Barry departed, and I was left to beat the working day into shape. I went through my in-tray and sorted it into ‘urgent’ and ‘pending’. Rose had taught me the tricks and procedures of an office, and the lessons remained with me. Funny, that: she had handed me professionalism and her husband on a plate. I wrote a report, made phone calls. I read scripts until my eyes blurred.

Eventually I pulled the file marked ‘Middle Age’ towards me. I had been avoiding it. Definitely. I opened my notebook and wrote: (1) What is the story? (2) Why are we proposing it? (3) Who will make it? (4) Likely costs?

What was there to say? Wasn’t middle age a furtive, secretive stage? When I’d bought my first bra, there was no one I didn’t buttonhole with the news. Ask the spirit of my dead, unsympathetic mother. But I’d rather die than reveal the existence of a varicose vein in my leg. (Thank you, twins.) I had no desire to discuss my body’s slippage. The first blows of age. It was akin to tourists tramping round a ruin. And which of us would volunteer to examine the mistakes, guilt, regret or banalities of working, nurturing and fretting? Who wished to acknowledge the loneliness of growing older?

‘When middle age creeps up on a woman, she discovers that younger women are just as much wolves as men,’ a newspaper pundit stated in one of the cuttings that Deb had handed over. On that point, I conceded, I was the expert.

I remembered playing the wolf…

Nathan had tracked me down in Bonne Tartine. He must have followed me from the Vistemax offices. He slid into the opposite seat, then nodded at my coffee and the plate on which sat a tiny, untouched croissant. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself, his expression absurdly young and his hair ruffled. ‘Is that just there for temptation?’

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I watched and waited.’

I swallowed the uneven lump of excitement and apprehension: now that I had got to this point, questions needed to be asked. ‘What about Rose?’

Carefully, Nathan cut the croissant into pieces. ‘Rose is busy with her own life.’ He paused. ‘All things considered, I don’t think she’d mind. I’ve never been her first concern…’ He leant forward and began to feed me the croissant. Its sweet, crumbling texture dissolved in my mouth, and I thought, Rose must be mad or stupid to be so blind.

‘Why did you do it?’ asked the forty-two-year-old Rose, after I had taken Nathan. ‘We were friends.’

Yes, we had been friends. Sweet, sweet friends…

‘You look stuck in.’ Deb sashayed into my office. ‘Anything I should know about?’ Uninvited, she perched on the edge of my desk, and I suppressed the desire to push her off.

‘OK.’ I sat back. ‘Do women feel middle age more acutely than men?’

‘God, I don’t know’ Deb gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘Isn’t it all over for the middle-aged, whichever sex?’ Her eyes drifted past me towards Reception in case anyone useful was waiting.

‘I think my husband feels it.’

Deb transferred her attention back to me. ‘Barry says you’re a second wife. Is he a lot older? Is he nice?’

‘He’s very nice,’ I said flatly. ‘That’s why I married him.’

‘How much older?’

‘Twenty years.’

The corners of Deb’s mouth went down, registering distaste. ‘How… very brave,’ she said, after a few awkward seconds. Then she said. ‘I wish…’

‘You wish?’ She might have been wishing for a new body or a new life. Or maybe she was just wishing she could fall in love, in which case I might warn her off it. Apart from anything else, love is ageing. You fetch up with twins, varicose veins and being hated by a clan.

‘Did I tell you I’m going mad in my flat? It’s above a curry restaurant and it reeks – I reek – of curry. The landlord won’t do anything about the ventilation and is threatening to put up the rent.’ She spread her hands. ‘I long to live in a clean white palace high above the trees. I long to be different. But at the moment the future doesn’t look bright.’ She paused. ‘Did you know that Barry’s taking on another producer?… You didn’t? He’s brilliant apparently’

Annoyance with Barry clocked in. No doubt he’d had his reasons for not mentioning it when I talked to him earlier, which showed that one should never forget the boss always has a hidden agenda. I closed my notebook with a snap. Perhaps things were not going to work out with Paradox. I experienced mild regret at the thought, but there were other production companies and I would allow Nathan an I-told-you-so conversation.

Deb stood up and stretched. The junction between her cargos and T-shirt revealed gooseflesh. I nearly said, I so nearly said, ‘ You’ll catch cold if you’re not careful.’

