We’d just had sex, on that particular morning. I didn’t want to, I hadn’t for a long time, but somehow I knew it was in the rules. Always in the mornings, and usually once a week, on a Saturday. To set him up for the weekend. And to celebrate a week pretending to work, but actually lunching and drinking with his cronies in a pub in Soho, all of whom, except one old soak who propped up the bar in fingerless gloves, were male. Michael preferred male company. He wasn’t really interested in women. He didn’t understand them. But even Michael couldn’t in all conscience slope off to the pub on a Saturday, so sex in the morning put him in a good mood for the weekend. Thereafter he played the diligent father and husband, welcoming the children when they came home, which wasn’t so much these days, carving the roast, and hinting jovially at potential grandchildren. Neither of my children was married, so it wasn’t that jovial. Our children, I should say. Except they felt more like mine because they were my proudest possession, and Michael’s was his ego.

Michael was a theatre critic, and I nearly prefaced that with ‘respected’, which he had been in the old days, but now I think he was just feared. His column in the Sunday Times had been shifted to Mondays, then cancelled, and now he only featured occasionally in my mother’s Daily Mail. Latterly, he’d written regularly for a glossy magazine, but after he’d single-handedly closed one too many shows, he’d been asked to leave. The gentle young editor, blinking with embarrassment, had asked him to come in, which was brave. In his office, he’d asked him to step down, because, on the whole, he said, they only reviewed plays they liked, as who wanted to wade through a poisonous review to be told they shouldn’t see it? They were a smart, country magazine but eager to promote all things cultural. To get the county folk up to town, or to support their local provincial theatre. Michael’s famous temper, spoken of in hushed tones in newspaper circles, had surfaced. He’d turned the editor’s desk over, leaving the poor man lunging for his glasses on the floor as he stormed out to meet his boorish colleagues in Soho.