She watched him rise and stretch, his fringe sticking up at all angles, the grey hair of his chest wiry and long and his eyes bleary, picturing the man she had fallen in love with when he had come to talk to the manager of the supermarket in which she had been working. He, a young salesman, and she, a girl trying to find her place in the world, keeping her head down, working with tins of beans instead of flying the skies. The man who had held her hand as they fell asleep each night, as if contact was vital. The man who would creep downstairs in the morning, returning with a cup of hot tea, steadying it on her bedside table for when she woke. That man, who had thrown her a lifeline . . .

‘Do you know, I sometimes wish we could go back to those years when we were first married and you were so much nicer to me,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have dreamt of saying something like that . . .’

His response was slow in coming. ‘I’d like to go back to then too, when I was three stone lighter and you were fun – remember fun? When I had the energy for great sex, and you had the inclination. And when you were much nicer to me too.’

‘I am nice to you!’

He scratched his chest. ‘You are, but that’s the issue, I guess, love. You’re nice to me in the way you are to anyone else, but you used to be . . . you used to be . . .’ He looked up and his mouth moved, but no words came. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I used to be what?’ On some level she wanted to hear it, like expelling a splinter or spitting out poison.

‘I don’t know what the word is, Bess. I don’t know how to describe it.’ He shook his head. ‘What I do know is I haven’t time to sit down and analyse it right now – time and my foreman wait for no man, as the saying goes.’ He laughed drily.

She watched him leave the room and remembered her husband, when the gold band on her finger had been shiny and loose, crawling up under the duvet, kissing her foot, her leg, mad for her and so in love, like she filled him up, like she was enough. She swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing she had felt that way too. It had been enough. But they had started married life as a couple heading out hand in hand on a great adventure, joint captains at the prow of their ship – now it was as if they were tethered, but slightly adrift, bobbing on a vast, endless ocean without direction and on a lilo that was slowly deflating. And the hiss of escaping air filled the quiet moments when words were wanting.