She can see the thoughts turning over in his mind. In a rush, she says: ‘I’m just calling down to Leah and Jake. Do you know them?’

‘Not really. I’ve seen them but –’

‘I was going to ask if they’d like to join us today.’

‘Ah, I see.’

He stands there nodding and smiling, while she slips past the gate and down the steps, half turning to wave goodbye.

Down in the hollow by the door to the flat, she feels a tremble of nerves going through her legs. For a moment, she just stands there, waiting until Martin has gone and her composure has returned. It’s cooler down here and she welcomes the opportunity to calm herself, to think this through.

The window to the bedroom is situated at the front of the flat, and Hilary goes to it now, presses her face to the glass. She sees the unmade bed, the wardrobe, the door standing ajar. There is an air of desertion to the place – a profound emptiness.

Emotions stir inside her when she thinks of how she once lived here, once slept in the room she now peers into from the other side of the glass. And then she remembers the last time they lay together – her and Anton – in that bed. How he’d held her against his chest, running his hand over her bare shoulder and freckled upper arm.

‘This is all that matters,’ he’d told her. ‘The time we’re together. Everything else is just a blur.’

She’d been crying. It was their last day before the move to the new house. Her last day in Number 14. What would happen once she left? How would they see each other? She couldn’t bear the thought of not being near him. Couldn’t countenance what they had shared coming to an abrupt end.

Light had filtered through the heavy curtains into the bedroom, and in the dimness of the room, she could see the outline of the little wardrobe lying open, displaying its emptiness. Everything had been packed up and taken to the new house. Even the bed had been stripped. They were lying on the bare mattress in a tangle of limbs, his thigh pressed between her legs. Her dress lay on the floor alongside his shirt and trousers. She’d told Greg she was going to Nolan’s to look for fabric samples, and instead she’d come creeping around the back lane and snuck up through the garden to where Anton waited in the basement. Hilary had no idea where Charlotte was, nor did she care. Probably upstairs, drinking herself into a stupor, and Hilary could not find it in herself to feel remorse or guilt, let alone pity for the woman.

‘I just want us to be together,’ she told him. ‘If only there was some way, without all this sneaking about.’