Emma poured another glass of champagne for us both. ‘The thing is, Alice signed up for the lawyer boyfriend, lots of money, and a nice house.’ I looked around at the tattered Seventies décor and raised my eyebrows at Emma. ‘This isn’t exactly her sort of thing. We had a place in Stoke Newington – a nice little flat. It was pretty much all mapped out – two-point-four children, dog, cat, move out to the suburbs eventually . . .’

‘Ugh,’ Emma said, making a face. ‘That sounds like hell.’

‘Everyone says that,’ I said, spinning my glass round on my knee, slowly. ‘Thing is, I think I’m a bit of a romantic at heart. I wanted the whole thing.’

‘That’s quite sweet,’ Emma said. ‘Even if it’s my idea of hell. I don’t even like being responsible for a potted plant.’

‘Yeah, well, we were engaged and everything. Then we had some family stuff happen, and I realised that actually I didn’t want to carry on doing law. I wanted to do something that made a difference. That’s how I ended up getting into nursing.’

‘That’s fair enough.’

‘Yeah. Not for Alice, it turned out. She’d had our future all mapped out, and my giving up the well-paid job with prospects for a career in a failing NHS wasn’t on her to-do list.’

‘So when you gave up on law, she gave up on you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, and took a large swig of champagne. ‘Pretty much.’

Emma reached over, putting a hand on my leg. ‘I’m sorry. That’s pretty brutal.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and looked down at Emma’s hand, which hovered there for a second. And I’d like to say that we carried on watching the television and then went to our separate beds after the bells struck midnight and that was that. But no. Turned out I was only human, after all, and that after a bottle of champagne and some sort of dodgy liqueur from the back of the kitchen cupboard, and some pretty direct flirting from Emma, my resolve to stay celibate and focus completely on my studies was – well, it wasn’t as steely as all that. And afterwards, when I was lying on the bed watching her fastening her bra and slipping the impossibly tight red dress back on, Emma had turned to me and smiled.

‘Nobody needs to know this ever happened,’ she’d said.

‘Not a soul,’ I’d agreed. ‘Becky would murder us, for one thing.’

‘Nice though,’ she’d said, and given a wicked little smile that had made me want to pull her back into bed.

Bloody hell.

And then last night it happened again.