Harold said nothing. Maureen stood and paced up and down the hall carpet, feeling the size of her victory with her feet. “If you are going to this woman, if you are going to walk the length of England without a map and your mobile and without even telling me first, then at least have the goodness to own up to what you’re doing. This is your choice, Harold. It’s not mine and it certainly wouldn’t be David’s.”

Ending on such a blaze of righteousness, she had no alternative but to hang up. She instantly regretted it. She tried to ring him back, but the number wasn’t available. Sometimes she said these things but she didn’t mean them. They had become the fabric of the way she talked. She tried to find something to distract her, but the only thing left to wash was the net curtains and she couldn’t face taking them down. Another evening came and went, and nothing happened.

Maureen slept fitfully. She dreamed she was at a social event, with a lot of people in black tie and evening dresses, whom she didn’t know. She was sitting at a table to eat when she glanced down and found her liver in her lap. “How lovely to meet you,” she said to the man beside her, smothering it with her hand before he could see. And all the time her liver was slithering between her fingers, squelching in at the gaps beneath her nails, until she was at a loss to know how she might contain it. The waiters began delivering plates covered with silver domes.

Yet she felt no physical pain. Not as such. What she felt was more like panic; the agony of panic. It came over her in a rush that left her skin prickling below her hairline. How was she going to get the liver back inside her body without anyone noticing, and when she couldn’t feel any fleshy gap through which to post it? No matter how hard she flicked them below the table, her fingers were stuck all over with the thing. She tried to loosen it with her free hand, but in no time it clung to that too. She wanted to jump up and scream, but she knew she mustn’t. She must remain very still and very quiet and no one must know she was nursing her entrails.

Maureen woke in a sweat at quarter past four, and reached for her bedside light. She thought of Harold in Exeter, and the pension fund dwindling to nothing, and Rex with his gifts. She thought of the silence that wouldn’t be cleaned away. She couldn’t take any more.