‘Yes,’ he said. He picked up the newspaper. Aggie dropped her glass of warm milk onto the tiles and her mouth opened in a howl. Clem kicked Sasha under the table because she’d taken the last waffle. Outside, their neighbour shuffled up his garden in his slippers, beaming in through the window. ‘Yes, of course.’

He bought her blue flowers – irises and thistles – and she arranged them carefully in a glass vase and put them on top of the tinny, out-of-tune piano so that they trembled when Sasha practised her scales. He shouted at her when he couldn’t find his grey shirt. He drank whisky late at night, waiting until he thought she was asleep before coming into their bedroom and sliding carefully into their bed. He held her hand too tightly when they walked along the street together, so that her ring cut into her fingers. He complimented her on how she looked and bought her a bottle of expensive perfume she didn’t like, silver earrings she never wore. He talked garrulously and loudly when they were together, filling in the pauses so that she wouldn’t ask him. He turned his face slightly when she kissed him so their mouths didn’t meet. He didn’t want to kiss her; he couldn’t believe he’d ever desired her.

She became a spy. She lifted Adrian’s mobile out of his jacket pocket and, taking it into the bathroom, pressed ‘Redial’. But their own phone rang and Clem snatched it up at once. ‘Who is it?’ she barked into Irene’s ear. ‘Who’s there now?’ In the middle of one night, she rifled through his old bank and credit card statements, without knowing what she was looking for. She looked at his e-mail messages, including the ones that had been sent and the ones that had been deleted. She watched him, standing on the other side of the door when he made calls, trying to read his face when he thought that no one was looking at him. She watched him until he became a stranger to her.

He was stranger to himself, as well. With Irene, he had become used to being a sporadic father, a failed actor, a man approaching forty with a spreading paunch, thinning hair, dirty socks and annoying habits – someone who left cupboard doors open, flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, and nail clippings on the floor, who didn’t help round the house enough, drank more than was good for him. But Frankie turned him back into an outsider and a lover; tragic and romantic and utterly wanted. She leant forward to hear stories from his childhood; gazed at him when he spoke of his hopes and his plans; trembled when he touched her; turned to liquid under his hands. How could he resist?

‘Stand straight with your feet slightly apart.’

‘Like this?’