‘Oh Christ! Caldicott! I should have known. I have read your books. A book. Paperback. About Incas or something?’

‘About Argentina actually.’

‘Same thing. Oh! Will you ever forgive me? How dreadful! How rude!’ She threw warm naked arms around me, and we slid back into euphoria.

Six months later she chucked the job, married me, and we bought the house in Parsons Green and didn’t live happily ever after.

I mean, that, in a nutshell so to speak, is that. Over ten years we had. Well past the seven-year-itch time, as they say. Slowly the bed-part began to fade … the kids had arrived. Well, Annicka was first, a love child, and Giles a patch-up job. We tried for the poor little sod and made him a sort of bicycle-patch on a slow puncture.

But the tyre went flat anyway.

She missed her crowd, missed the travelling in the end. She’d have traded Parsons Green any day for a trip to anywhere, Corfu, Easter Island, the Falklands even, and she missed the male conversation, still using, as she always had, the coarseness of a unit’s language sitting in a bar.

Couldn’t blame her really. I’d given her what she thought that she wanted, the house, security, children, before she grew too old. But it really wasn’t what she was after, and she gradually found it out. Breast-feeding, disposable nappies, cooking (very badly), yearning for the telephone to ring. For her. One of her predatory gentlemen in television. They seldom did.

And my work suffered too. She hated my being locked away up in the attic I’d converted into an office. Wasn’t interested in anything I tried to discuss with her, plot development, characters, research, that sort of stuff. And we foundered, that’s all. I hate clutter, and she was a clutterer, careless, letting her hair go, grey streaks, slogging away at the vodka from time to time.

‘What else do I do? I’m not constructive like some people.’ This said with sour heaviness. ‘All I am is a bloody nanny-cum-cook-cum-bottle-washer. ‘

‘Not very original.’

‘And don’t tell me, again, that I talk in clichés, I bloody know I do. I’m a living, walking cliché or whatever it is. Screw you.’

‘Well, chuck it. Clear off. Take the kids and go back to mother. Cliché number 1.’

‘I bloody well might just do that. Poor Mother. But there’s plenty of room since Dad died, a garden for the kids. I could get back to work somehow. I know things have changed, all those Bright Young Bitches in Harper’s and the Tatler have taken my place. Still, I’d hire a proper nanny. I could –’

‘Well, do. There is no point in going on like this.’