‘Dancing’s different.’ I swallowed the rest of the flapjack. ‘Anyway, I was supportive. What did she think I was doing, slaving my guts out so she didn’t have to go out to work, so she could go to her bleeding classes.’ I swept the crumbs off my trousers. ‘And meet other people’s bleeding husbands?’

We were silent. I stared at the white lines of the road, endlessly swallowed up by my coach wheels. They tickered towards us, at speed.

Hilda said: ‘I know why you married a foreign wife.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you were too lazy to have an English one.’

I paused. ‘What?’

She passed me the thermos cap, filled with coffee. ‘You didn’t have to understand her so much. You could put it down to her Greek-ness.’ She paused. ‘You didn’t have to talk.’

‘We did talk!’

‘It’s like, in your job, being a coach-driver, you don’t have to talk.’

We drove on for a moment in silence. A single car, its lights glaring, passed in the opposite direction. I said: ‘All right. I talked, and she talked. But we didn’t always meet in the middle.’

‘Sounds as if you didn’t like each other much.’

I didn’t reply. I drained the coffee, and passed the cup back to her. ‘We weren’t friends,’ I said. ‘Not really.’ I lit a cigarette. With a click, Oklahoma finished. ‘I’ve never been friends with a woman. We’ve never been able to chat in the bathroom and do the crossword together.’ I gazed at the motorway, suffused under the arc lights. ‘You’re the first woman I’ve met,’ I said, ‘who’s my friend.’

There was a silence. Then she said: ‘Thanks a lot!’

‘She wasn’t happy,’ I said. ‘I didn’t notice. You don’t notice when you’re married, there’s always so many things to do.’ I paused. ‘When I went back to my house, last Sunday, it felt different. I told myself it was just tidy, and his things were there, but it was more than that.’ I took a breath. ‘It felt like a happy home.’

We had finished the flapjacks but we were still on the M25. It seemed to go on forever. This felt like the longest journey I had ever taken. Perhaps it was these dead hours of the night; however fast I drove, time moved so slowly.

‘My parents weren’t happy,’ I said, ‘if you want to know the truth. They never had rows, they never raised their voices. But I knew.’

‘Sound like mine.’

‘I had to make them happy, in my head. I had to think I was like other children.’

‘You were like other children,’ she said.

‘Not all!’ I cried. ‘Not all!’

‘All right. Not all. Coffee?’ She refilled the cap and passed it to me.