She remembered every detail of the evening. On the way back from Paris, where he had been interviewing an actress, he had arrived without warning at Liz’s basement flat in Kentish Town. She’d been in the bath, listening to La Boheme and trying half-heartedly to make sense of an article in The Economist, and suddenly there he was, and the floor was strewn with expensive white tissue paper and the place was reeking-gorgeously and poignantly-of Vol de Nuit.

Afterwards they had opened a bottle of duty-free Moet and climbed back into the bath together. “Isn’t Shauna expecting you?” Liz had asked guiltily.

“She’s probably asleep,” Mark answered cheerfully. “She’s had her sister’s kids all weekend.”

“And you, meanwhile…”

“I know. It’s a cruel world, isn’t it?”

The thing that had baffled Liz at first was why he had married Shauna in the first place. From his descriptions of her, they seemed to have nothing in common whatever. Mark Callendar was feckless and pleasure-loving and possessed of an almost feline perceptiveness-a quality which made him one of the most sought-after profilists in print journalism-while his wife was an unbendingly earnest feminist academic. She was forever hounding him for his unreliability; he was forever evading her humourless wrath. There seemed no purpose to any of it.

But Shauna was not Liz’s problem. Mark was Liz’s problem. The relationship was complete madness and, if she didn’t do something about it soon, could well cost her her job. She didn’t love Mark and she dreaded to think of what would happen if the whole thing was forced out into the open. For a long time it had looked as if he was going to leave Shauna, but he hadn’t, and Liz now doubted that he ever would. Shauna, she had gradually come to understand, was the negative to his positive charge, the AC to his DC, the Wise to his Morecambe; between them they made up a fully functioning unit.