The woman on Emma’s left was a television producer and the man on her right was a gynaecologist. Emma had arrived late and missed the introductions and the martinis. She missed the beginning of things because, however hard she tried to be on time, she always seemed to be late. It drove Si mad; he had argued vehemently once that late people were deliberately inconsiderate. She had been shocked – she hated to be thought of that way – and yet she never seemed capable of rushing. Perhaps she was on a different clock to other people. Everything took time: deciding what to wear, booking a holiday, having an orgasm.

Tonight, though, she had completely forgotten about the dinner party. It had been organized way too far in advance to remember. Hattie was good at cornering people; in the flush of a new relationship, she’d pinned Emma back in July: ‘What are you doing November 28th?’ It was designed to lasso the recipient into commitment. And Emma had not been quick-thinking enough to slip the noose. It was the last thing she had felt like doing but Emma was a reliable person: if she said she would go to something she always did. She got an Uber but the traffic had been so bad around Highbury and Islington that she had got out and walked the last ten minutes, getting severely rained on and thus arriving with make-up running down her face – which Hattie had felt obliged to point out in a room full of dry, perfectly groomed, marginally pissed strangers.

And now here she sat, at the table on 28th November, having knocked back a catch-up martini, asking polite questions of her neighbours in the way that she had been brought up to do. So far she had discovered that the gynaecologist was a misogynist and that the producer made salacious reality shows where the aim of the game seemed to be to lure beautiful young people to have sex live on TV. Her name was Alba and she was also a vegetarian who loved animals, but appeared not to be very fond of human beings. Alba and the misogynist bickered across Emma’s pea and mint scallops. She presumed they were married. She was relieved that neither of them had asked her a single thing about herself.

She caught Si’s eye down at the other end of the table. He was sandwiched between Adrian and Adrian’s girlfriend, whose name she didn’t quite catch. Everyone agreed how nice the pea and mint scallop dish was and Hattie, without any qualms, was going into the details of the cooking of it, although Emma knew for sure that she would have bought it pre-prepared at some expensive eatery, because Hattie’s driving force in life was expediency. She had found the short cut to everything: why exercise when you can have the fat sucked off your buttocks?