Later that day I was wandering down Deal High Street. I knew the town; when I was a child I’d come here on holiday with my parents. I was thinking about their fractious relationship when I stopped outside a charity shop.

In the window, something caught my eye. It was a little black dress. A classic little black dress—ostensibly demure, yet deeply seductive. A dress that someone’s mistress would wear, back in the 1950s, when people smoked and went to cocktail parties and called mistresses mistresses.

It was a surprising garment for a seaside town at the height of summer, whose shops were full of matelot leisurewear and pastel shorts. It spoke of Martinis and adultery. Of sex, and death.

Of funerals.

I don’t know anyone here. The words came back to me. Golders Green Crem, and the crowd of strangers, filing out of the funeral of somebody I’d never known.

It spins on a sixpence, doesn’t it? There I was, stepping out into the dazzling, dizzying sunshine, the dress in its bag, the bag in my hand. I found I was smiling insanely at passers-by, even dogs. Especially dogs.

You’ll have to wait till their wives die and then move fast. Azra, licking a cigarette paper with her neat cat’s tongue. Widowers are a better bet than divorces because they won’t be bitter, just bereaved.

I drove home, my head spinning. It was heatstroke; I shouldn’t have sunbathed. Tomorrow I would have forgotten the whole mad idea.

And the next day I did forget it, for the entire morning. It was only when I was leaving the house that I noticed the carrier bag lying in the hall and it all came back to me. My first thought was: why would I wear a black woolly dress in high summer?

Then I remembered, and burst out laughing. I looked at my reflection in the mirror—sunburnt nose, unbrushed hair. I’d been searching for my specs and there they were, sitting on my head. Mad, you see. Mad old bat.

Mad to even consider, for one nanosecond, such a plan.

Two

I used to be pretty wild. I haven’t told you this. Even Greg didn’t know the half of it. When we met I’d put all that behind me and become a hard-working student at teacher training college. Then I’d had children, which changes everything. I could scarcely remember the person I’d been and the risks I’d taken.

I wasn’t the only one. Look at them in Waitrose, those Muswell Hill matrons, those doting grandmothers with their choirs and sourdough. They, too, might have younger selves they could scarcely recognise without blushing. Sex with two different men at the same party, one in the loo and one under the coats. A knee-tremble in a Soho alley with a West Indian drummer who was high on heroin. Threesomes in the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn. That sort of malarkey. Even now I can be brought up short, remembering a man I haven’t thought about in fifty years, who’s probably a grandfather now. A great-grandfather. Who’s long forgotten me, too. Who might well be dead.