As I drove back across London in the dusk I was thinking that was why I wasn’t in the house in Twickenham. I still loved Tony and I knew his face and the shape of his hands and the weight of his body as well as I know my own. We met when I was still at art college. I went to a party, wandered into the kitchen in search of something to drink and there was Tony. He was standing at the sink washing glasses, smoking a cigarette between clenched teeth and talking volubly out of the other side of his mouth to a girl with spiky eyelashes painted on her lower lids.

‘Here’s a glass,’ he told me, squinting through the smoke and handing one over, ‘and there’s the Vino Collapso. Pour me one as well, will you?’

It wasn’t love at first sight. We moved in the same circle and kept bumping into each other. In the end he asked me out and on our first date he came to pick me up, at exactly the appointed time, in his Triumph Herald. He was already working in advertising. He drove me home again afterwards, too. He was never late, never cancelled, never kept me guessing. And very quickly, amazingly, he did fall in love with me. I was wary to begin with and then I eagerly gave way. Tony offered me delicious safety and the reassurance of unconditional love after Ted’s shiftiness, and I grabbed hold of him.

It was only much later that I discovered safety wasn’t what I wanted after all.

Stanley, on the other hand, was a showcase of theatrical attitudes and unpredictability. On Valentine’s Day he carved our entwined initials into every stripped pine floorboard and door panel in our living room, and a month later he completely forgot my birthday. He could be dazzlingly generous, as when he saw me longingly stroke a cashmere sweater that I couldn’t afford and came home the next evening with the same sweater in six different shades, and as mean as the time he made me pay exactly half the cost of the petrol we used to drive up to Sunderland to visit his mother.

Ted adored him. Of course he did, because they were so alike.

‘He’s a bit of a shyster, you know, your boyfriend. But he’s bloody good fun.’

He was very disappointed when Stanley left me but there had also been more than a whiff of male solidarity.

‘Damned shame. But then, you are a bit older than him and you have got two kids. I suppose that’s not what a chap like Stanley really wants, in the long run, is it?’