He shrugged and smoothed his hand over the package which he still held. ‘It was cruel. The end of physical love, attraction if you like, is always cruel.’

She jammed her fingers into a jar of face cream and started to cover her face with it in angry, desperate, movements. ‘You left me first. It was you, Archie. I was always physically in love with you, just remember that.’

He laughed sadly, shook his head. ‘You left far before me, my dear, you’ve been physically in love with every man who ever looked at you: so long as he was younger. What you called “scrumptious”, remember? A “scrumptious” young man on a beach, on a yacht, across a dining-table; any young man with a good figure and a modicum of wit and you were an easy lay.’

She gave a little scream of rage as one of her rings, slippery from the cold cream, slipped from her fingers and rolled away across the parquet floor. ‘A despicable, filthy thing to say. How can you say such vile things?’

‘Easily, sadly. It doesn’t matter now. Hasn’t. Never did, I suppose. For I knew from the very start that I’d never change you. All I’d done was marry you. And that didn’t stop you, did it? Marriage only gave you a licence to “kill”, if you can follow what I mean?’

She wiped her face clean, threw the greasy tissues at her feet. ‘I can’t. I don’t know what you mean. You are being utterly deranged and foul.’

He got up again and wandered across to the window, leaning against the folded shutter. ‘My dear Cuckoo. If I had cut a notch in that big parasol pine down there for every time you had made a “killing” there would be a damned fine totem-pole standing at the edge of the lawn.’

She turned towards him unsteadily, smoothing her hands carefully. ‘What a perfectly ghastly time of day to play the Truth Game. I presume that’s what it is? And you’ve waited forty years to play it. On the morning of your sixtieth birthday. Quite marvellous timing, I suppose. And what, after this quite astonishing confession from you, am I supposed to do? Admit that I was always oversexed and that you were, shall we say, less demanding? Do you care for that better?’

‘I don’t like any of it. At all. Stop please, let us stop!’