‘When he left,’ continued Irene, ‘I was like someone who’d been in a terrible car crash, like that man we once saw when we were on a bike ride together. Remember? When we were just kids and your mum gave us a picnic and we just set off. The car was turned over in the ditch and he staggered out and there was blood all over his face and he was walking jerkily, like a marionette, but all he kept saying was that he’d lost his false teeth. That’s what I was like. I just stumbled along through the days. All that mattered were the children. The children he’d fucking abandoned. But was I like that because the man I loved had left me, or because – well, I don’t know. Because I’d been left? Because I was alone and lonely and afraid and my life hadn’t turned out the way I’d meant it to? Because I’d failed.’

‘You never failed,’ said Karen in a sentimental voice, laying her hand over the top of Irene’s.

‘Failed,’ Irene repeated. Then, more loudly and bellicosely, ‘Failed, failed, failed.’ I mustn’t have more wine, she thought, even as she took a giant gulp.

‘You mustn’t think of it like that. He’s the one who failed. Your soup’s going cold.’

‘It’s meant to be cold. He didn’t fail. Actually, that’s the bloody irony of the thing. For our entire marriage he felt he was failing because his acting never took off. Everywhere he looked, his friends were doing better than him. And I was having to do the earning for both of us, though God knows I hardly earn anything. We got through all that, more or less. Then, as soon as he started being just a bit more successful, maybe turning a corner at last, he fell in love with someone else. Like he needed someone new to go with the new him, or the him he was hoping to turn into. I was just the old, ordinary, worn-out model. An old shoe. Such a cliché, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ agreed Karen, pouring more wine into Irene’s glass and her own.

Later, before the pasta arrived, Irene suddenly said, ‘Don’t you loathe things like spritzing?’

‘What?’ said Karen. ‘What are you on about?’