I drank a couple of glasses of sherry and left the bottle well in sight on the bedside table. If I was going to end up as a tippler I didn’t want anyone to imagine that I was trying to hide it. Drinkers I did not mind. Secret drinkers I could not abide.

‘That Lili’s a bad influence on you,’ said Mrs Raffald, folding a towel. ‘You’ve hit the bottle since she turned up and you smoke like a chimney.’

‘It’s not her,’ I said, ‘it’s the wedding.’

‘This wedding’s getting everybody down,’ said Mrs Raffald. ‘Be glad when it’s all over.’

I said I’d decided to stay in bed that day and asked her if she’d leave something cold in the dining-room for Syl’s supper. She brought me up a library book I hadn’t yet opened and the latest copy of the Croydon Advertiser and I leaned against the pillows and went back to sleep. I slept on and off for most of the day and in consequence was wide awake as darkness fell.

Syl was late. I put on my dressing-gown and went downstairs. Dog had gone down earlier and acknowledged my descent with a snuffle or two. I supposed Mrs Raffald had fed him, but I gave him a mouthful of the ham she had left for Syl.

‘All alone, dog,’ I said. ‘All alone, you and me by the telephone.’

I was waiting for it to ring: for Syl to tell me he’d stayed late at the office, or had gone with a colleague to a restaurant. I told myself it was ludicrous to worry. If we had been an ordinary family Syl would have left me years ago and be living in his own house with his own family and I would certainly not be staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring, like a lovesick maiden. I resented having been forced into admitting to myself that our situation was not ordinary, and when the telephone did ring I picked up the receiver intending to be very short with Syl.

It wasn’t Syl. It was Monica.

Taken by surprise I told the truth and said he wasn’t home and I didn’t know where he was.

She lied and said Margaret was missing him.

I wanted to implore her to drop the pretence, but I merely said in a conventional voice that I would leave him a message and ask him to return her call.

I knew that there were women whom Syl visited. I had overheard snatches of phone calls. He had recourse to them when he had no regular girl in his life. I was irrationally sure that he had gone to one of them. Fearing the ties of marriage, the end of freedom, the anchor of domesticity, my son had gone to a whore.