Greg never normally confided his problems in Ray. Primarily because he never normally had any problems. Nothing outside of the work environment, anyway. He’d had twenty years of relatively trouble-free marriage with neither his wife nor his kids giving him any grief. Now it seemed that times were changing and it weighed heavy on his heart. Who else could he talk to this about? He wasn’t a talking man, but he couldn’t keep all this to himself, hold it all in his head which felt as if it was fit to burst.

‘When we went to Norfolk,’ Greg ventured slowly, ‘Annie took all her clothes off and ran into the sea.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Ray spluttered some of his cheese sandwich into the canal and a brave duck scuttled up to make the most it. ‘She did what?’

‘She took all her clothes off and ran into the sea.’

‘What did she do that for?’

‘She said she wanted to do something different.’

Ray spluttered again. ‘That’s different, all right! The woman’s lost the plot.’

‘That’s what I said. And now we’re not speaking.’

Annie – good, reliable, uncomplaining Annie – was frightening him with her strange behaviour, and Greg didn’t know what to do. She seemed so unsettled, so discontented, and he didn’t know what had brought it on. Nothing in their lives had changed. There’d been no upheaval or upset to unbalance the status quo. Their life pottered along as it always had. So what had brought it on?

‘Do you think that I should talk to her about it?’

‘No,’ Ray said, aghast. ‘No, no, no. You don’t want to be doing that. You’ll open the floodgates. Next thing, you’ll be down at Relate and unpicking all your dark secrets in front of some posh counsellor in pearls.’

Greg didn’t have any dark secrets, but he didn’t want to be doing anything in front of a posh counsellor in pearls.

‘Has she started reading Woman and Home recently?’

‘No.’

‘That is the publication of the devil, matey. If you check round your house you’ll probably find one secreted somewhere.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Greg wracked his brains but he didn’t recall seeing Annie reading Woman & Home. Or any other magazine.

‘Trust me.’ Ray was adamant. ‘It’s the Cosmopolitan for the over-thirties. Puts ideas into their pretty little heads.’

‘What if it’s not Woman and Home?’ Greg wanted to know. ‘What if it’s something else?’

‘Just ignore it,’ Ray advised. ‘It’ll be her hormones, like I said before. Pound to a penny she’s having an early change.’ He mouthed the word change. ‘They all go funny then. Trust me – I’m speaking as one who knows. Marla’s hormones are all over the place. She’s a different person every hour.’

That certainly sounded like Annie.