Simon Parr-Fielding, middle-aged, semi-retired antiques expert, and far from retired gambler, was covering his position as best he could. He sat up, placed the drink on the end table, and said: ‘Look, I had a few speculative open positions that I needed to close. It’s just that some of them moved the wrong way. So I’m having to cough up some margin.’

‘I’m not paying for this any more. Do you not understand?’ She waved her phone, on which was displayed a statement of account from the spread-betting company.

He looked anywhere but at it. Her partner of six years still looked boyish, despite his fifty-seven years. Perma-tanned from his solarium sessions at the gym, and a decent thatch of blondish hair. As always he was dressed for the beach, probably the only place where he had ever been truly happy. He always maxed the central heating to mimic the tropics. He was wearing ragged cut-offs and a bleached denim shirt, three buttons open, revealing his fair chest hair. That was something she had always liked. Fair body hair was rather exotic to her, and until quite recently she had enjoyed running her hands through it. But now she wanted to take great handfuls of it, and wrench it out by the roots.

‘This will be the last time I promise, Prish. Honestly.’ He stood up and reached out for her as if to hug her.

‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ she hissed, and turned her back.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’ll be fine once the will is sorted out. It’s just a temporary phase.’

Prisha stared at herself in the ground mirror on the mantelpiece. Not yet forty, a hard-working businesswoman. It was beginning to show in the faint lines underneath her eyes, what Simon had once called those ‘bewitching brown orbs’. He had called her haughty, but really she was just shy and introverted. She had fought her way out of Indian orthodoxy. Set up her own business, not relying on the family, asserting her own skills and abilities, divorced that idiot Deepak. And she had found, while on a two-week beach holiday back in Mamallapuram, what she took to be a rather charming and kind English guy. The string bracelets and the leather bangles should probably have been a giveaway that this man, who had once been a senior advertising executive, and was now divorced and penniless, was only destined to be a beach bum. If only she had known then what she knew now. His secretive booze habit she could just about handle. He was after all an affectionate drunk, not a violent one. But the secretive gambling was far more worrying, a bottomless pit of addiction. And now with her mother murdered, he was still gambling. If only she had just a bit more cash, it would be easier to deal with.

She had originally taken up Vedic astrology to try to guide the best moment to create a Hindu son. The first two years together, she and Simon had made love at least twice a day. For Simon it was bliss on a stick, for her a means to an end. Her eggs remain stubbornly unfertilised. She persuaded him to visit the GP and get a fertility test. The result was as she predicted. His sperm were as lazy and immobile as he was. Azoospermia, it was called. ‘That’s a bit of a mouthful,’ Simon had said, as always making a joke of it. ‘Mine are apparently not very motile. Quite a lot of them were twisted or tailless.’ The regime, drinking less, and a change of diet, seem to make no difference, although whether Simon was following the first part of it she doubted.