She met Nick, her ex, at a family wedding. He had her in hysterics over dinner and then swung her around the dance floor later. She could see her parents at a table watching, judging, leaning towards their friends asking, ‘Who is that?’ When Nick tried to kiss her she moved her face away, aware that they were still being watched, but then she took him by the hand and led him out of the marquee. She shagged him in an adjoining field and got grass stains on her dress and sheep shit on her knees. When they returned to the marquee, her mother beckoned her to the table. Jenna braced herself for a lecture – ‘you didn’t just let the family down, you let yourself down too’ – but the lecture didn’t come. Instead she’d whispered hotly in Jenna’s ear, ‘His father’s a surgeon, hang onto him.’ Any lust Jenna may have felt for Nick was immediately extinguished. Her mother’s approval was an anathema to desire. But Nick knew none of this. He bombarded Jenna with texts until she finally agreed to a date. Three months later and they were madly in love.

Geraldine began a new campaign then. Instead of hassling Jenna about buying a flat she started talking about marriage. A year of dating, she felt, was a suitable amount of time for an engagement to take place but, given Jenna was already in her mid-thirties, the sooner they got married the better. ‘You don’t want to be a geriatric mother,’ Geraldine repeated almost every time they spoke on the phone. Jenna did her best to block her mother out and concentrate on her relationship with Nick but Geraldine’s comments were always there, buzzing in the back of her brain: ‘You’re running out of time’, ‘You won’t meet anyone as good as him again’, ‘Snap him up while you can’. Her self-confidence faltered. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe Nick was her last chance at happiness. She hadn’t had much luck with men in the past and he did make her laugh more than anyone she’d ever met, plus the sex was amazing. She found herself making excuses for behaviours that normally would have had her questioning a relationship – Nick rolling his eyes when she shared her doubts about her career, his refusal to talk about past relationships, the guilt trips he’d spin if he didn’t get his own way and his inability to apologise – and decided that what they needed, after eighteen months of seeing each other every weekend, was a holiday. They were both tired, she reasoned, and they needed to get away. A week touring the Greek islands would repair his short temper and her neediness.