Angie was simply filled with grief. I could understand that. I felt it too, of course—the helplessness and despair. I, too, wept for the world as I uselessly recycled my newspapers and switched off the lights. Thank God I didn’t have grandchildren.

‘I tried to be reasonable,’ he said. ‘Hand on heart. At first I tried to talk to her, but suddenly I’m the enemy. Men the oppressors, all that shit. It was men who were destroying the planet. She’d had some bad experiences with them, of course, but she didn’t have to take it out on me.’

He was sounding more and more aggrieved, as if the whole thing was Angie’s fault. He didn’t quite say she brought it on herself, but near enough. His new Angie was almost unrecognisable; he felt he was living with a stranger. But then, how many of us really know the person with whom we share our life?

‘And a fuck was certainly out of the question,’ said Calvin. It was the only time I saw a glimmer of humour.

But something else was happening too.

‘See, I’d got into a spot of bother,’ he said. ‘Finance-wise. Things were going down the tubes, big time.’

I won’t bore you with the details. Basically, his business was haemorrhaging money and he was borrowing heavily to bail it out. Angie knew nothing about this—Calvin had his pride. Finally, without her knowledge, he’d taken out a large mortgage on the house—maybe its deeds were in his name; maybe he forged her signature. I suspect there was something even dodgier going on, but only Doug, his partner, was in on the secret.

And then, a week before she died, Calvin learned that Angie was going to change her will and leave everything to Extinction Rebellion. He learned this from Angie’s closest friend, Johanna, who happened to be Doug’s wife. Johanna told him this in confidence.

‘We were in bed at the time,’ Calvin said.

‘You were what?’

It transpired that they’d been having an affair for years, he and Johanna. Nobody knew—not Doug, the husband; not Angie, his own wife.

I was astonished. ‘So did she give you a biscuit afterwards?’

Calvin didn’t laugh. He was past laughter. The biscuit joke was another double-bluff, I realised. A dangerous one, but this was a man who liked to push things to the edge. That’s how he got his kicks. It was part of his attraction. And to think I had my doubts about him simply because he called women ‘girls’ and voted Tory.