Later she put on Marigold gloves, slid two or three of the objects into a plastic bag and carried them back to the house. There, she emptied them into a glass dish. Slumped on the worktop they looked like any offal, unused to supporting themselves in the world. Their colours resembled the flasks of liquid you could still see in the windows of pharmacies when Anna was young – blues, greens and a rich permanganate – now faded and a touch acidic under the halogen lights. Anna removed her best Wusthof knife from the block and then, nerve failing her, put it back again. She stared at the contents of the dish from different angles, then went to telephone Marnie.

‘Why are you calling?’ Marnie said, after five minutes.

‘I suppose I just wanted to tell you how lucky I’d been. In all sorts of things.’

At a glance, Anna knew, this seemed absurd. She had been anorexic throughout her twenties; twice a failed suicide. Her first husband, Michael, who wasn’t much better, had walked into the sea one night off Mann Hill Beach south of Boston. They never found his body. He had been a brilliant man but unbalanced. ‘He was a brilliant man,’ she would tell people, ‘who took things too much to heart.’ But since then she had remarried, borne Marnie, lived a life. She had made quite a nice life with Marnie’s father, first in London and then in this quiet, expensive house near the river. It wouldn’t have suited Michael. Living had to be an effort for him; a kind of punishment.

‘Neither of us knew how to live,’ she said now.

‘Anna—’

‘He had some difficulties.’

Marnie received this in silence.

‘You know,’ Anna said. ‘Sex difficulties. Your father was much better at that side of things.’

‘Anna, that’s more information than I need.’

Marnie had been conceived out of both guilt and relief at losing Michael – literally, misplacing him – that night on Mann Hill Beach. Confused, Anna had flown home to London and fucked the first kind person she found. That was the only way to put it, especially from this distance. She had no regrets, although at times the memory made her feel she ought to be especially nice to Marnie. Now she had a sudden surprised recollection of Michael leaning over her in the dark, and one of them saying something like, ‘Sparks! Sparks in everything!’

‘Anna? Anna, I have to go now. It’s late. It’s midnight.’

‘Is it, dear?’

‘You’ve got Dr Alpert tomorrow,’ Marnie reminded her.

‘I’m afraid I’ve lost the details of that appointment,’ said Anna in a vague but mutinous way.

‘Good job I kept a note of them, then.’

Anna, suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety and love, said, ‘Oh, Marnie, I do hope you enjoy sex. I’d hate to think of you missing out on something so lovely.’