‘What? Why are you worried?’ Surely it can’t be the omelette; that was three days ago. He’d have mentioned it before now if he’d suspected I did it. Maybe I should never have shared all that stuff about the museum? Serves me right for letting down my guard and confiding in him.

‘I’m just wondering if something’s wrong,’ he murmurs.

‘Nothing’s wrong, Andy. And if it’s not important, I’m going to go and have lunch now …’

‘Viv, look … I’m sorry if this embarrasses you, okay?’

I feel sick now. That must rank as the top phrase from the ‘things you never want to hear’ list.

‘But you were seen,’ he adds. The second-top phrase. ‘On Saturday night, at around midnight.’

‘What are you talking about?’ It can’t have been me. I was tucked up in bed, reading and drinking chamomile tea!

Andy exhales. ‘You were seen wandering about pissed in the street by my flat, and then fishing about in a carrier bag and stuffing some kind of egg thing under the windscreen wiper of my car.’

I open my mouth to speak. I could say, ‘How dare you suggest I’d stoop to such ridiculous behaviour?’ But I can’t bring myself to do it. Standing here, with colleagues passing me on the stairs, smiling briefly while I try to look normal, I am incapable of feigning outrage. ‘Some kind of … egg thing?’ I ask.

‘Yes, that’s what it looked like, she said. Like a tortilla.’

‘A tortilla?’ Don’t we call them omelettes anymore?

‘Viv, look,’ Andy blusters, ‘I don’t want to make big thing of it. There was no harm done, it’s not about that. It’s more about … you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I ask faintly.

‘I’m worried about you,’ he exclaims, adopting a headmasterly tone now. ‘Getting drunk – okay, we’ve all done that …’

‘Please don’t start crowing at me.’

‘We’ve all been pissed, we’ve all done stupid things …’

‘Can you stop this phoney concern please?’ I cut in, anger rising in me now. ‘Okay, so I did it. I’ll admit it now, and it was a bit mad, a bit stupid, not exactly how I’d planned to fill my time when our daughter was away at Brownie camp.’ I focus hard on the uninspiring view of car parks, garages, shabby low-rise buildings and scrubby ground. It’s mainly light industrial units around here. When Flaxico’s sweet potato falafels are released into the wild, the cutely illustrated packaging will suggest they’ve come from a country kitchen with its own vegetable plot. But they’ll have been churned out in the factory like everything else we make.

‘It was dangerous,’ he adds gravely.

‘It wasn’t dangerous. It was just … ill advised.’

‘Anything could’ve happened to you, tottering about on your own like that.’