But who should she tell? She wanted to talk to Jem, but Jem was in the south of France and she didn’t want to say it down the telephone, her words translated along a wire for hundreds of miles. Karen was her oldest friend, her listener, but Karen was Frankie’s sister and in Irene’s mind was now grouped with the enemy. And everybody else she could think of was so tied to Adrian too. For years, they’d gone around as a couple, sharing common friends, being part of a complicated network, a maze of relationships that connected with each other. If she talked to Sarah or Lisa or Grace or any them, her words would be repeated, gathering meanings and innuendoes; they would multiply in all the separate houses and travel down the phone and through ether, echoing and rebounding.

If only her mother was still alive. But her mother had died years ago. Her mother had died and she had met Adrian – losing and finding all at the same time. She picked up the photograph of her and Adrian together, taken soon after they’d met. Strange to think that she had been this young woman who still looked like a girl, with a bright cascade of hair and freckles over her nose and forehead, her hand in his and her face lit up with excitement. She looked at his face; he looked more like his old self than she looked like hers, as if the years had carved more deeply into her while they had washed over him. She lifted the photo frame high above her head and smashed it down onto the hard floor, where it cracked apart. Then she got a dustpan and brush and swept up the pieces of glass and dropped the whole thing into the bin. Gone, before the children had even run into the house, dragging their bags, rushing from room to room to check that everything was the same as when they’d left it.

She watched as Adrian followed them, a case in each hand and the laces on his shoes trailing. Then she picked up Aggie who was coming backwards down the stairs and kissed her nose. ‘Welcome home, poppet,’ she said.

‘Jem?’

‘Irene! Hang on, let me turn down the music. There. How are you doing?’

‘Fine,’ she said. She found, sure enough, that she couldn’t say the words out loud. They would just bounce back off the phone’s receiver and smack her in the mouth. ‘I’m doing fine. I’ve just got back. I wanted to know how you both were.’

‘Karen.’

‘Hi! How was your holiday? I thought you weren’t getting back till tomorrow. Everything OK? God, I envy you – it feels like months since we went away even though it was only two weeks.’

Irene listened for sounds of falseness, betrayal.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘All right.’

‘It’s been ages. When shall we get together?’