Yet look at Em now: getting her nails done and buying skimpy knickers in her lunch-break, blushing like a teenager at the drop of a hat. Her body, which had resembled an abandoned field in recent years, with numerous unpleasant weeds sprouting here and there, was now waxed and plucked, smooth and scrubbed. Alive and kicking. She walked down the street and felt her bottom swing with a new jauntiness. She looked in the mirror and arched an eyebrow at her own sassy reflection instead of ducking her head away to avoid eye contact. Poor Em had been banished, replaced by Delighted Em, this fabulous new edition who couldn’t believe her luck.

‘Have you lost weight?’

‘Have you had your hair done?’

‘You look different!’ her colleagues commented in surprise.

Her friends were rather more blunt. ‘Are you having loads of sex?’ they asked, some with more horror than envy, admittedly. Perhaps even a certain measure of mistrust. ‘I mean, how do you have the energy?’ a few of them wondered aloud. ‘Or the inclination? Don’t you feel too old to be doing that sort of thing?’

As for her sister Jenny, she had cut straight to the chase, as she invariably did. ‘It’s all sounding a bit too good to be true,’ she had remarked. ‘What’s the catch?’

Em deflected these questions with her radiant shield of happiness, but in truth, there was a tiny catch. Wasn’t that simply a part of being a human, though? Surely no person on earth reached their forties without some kind of baggage trailing along behind them, unless there was something a bit odd going on. Right?

In George’s case, the baggage was fairly minimal at least; practically hand-luggage levels, really, consisting of one ex-wife, Charlotte, and one small daughter, Seren. Em hadn’t yet met Charlotte, but had done enough furtive Internet searches to have discovered that she was both glamorous and beautiful in a way that freckle-faced, soft-bodied Em was never going to be. Charlotte was also an intimidatingly successful high-flier in the field of genetic engineering and often jetted around the world to present scientific findings to other brainy types.

So far so disconcerting, admittedly, although Em was trying not to let any of this get to her. According to George, he and Charlotte had split up because they had grown apart, but further prying had revealed that Charlotte was now living with another man, one of George’s mates, just to put the boot in. From what Em could gather, they had got together very quickly after the split – suspiciously quickly, you could say – and were now engaged, so at least that was her off the scene. Technically, anyway. The sticking point was that, due to the fact that Charlotte and George had a child together, their lives would be linked pretty much forever, like it or not.