"Laura", a charming, elegantly dressed young woman, sat at a golf-club do just after Easter, "covered in make-up to cover up the bruises".
"I sat there, wondering how many other women in the room were doing the same thing - sitting there saying, 'Everything is lovely, everything is lovely' and all the time being in a living hell."
She was badly beaten by her partner of three years during the Easter holiday weekend. l"He kicked and dragged me around the living-room because he said I couldn't drive properly."
After the beatings, she says, "he is a different person". "It's as if he doesn't see what he's doing. And then there is the period of seduction, where he wines and dines you, is totally charming. But then the violence creeps up. It's like a crescendo when he finally lashes out with violence - it's like a release for him.
"He's two different people - like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His staff think he's lovely, could never imagine he'd be capable of such violence."
After the last beating he took her to St Vincent's Hospital, where, she says, A&E staff were "wonderful" and "knew immediately what had happened". She was admitted for three days. And then went back to her partner. Asked why she keeps going back, she says in the first instance because she has "no other home to go to".
"But also - and I find this difficult to articulate - I seem to be out of my body, as if I'm looking at my life from the outside, as if I have become desensitised to what is happening.
"I know there is an image of women who are beaten as being marginalised, easily identifiable, but I am sure there are hundreds, thousands, of women like me - maybe middle class and well educated - who are invisible, just too ashamed to admit what is happening to them."