‘Just because a woman can hide the primal engorgement of her libidinous organ doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to discover the supple hydraulics of a love god’s manhood on a regular basis,’ she confided to her dog. ‘As a young woman I longed to meet the right man. But now, aged fifty-five, I’m wondering if I’ve had enough of the wrong ones.’ Emerald realised, with a slight shock, that she felt no qualms about making love to a perfect stranger except that she didn’t want him to be perfect – she wanted him to be really naughty and dirty and bad.

Yet the one man she really wanted did not want her. And she wasn’t unattractive, was she? The fuller Kardashian figure was in vogue – a peachy derriere was now de rigueur. Why, just last week a bloke on a building site had given her a long, slow wolf-whistle when she’d dashed across the road to pick up a tray of mangoes. And what a tingle of illicit delight it had given her. She reckoned it should be illegal to wolf-whistle at any woman under fifty, but mandatory for women over it. Alessandro’s rejection was so humiliating. She was too young to be tossed onto the sexual scrap heap.

Emerald had tried to talk to him about it but Sandro just shut down the conversation. She’d suggested some vitamin V, but he saw Viagra as an affront to his masculinity. She had slyly purchased a packet and left it lying by his side of the bed anyway. She bought him oysters by the bucketload. But still nothing. They were living like brother and sister.

Emerald stroked her kelpie as it nestled contentedly in her lap. ‘Ah, it’s so easy for you, girl, isn’t it?’ Animals are so much better at mating than humans, she mused. Her mind flitted to the female emperor moth, which simply discharges a perfume from her abdominal glands to be picked up by the long feathery male antennae, bringing him frantically fluttering to her side. Female red-backed salamanders choose male newts by inspecting their droppings. If she liked the bloke’s diet, she moved on in and copulated between courses.

Lacking a perfumed abdominal gland and a dung-detector, maybe she needed to migrate somewhere, forcing Alex to miss her? Creeping obsolescence flickered in her peripheral vision. From adolescence to obsolescence – it had all whizzed by in a heartbeat.

She dialled my number from the landline.

‘Does this cruise go to Bangko?’

‘Bangko?’

‘I don’t say “cock” – it’s not the way I was brought up,’ Emerald joshed.

‘No, we aren’t cruising to Bangkok,’ I said, laughing. ‘But Vanuatu, New Caledonia and lots of exotic Pacific islands.’

‘I’m eating double-choc mini rolls by the tub. We can only go to places where they don’t discriminate against fat people.’

‘Relax. Caftans are in this summer.’