They had known each other for nearly two months. Two, three, sometimes four times a week, Sylvie would drive across the city to meet him, and on the days in between there were long and often racy phone calls — so racy that a couple of weeks ago she had asked Mark whether they were having phone sex. She was shocked at how easy it was to ask such a question, but then ever since they had met, she had often shocked herself. Respectable, reliable Sylvie Morrow, who had previously known only one man, now had a lover. And she’d not been the innocent led astray by the more experienced Mark. At their very first date, when they met for lunch at University House, she knew exactly where she wanted to end up with him.

Never before had she experienced an irresistible and overwhelming sexual feeling, yet she had recognised it immediately. On that first date, every part of her was aroused: her face, her legs, even the skin of her hands. And when he reached across the table and with his forefinger stroked the soft, inner side of her wrist, her whole body fired up. Sitting on a hard chair in a crowded café, fully clothed with both hands on the table, Sylvie experienced a physical response she would not have thought possible. She ate in a rush — she didn’t want dessert, she didn’t want coffee. He had a class in an hour. Your office, she said, show me your office. He’d hardly shut the door when she lunged at him, mouth, tongue, hands, she pulled him on to her, she pulled him into her, she didn’t give a damn.

Demure, well-behaved Sylvie Morrow had vanished entirely.

Had she been fooling herself all these years? That while she cooked and cleaned and did the laundry, a sex-crazed woman had been huddling beneath the skin, just waiting for an opportunity to leap out. Had she repressed this aspect of herself? And how can a repressed person even know what they are repressing? She supposed she should read Freud, but as one of the correspondents in her letter collection had written, she had already entered ‘the dessert phase of life’ and she didn’t have time for Dr Freud.