Wrong, in my spontaneous book.

But Rex was a traditionalist, and very much his father’s son in that respect, it turned out, even though I soon came to realise he was also ashamed of his parents. How well that elderly couple fitted their neat semi in Pinner: matching twin beds with candlewick spreads that hadn’t seen a ruffle since 1965 or thereabouts. Saturday nights might have once been about passion – although I sincerely doubted it – but now were about a TV gameshow, chicken pie and a sherry trifle if they were feeling particularly racy. Two precise glasses of Harveys Bristol Cream for his mum; a bottle of porter for his dad.

Rex longed for more than they’d ever had – and he certainly didn’t want to be known as the son of a railway clerk and a cleaning supervisor; a couple who always holidayed in Weymouth, apart from the single time, after pocketing a few shares from the railways privatisation, they’d had a fortnight on the Costa del Sol, never venturing so far again after a dose of what they called ‘dicky tums’.

When I met him, I knew none of this – just that Rex seemed steady and ambitious, in a safe way. I’d never known a man like him, with his own house, a mortgage and a proper job; a daughter he took actual care of. What an allure that was.

When I met him at the corporate gym in Paddington, I wasn’t in the best place anyway, nursing yet another broken heart while climbing the ladder after a complete career change. I ignored the wedding ring on his finger at first; the ring that disappeared soon after. I was tired of being alone: it had been a lifetime, after all.

It was easy to focus my attention in the wrong places.

It was easy to do that until it was too late to do different.

When Ceci left at lunchtime for her mother’s, I’d begun to fret, worried I might soon be paying for my stupid joke about Willow last night.

Quickly, I passed Rex another beer in front of the cricket, and texted Jan Vermaak to ask if she could knock on her way past to the meeting.

Jan was the mum of a sort-of friend of Ceci’s, Lola. She was a ‘Mummy Blogger’, the type of woman who got her kicks online explaining to everyone else how wonderful her life was, with her three girls and another dull handsome husband, like Nella’s. She was the type who went on at me to do more meditation with my yoga, to ‘seek our bliss’.

But I suspected Jan’s bliss might be quite far off, for all her posts about natural birthing, home schooling and managing foetal anxiety…

Lola, Ceci’s ‘friend’, was already a mess at fifteen, rife with bulimia and a burgeoning exercise addiction. Jan’s youngest had also recently been pulled out of Northgate Primary for an issue the Vermaaks had just about managed to squash, though not before the word ‘racism’ was whispered round the square.