She pulled the door shut. Irene drank her tea and then had a shower, washing her hair and then towelling it dry vigorously. She put on her shorts and the last clean shirt, then washed two pairs of knickers, to last her till she got home. In the tiny mirror in the shower room she saw herself, a plumply triangular face covered in golden freckles, her drying hair a streaked coppery cloud. She put up a hand and touched her speckled lips, smiled. Was it possible she was a woman in her thirties, with three children, a divorce pending, a job, a mortgage, debts, a car, a washing machine, pots and pans and an array of wooden spoons, a grown-up set of cutlery that included a cake slice, a shelf of recipe books, a filing cabinet for bills and receipts …? She felt like a lovesick teenager, just starting out.

‘Weeeeee’re off to see the Wizard,’ shouted Katherine.

‘The wonderful Wizard of Oz,’ bellowed Mickey. ‘Come on, breakfast, Kath. I’ve made eggy bread.’

‘Yuck.’

‘You won’t say that when you’ve tasted it. I’m the grand master of eggy bread – that’s what my kids say anyway, and you’d better believe it.’

‘Here, I’m putting sun cream on you.’ Lorrie’s voice.

‘Don’t want it.’

‘I’m putting it on anyway. Don’t wriggle.’

‘I want Daddy.’

‘He’d put it on just the same. No escape.’

‘Here. Coffee for you, Lorrie.’

Luke’s voice. In a few minutes, she’d walk up the steps to the deck and he’d be there. He’d look up and their eyes would meet … Irene rubbed moisturizing cream into her skin and brushed out her hair. Perhaps, passing near him, their hands would touch and secret currents of desire would bolt through both of them. Perhaps they’d find themselves alone in the galley just for a few seconds, reach out furtively. Later, maybe, they could sneak away like two guilty adolescents, push up against each other in a back street with shutters swinging above them and the smell of frying garlic and peppery herbs …

So this was what Adrian had felt. She pushed her feet into her sandals, reached for her dark glasses. He’d felt electrically alive like this: new and brimful of a quivering, weepy, sentimental gladness and every sense charged up so the world became impossibly beautiful and pulsing with meaning. On the one side there was his wife, his daughters, his friends, his house, his well-worn sense of himself, and on the other nothing but transfiguring desire. Which was everything, because it obliterated all the others.

‘I never stood a chance,’ she muttered. Then added ‘bastard’ in a satisfyingly vituperative hiss to keep her anger alive.