It is Christmas Eve. Bruce and Renee speak to us from the appropriate corners of their home and we discover that, after 23 years of marriage, they know absolutely nothing about each other.

A duologue ensues from Bruce Naylor as he sits in his plush lounge, smugly reflecting on the success of his marriage, and from Renee, his wife, who tells the same story but through very different eyes as she awaits the Christmas turkey.

Long-married Renee was doing the bread sauce for the next day's Christmas dinner. Her husband Bruce was in the living room thinking about his secretary and congratulating himself on Renee's loyal domesticity, the loyalty he put down to her Northern upbringing and his own indefinable air of mystery.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Renee was recalling the torrid affair she had enjoyed for so long without arousing the mysterious Bruce's suspicions. In short, a well-balanced marriage: equal measures of deception and self-deception. The two never actually speak to each other. Perhaps because they were in different rooms. More likely it was because they were in different worlds.