Need them this morning. Hungry. She added a few smiley emojis with heart eyes to make sweet nothing of her hangover.

He sent a lot of winking ones winging straight back. I am just hungry for your body.

Yawning, Bridge matched his winking faces, wrote Miss your tongue, baby and raised him some tongue-out winks before flipping screens to google rogaliki biscuits.

His reply chimed as she scrolled through the ingredients.

Want it now? He’d sent drooling emojis, plus a peach and an aubergine.

Wondering if they had enough ground almonds in the larder, she distractedly gave him ten kissing emojis and multicoloured love hearts. It’s licking me in my mind.

Aleš replied before she could navigate back to the recipe screen, his message bubble containing several thumbs-ups, okay hands, phallic-looking aeroplanes and a squinting face with its tongue out. I am coming, kochanie!

What did that mean? Bridge looked at it curiously. Had he just self-pleasured? Had they been having emoji phone sex without her realising? She scrolled back up to the doughnut and decided perhaps it had been.

Electing to be kind, she gave him a row of open-mouthed emojis and a Me too!

It was only after pressing send that she spotted that her autocorrect had given Me Too a hashtag and made it look like a protest.

*

In Lester’s cottage, tethered to the wall by the tangled phone flex, Ronnie was fielding a call from her furious son-in-law. ‘Tishy has taken a stun gun to our marriage, fully intending to cut its throat and bleed it out!’

Sounding like David Tennant playing the fifth act of a Shakespeare tragedy, and demanding to speak with his wife between long self-pitying monologues, he’d been banging on for ten minutes now, mostly self-aggrandised descriptions of what a good husband and father he was, with brief blasts of Othello rage. ‘I have done nothing to her and she’s destroyed us!’ Getting a sensible word in edgeways was like trying to parallel park a tank in a battlefield.

‘You know all about this, didn’t you?’ Mack was ranting.

‘No, I—’

But he was off again, cutting across her to shout that he knew Ronnie was covering for her. She could only imagine at Pax’s frustration if this was what she had to deal with behind closed doors. Although mother-and-daughter talks were strictly verboten to Ronnie, she’d guessed Pax’s marriage was in trouble, unable to find her way across the glacier-filled chasm that still divided them. ‘Mack, I’ve just this moment got back. I’m not even sure where Pax is.’

‘With her fucking lover, fucking each other probably!’

‘What?’

‘I heard him. Dad spoke with him! They’re together. Don’t deny it. They spent last night in a hotel.’

‘Gosh.’ Good for Pax.

Cue another unstoppable tirade, extolling how virtuous he’d been – ‘there’ve been plenty of offers, Veronica, many temptations of the flesh laid in my path’ – and how Pax had no such qualms given all the marriage vows she’d broken in the last twenty-four hours.