Somehow he put her in the position of the grateful one, grateful that he should have accepted a £10,000 watch. Now he’s a little late and, like a schoolgirl on a date, she fears he may not be coming. She does some stretching; Morné is a great believer in stretching.

‘Howzit, Fleur. Sorry I’m late. The bus ran over an old doll and we all had to get off. I ran from Elephant and Castle. OK, today I think we should work a little on your butt. In a nice way.’

‘Yes please. In a very nice way.’

God, she sounds pathetic.

He puts on some music and shows her what he wants her to do.

‘This is the number one exercise for firming the glutes.’

‘Do I need it?’

‘Everyone needs it.’

His glutes are like iron.

‘You don’t.’

‘Ja, maybe, but I am in the gym all day. No problem. OK, let’s go. Take this barbell and squat, thighs parallel to the ground. That’s it. Now hold that, lift one leg in front of you, ja, just like that, back straight. Feel those glutes.’

She’s keen to please. In this world all muscles have a distinct personality and they are all diminutives: abs, pecs, glutes, but she’s moved some way beyond irony. She wishes she could talk to a friend about Morné.

‘You live in South London?’

‘Ja, in Brixton. It makes me feel at home. OK, now work it – one, two, three, four and five. Now the other leg.’

How little she knows about him and how she longs to know more. Also he shows no interest in her life outside the gym. It’s perfectly acceptable to be seen with her in the Starbucks in Kensington High Street, but that’s the limit of their joint range. She wants to take him away somewhere, but she sees that there is no hope of that. Rugby has given him an elemental, old-fashioned philosophy, a sort of sporting Ten Commandments. He’s planning to go back to South Africa and buy a place in the country and coach African children. Coaching sounds like secular missionary work: whitey still in charge. She doesn’t say this, because he is holding all the cards in this game. If it is a game. So many of her girlfriends have said that they entered affairs knowing from the start they were doomed. Avril left her husband for a drunken painter. She said she knew it was a train crash waiting to happen. In the family court the judge handed her husband custody of the children. He accepted that they wanted to stay with their father.