It had been a lateish life romance: a second marriage for her, a third for him. Autumn, 2018. Shedding of old leaves and skin. They’d made their mistakes and out of them, sometimes it seemed almost directly, had come what they found in their union: a harmony but not like anything either of them had pictured earlier in life when focusing on the word ‘harmony’ and trying to pin down precisely what that would look like. A harmony made of old wood and notebooks and soup and a coffee grinder and shouting at robots on the phone and rejecting what nonsense they could and pianos and keeping out of each other’s way for quite a bit of the week and car boot sales and a sheep and then two sheep when the first sheep got lonely and then three sheep just because they felt like it. He was forty-nine, she thirty-eight. He’d come to the book group that February, the first new arrival for a while, invited by Jane. It had been Sally’s turn to choose that week, and she’d opted for A Widow for One Year by John Irving. She talked about what a warm, generous, funny and sympathetically human author Irving was. Bob sat in the corner on the most important-looking chair, frowning, filling his cheeks with wine and hogging the chilli-coated peanuts. ‘He’s bland and overlong,’ he said. ‘And why do his female characters always have big tits? It strikes me he’s just writing out his sexual fantasies, getting off on his own inventions.’ She thought Bob was a ghastly grump, a withered wirebeard, a molten meanmouth, a blown fuse of predictable cynicism. He didn’t come again.