And therein lay the rub for many wives, I thought, as I cruised along in the middle lane where I didn’t have to think. Money. Not that it bothered me much. Not at all, actually. But I’m ashamed to say I used it as my foil. If I divorced Michael, as Helena, and even Ned and Imo, who knew the pitfalls more intimately, said I should (Imogen reasoning down the phone from New York about it being time now, and Ned from his tiny modern rectory above the chip shop in Ealing, persuading me they no longer needed protecting), I told them it worried me. Or I pretended it worried me. The financial implications. Instead of the all-consuming fear I couldn’t voice. Where would I live, I asked them? Where would Dad live? And then I’d rattle on about the house being re-mortgaged to the rafters and the debts eye-watering, and the position, frankly, impossible. They’d go quiet. A mixture, perhaps, of knowing what I couldn’t say, and not wanting to hurt me by voicing it. So much subterfuge. So much deceit. Was it necessary? Of course it was. If it protected people’s hearts. People’s lives. Pitfalls? Ruddy great man traps.

As if in defiance, in a sudden show of uncharacteristic boldness, I pulled out into the fast lane. I overtook a lorry, but ducked back in fright as a Mercedes roared up behind me. I sank back to a more restful seventy in the middle lane. And it wasn’t as if life was awful all the time, I reasoned. It wasn’t as if I hated him every minute of the day. Although recently, as I’d lain in bed and looked at him, admiring his profile in the mirror in the en suite bathroom – still square-jawed and handsome, steely-grey hair swept back from a high forehead, eyes clear and blue – something much worse than hatred had consumed me. Something closer to homicidal rage had made me turn over, so that I couldn’t see him.