As the music changes track, in the silence between beats, she thinks she hears something – a breath, or a moan, something like pain perhaps. She can’t put a name to it, but her mouth dries and her skin prickles, the fine hairs on her forearms rising.

She wants to flee, but what if it’s him, dying? An olive caught in the throat. An allergy he hasn’t told her about (not that, she’d know). And in the end, she has to check. Of course she does.

She pads quietly around the wood-burning fireplace that part divides the room. Another noise – this time male and urgent. And, horrified, Becky realizes that she is in proximity to sex.

There is movement. On the floor, on the rug that softens the sofa grouping, their bodies mostly hidden by the furniture. Becky cranes her neck a little. She sees a woman’s head, and Matthew on top of her, and the woman is not his wife, cannot be unless Antonia has gone blonde. She notices a tall-heeled foot, black shoe with a red sole, sliding off the rug, onto the flagstone, like a calf’s leg slipping outward as it takes a first step.

The woman says something to the man. Her arm goes up – pushing him or reaching for him? He catches her by the wrist and moves that arm back onto the rug – and his breathing, his grunting, deepens. The woman’s face contorts. Perhaps close to orgasm. Perhaps uncomfortable.

The woman turns her head and looks straight at Becky. And opens her mouth, as if about to speak – or call out – or warn him – or—

Chapter 2

That night in bed, restless under her covers, Becky goes from hot to cold, aggravated by the duvet’s shortness, its longness and finally its mere existence. Window up, window down, she cannot seem to find a simple point of balance between sweating and shivering. She lies on her front, her back, curled up, stretched out, grasping and un-grasping her wrist.

Matthew Kingsman. Oxford man. Family man. Film man. There is a waterlogged feeling in her. Perhaps it is disappointment, though that would be irrational. Matthew is a free agent in a free country. He can do as he pleases, and it is no business of hers.

She tells herself she has been naïve: that people do this all the time. Flings, dalliances, affairs, trust-bending, trust-breaking. There are of course open marriages whose openness isn’t advertised to one and all. People have sex with people they shouldn’t, all the time, particularly in her industry where everyone is looking at themselves, and if not at themselves then at each other, in the mirror or through a camera or on screen. Bodies attractive enough to sell tickets win easy lays, quick fucks, promotions. She gets it. It shouldn’t be news to her. She needs to loosen the fuck up.