faced with a premonition?

The day Frank’s beauty announced itself was an anniversary more profound than the one we marked with cards and varying levels of ardour every year on 29th April. It was as if a countdown to a devastating event had begun, from which no amount of cultivated cynicism about marriage, trust inFrank, nor love for my child could save me. Sometimes I lay awake at night beside my beautiful husband and wondered if the devastating event had actually already happened, I had missed it, and I was wandering deluded in its aftermath.

For the truth of it was that I loved my husband, with all my heart. My love for Frank embarrassed me with its cheerfulness and its hope. When we married, back then on the deck of the Innisfree, I cried with happiness, and not because I was young and stupid.

I believed our marriage to be the most beautiful thing either of us had made, outshining even the child it contained.Even as it would come to splinter inside us and smash around us, still I could not fully imagine myself without it. And this was surely why I could not breathe a word toFrank about what I had glimpsed in our future. The survival of our relationship felt basic to my own survival, as vital a mechanism as thirst. My faith in what we had created made any journey comprehensible, every fire possible to withstand; without it there was only wreckage strewn all the way to the lonely horizon, and the slow collapse to the deep sea bed.