He couldn’t get over how conscious he was of her. It was like the first wild days of attraction on tour all over again, the leaning into each other, trying to find ways to touch, always aware of where she was in the room even when he couldn’t see her. Not sexual this time; something just as primal rising in him. He found himself scanning the street that they were walking down for potential hazards

‘Are you OK? Do you want my coat?’ he asked again, as the wind hit his face, and he tried to position himself in front of her, like a shield. ‘This is too cold out – look, let’s just get you inside, shall we?’

She moved her head, nodded as he ushered her into the pub they’d spotted from the car. She’d been quiet for the whole walk, he realized, just listening to him talk through the issue with that arsehole Adam and the bookings for Edwyn’s tour, until she’d asked if they could turn around and go back, and he’d felt immediately guilty that he was making her go out and exert herself when she should have her feet up. They’d been badly prepared for the walk anyway; both in their Converse, picking around the puddles and shivering. He’d thought it would be a good wholesome thing to do: drive to the Lakes, see some countryside, really spend some time together. Making plans, dreaming up the future, not in a city.

Wherever they went at home, people knew them, whether it was idiots who recognized Clio ‘from off the telly, aren’t you’ or scenester kids in bands anxious to get Danny to book them. In the city, they were too visible. It was always something he’d loved, the way heads would turn as they walked into a bar, the way shy girls in band T-shirts or Beatle-haired boys would approach Clio, supplicant, while he stood just behind her, stroking secret messages into the small of her back. His wife was not ordinary.

She kept her hair huge and curly even though the fashion was for short and boyish, decked herself in sparkling Lurex and old fur scavenged from second-hand shops while every other girl zipped her chest into tatty Adidas. She painted her eyelids and fingernails silver, and the shimmery powders coated their bedroom carpet, the bathroom, the walls, never quite washed out. She managed to pull focus to herself even in the crowd at someone else’s gig; in a dimly lit nightclub a spotlight could always locate her, a bold streak of scarlet in a world increasingly brown. But since they’d found out, he’d found himself irritated at other people’s insistence on sharing her.