She looked at the small Jiffy bag in her hand, turned it over a couple of times. Squinting. She’d need glasses soon.

‘French stamps. Can’t read the postmark … Barg-something. No value. It says so on the Customs thing. “Sans Value”. It rattles.’

She threw the gas bill and the packet on to the table and went up to wake Annie.

Oh, I had loved her. Fourteen years ago she was vital, attractive to an alarming degree, and knew it with that quiet complacency sexually attractive women have: aware, smiling easily, contained, knowing what she could offer. She was hard to get, which made the chase the more exciting: men were after her like chickens with scattered corn, fighting, scrambling, pushing. She chose me, to my astonishment. I’d not really expected it. Perhaps because I didn’t join the others, just stayed quietly away, I intrigued her by my apparent distance – but I wanted her.

And she scented this in an animal way. I thought.

‘You’re a writer or something?’ she had said one evening at some awful party we both found ourselves attending. The Marshalls’ place, I remember, celebrating his new book published that week. Poor champagne and lump-fish roe caviar and a fowl in glazed something-or-other.

‘I write.’

‘Novels? Or terribly erudite biographies of dead people?’

‘Bit of both. Depends. Mostly novels.’

‘Ought I to know you?’

‘Only if you read.’

‘I don’t. Much. Haven’t the time really. I’m with Wright and Steinberger, commercial television. I arrange the “shoots”, you know? Locations everywhere, budgeting. I’m out of my mind with travel and figures. One week the Canaries for a Ford commercial, another week Welwyn Garden City for Fairy Liquid – it’s all go with me.’

‘It sounds hectic. But fun.’

‘It’s hell. Really. Can you get me a refill of this muck?’

A hired waiter handed us a tray with spilling glasses – not ‘flutes’ – those god-awful wedding champagne glasses, like inverted umbrellas.

‘I’d give it up in a flash, really. I’m getting on, you know; time I had children, a nice little house, get on with a settled life … all this careering about is for the birds.’

‘Plenty of willing gentlemen about, I’d guess.’

‘Guess right. But they are all arse-holes this lot. Commercial TV is the pits. I find it demeaning. Know what I mean? I’m worth more than that.’

She didn’t specify.

‘The money must be good. Surely?’