So, what on earth was I doing there? In a tired farmhouse in the Luberon in Provence. In a small mountainside town, with terracotta-, orange-, yellow-, and peach-coloured houses. With my husband, the one constant thing in my life, back in the UK. Well, he’d been there in body, except when he’d been in someone else’s life and bed for that one-off when the stress of our situation had got too much. Sex to us had become about making a baby, not making love. I can’t remember the last time I made love. And all the time, as I thought back over my married life throughout that night, trying to work out where it had all gone wrong, the loose shutters banged, banged, banged against the windowpanes. Eventually, when I could stand it no more, I stood up and went to tie the shutter to the wrought-iron railings we’d had made to stop any visitors falling out of the window. But no one had visited in the six weeks we’d tried to make a go of things here. Once the move had happened, our ‘fresh new start’, once we’d eaten the bread and cheese, drunk the wine, taken down the ‘happiness in your new home’ cards, once the front door was shut, it was just Ollie and me, alone, our future spread out in front of us, like a long, long night with nothing on the telly. And nothing much to talk about, apart from shopping lists, people planning to visit, Ollie’s frustration with the internet and his daily battles with the phone in the car. He’d come back to the farmhouse after a trip into the town furious that he had got no further in improving our broadband and Wi-Fi connection and that no one spoke English.

‘Bloody country!’ he’d rant. ‘And they all stop for lunch! Who stops for lunch these days? How does anyone make a bloody living here? And, honestly, it beggars belief how many of them don’t speak English.’ The last six painful weeks played over and over in my mind for what seemed like most of the night.

I felt safer in the bathroom than anywhere else in the empty house, in what felt like the tatters of my marriage, with Ralph by my side. Suddenly my dog was there for me when I really needed someone and no one else was.

I thought about Ollie and our life together over the last few weeks. Mealtimes had become fraught as the work Ollie had tried to pick up, then deliver, became more and more difficult to achieve, and our savings from the sale of the house started to dwindle.