‘Don’t you remember Mart?’ Martin was an ex-squaddie Rosaria had dated for a while the previous year. They had met on Tinder and had amazing sex, she reported – something about damaging a kitchen counter top – but also ended up throwing crockery at each other’s heads. When they split up, she wept catastrophically for one whole evening round at my place and was over it the next day. That was Rosie.

‘You told me he was great and you didn’t regret a minute.’

‘Well yeah, I know, seriously, I mean, you can have vanilla or not vanilla. I’d always go not vanilla myself, until you want something serious of course, then it’s definitely best to settle for vanilla. Have babies with vanilla. You’ve been moaning about being single ever since you split with Ian. Aren’t you my vanilla-babies friend?’

Our conversations often went this way – her wildness as opposed to my relative conservatism – but like most friends, we stereotyped each other, in a comfortable and friendly kind of way. I was sure Rosie would settle for a conventional marriage some day, and for all my occasional bouts of loneliness I was equally sure that it was a lot less likely where I was concerned.

I hated the idea of settling. I was thirty-five years old. If settling was what I was after, I’d have done it long ago. And this whole nice boy/bad boy thing – you wanted a nice boy to introduce to your parents but the bad boys were sexy. I didn’t buy it. Matty had impeccable manners – he actually pulled my chair out for me in the restaurant on our first date. I was sure I would have no problem introducing him to my parents when the time came. But the sex was, yes, well, no other word for it: a bit dirty. Both of these things pleased me immensely: I had every intention of having it both ways.

I smirked to myself as I walked along the empty street with the phone to my ear, thinking of Rosaria on the top deck of the bus, the other passengers staring straight ahead and listening to her expound on the relative virtues of vanilla sex as opposed to dirty sex. I pictured who those other passengers might be: a respectable middle-aged woman in glasses, her mouth a cat’s-bum moue of disapproval; an elderly man, aghast; two schoolboys all agog, perhaps – and maybe a very old woman at the back remembering her youth and giving a sideways, secretive smile.

*