No. The mortification of this little scenario had quite changed her mind about Silver and Single now. She just wasn’t ready yet, after all. Mo would tease her and make chicken noises at her, but so be it. Nobody else had to know. Sometimes it was best to stay in the safety of your own comfort zone, wasn’t it? And so what if that comfort zone felt as if it was becoming a tiny bit boring occasionally? So what if other people had more exciting lives? Alison knew her place and it was right here at home, managing perfectly well all by herself, just as she had done for the last thirty-three years.

She went in, switched on the television and sat there, doing her best to ignore the tiny part of her that felt disappointed.

Robyn still wasn’t any the wiser as to what had happened to John’s job, and why he had apparently lost it in such unceremonious fashion. She had brought up the subject of the ‘redundancy’ a couple of times, giving him the opportunity to correct her, and yet for whatever reason he had chosen not to tell her the truth. If anything, she could feel him edging away from her, looking for excuses not to be on his own with her, whenever possible. He’d even started going to bed after she did, staying up to watch films or late-night current-affairs programmes with his dad and then creeping up in the early hours, once he could be sure she was asleep.

Robyn didn’t know what to do, how to start the conversation. How did you go about saying to your husband, Look, I know you’ve been lying to me. I know you were sacked, without getting tangled up in your own confessions of going behind his back with phone calls to his former secretary? Neither of them came out looking like an honest, trusting spouse in this scenario. And yet it was driving her crazy, his resistance to just being straight with her.

‘Maybe we could have a chat later tonight,’ she suggested on Friday evening when, for once, the two of them were alone in the kitchen. Harry was having a very competitive game of badminton outside in the back garden with the children – ‘You two against me, that’s fair, seeing as I’m absolutely not going to give you an easy time of it,’ he’d said – and Robyn had been bashing steaks with a rolling pin, when John walked in and began pulling open the drawers.

‘What was that?’ he asked distractedly, rifling through the contents. ‘For heaven’s sake, what do our kids do with all the chargers in this house?’ he grumbled, slamming them all shut again in defeat.