Emma was unfamiliar with this part of London and if it wasn’t for Google Maps and the efficient female Australian voice giving her directions, she would have absolutely no idea of how to get there. She’d only decided an hour ago that she was coming. Despite leaving numerous messages, no one had returned her calls. She had planned to go to her yoga-meditation class and then spend the rest of the day with Si. Emma liked to have a clear agenda, but Si, without putting it in the diary, had gone off to a day’s orchestra practice – their annual concert was coming up and this year the bassoon actually had a solo.

She decided against the yoga. The central heating was playing up and there was so much preparation involved for a class before the humiliation of piling herself into her yoga clothes. Shaving and hair washing were vital – mid‒lizard pose it was possible to find yourself alarmingly close to random parts of strangers’ anatomies. Somehow she always seemed to end up next to twenty-year-old contortionists in spray-on stretch suits who made her feel huge and ancient with the malleability of a crowbar. Then there were further embarrassments in the tiny changing rooms as naked, nubile, rippled, perky-breasted girls with no hang-ups and topiaried little mounds chatted loudly by the cubicles while Emma, clasping a towel to her roll-over tummy and untamed bush, tried to squeeze past to the showers.

A long time ago, when she and Si were first together, she used to get her bikini line waxed. She couldn’t remember when she stopped; she cited feminist reasons but really it was laziness. But why was she lazy? When did she stop bothering? When did she stop thinking of herself as a sexual being? How had she lost her libido? She knew it was still there somewhere, lying latent; she still had occasional urges, but the urges had become secretive, not something to be shared with Si.

Did you and Si Hubby ever have passion?

‘Turn right on to Fulham Palace Road,’ said the Australian.