He’d even learned to take it for granted. Moments like this, where he stood back and analysed the situation, had become increasingly rare in the circumspect life they had built together. He was, he thought, like a toddler taking his first clumsy steps. Initially, it required enormous concentration and carried its own burden of bruises and unexpected knocks. But gradually the body forgets that each time it steps forward successfully it is an aborted tumble. It becomes possible to walk without considering it a small miracle.

So it was in his relationship with Frances. She had kept her own modern semi-detached house on the outskirts of St Andrews. Most weeks, they would spend a couple of nights at her place, a couple of nights at his and the remainder apart. It was a rhythm that suited them both in a life with remarkably little friction. When he thought about it, he considered that calm was probably a direct result of the absence of the sort of passion that burns as consuming as it does fierce.

Now, she looked up from the peppers her small hands were neatly dicing. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked.

He shrugged, moving across the room and giving her a friendly hug. ‘Not bad. You?’

She pulled a face. ‘It’s always horrible at this time of year. Spring sets their teenage hormones raging and the prospect of exams fills the air with the smell of neurosis. It’s like trying to teach a barrel of broody monkeys. I made the mistake of setting my Higher Spanish class an essay on “My Perfect Sunday”. Half the girls turned in the sort of soppy romantic fiction that makes Barbara Cartland sound hard-boiled. And the lads all wrote about football.’

Tony laughed. ‘It’s a miracle the species ever manages to reproduce, given how little teenagers have in common with the opposite sex.’

‘I don’t know who was more intent on counting the minutes till the bell at the end of the last period, them or me. I sometimes think this is no way for an intelligent adult to earn a living. You knock your pan in trying to open up the wonders of a foreign language to them, then someone translates coup de grâce as a lawnmower.’

‘You’re making that up,’ he said, picking up half a mushroom and chewing it.

‘I wish I was. By the way, the phone rang just as I came in, but I had a couple of bags of shopping so I let the machine pick it up.’

‘I’ll see who it is. What’s for dinner?’ he added, as he walked towards his office, a tiny room at the front of the cottage.

‘Maiale con latte with roast vegetables,’ Frances called after him. ‘That’s pork cooked in milk to you.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ he shouted back, pressing the play button on the answering machine. There was a long bleep. Then he heard her voice.