I returned home in good time to take over from Eve, who was going out. ‘Thanks, Minty.’ A rare, pale smile stretched her lips. ‘This is big night.’

Best not to ask. From the window of the boys’ bedroom, I watched her clatter down the street in a cheap pair of high heels. She looked released, happy, her hair loosened from its customary prison wardress’s clamp, and I reminded myself I must never forget that Eve was entitled to an off-duty life.

‘You are a busy mummy.’ Lucas’s fair hair, which was beginning to darken, was tumbled and mussed, and he was the image of his father.

The Thomas the Tank Engine clock clicked on the chest-of-drawers. Two pairs of socks, two T-shirts and two pairs of underpants dripped off a chair that was stencilled with dragons. Under their duvets, I could see that the boys had a long way to grow before they reached the end of the bed. It would take years and years, in fact.

‘Never too busy for you two.’ I tried to remember which bed I had sat on the previous evening and chose the opposite. Felix smiled shyly, his gaze flicking to a point above the bed where he had stuck a drawing on the wall. I was about to expostulate, Felix, the wallpaper, when it dawned on me that Felix’s drawing was of a large cat with black and white stripes. Underneath it he had written ‘My Lost Cat’ in blue crayon.

When they were asleep – Felix curled up on his right side, Lucas spreadeagled over the bed – I turned on the nightlight and left them to dream.

Then I found myself slipping upstairs to the spare room where the white roses in the painting appeared to leap out of their dark background. I searched through Nathan’s shirts for his notebook.

On 21 January, three days ago, he had written, ‘Is it better not to care?’ and yesterday, ‘I feel that I don’t really exist. I look in the mirror and I am not sure who I am looking at.’

I closed the notebook, and only then saw the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front. ‘Private,’ it said, in Nathan’s handwriting.

That made me smile. If the notebook was private, why did he not hide it more securely? Answer: he wished me to read it. It was a challenge and I took it up. I went downstairs, found a pen and wrote underneath: ‘Talk to me, Nathan?’

The candles I had placed on the table guttered. Nathan ate the organic fillet steak slowly. ‘Not bad.’

Not bad? Every mouthful had cost a fortune. I swallowed the final piece as if it was gold dust and said, ‘One day I’ll learn to cook.’

Nathan uttered a snort midway between laughter and derision. ‘It’s not you, Minty’

Upstairs, there was an eruption. Despite the direst warnings, the twins were swapping beds, as they did most nights. Nathan cocked an ear. ‘It’s fine,’ I reassured him. ‘Tell me what’s happening at Vistemax. I talked to Gisela yesterday and she said Roger’s ultra-preoccupied. I thought you’d had a good year?’

Nathan pushed away his plate. ‘A big libel suit,’ he confessed. ‘It was an article in Weekend Digest about bungs for football managers. It’s likely to cost Vistemax, and it happened on my watch.’

‘But not your fault.’

‘Not directly. My responsibility, though.’

‘You should have told me.’ The kitchen was quiet. ‘Journalists,’ I murmured. Since leaving Vistemax, I had lost track of what went on in the company. Nathan, however, swam with ease though the numbers and strategy. ‘You should have said something,’ I repeated.

Nathan shrugged.

The silence had become that of two people who were not communicating on the same level. On this point Successful Relationships was firm and clear: it was a situation that should be sorted.

‘I’ve bought you these,’ I heard myself say, and handed him the bottle of multi-vitamins I had picked up in my lunch hour.

He tossed the bottle from one hand to the other. ‘Thank you, Mother Minty.’

He changed into an old shirt in a washed-out blue that he had had since the dawn of time and refused to throw away. In the candlelight, the colour deepened. My skirt, a deep black, now gleamed bluish. One of the candles flickered and went out. Nathan leant forward, nipped the wick between his fingers and said, with regret, ‘Minty, you shouldn’t be spending your life watching me.’

‘It has been a bad day.’

He blew on smoked fingers. ‘Yes, it has.’

‘Nathan…’ The words trembled on my tongue. What is your ‘secret grief’? But I already knew the answer. Nathan’s secret grief was Rose and the past… and so was mine.

‘Take one of those vitamins.’ I reached for the bottle and unscrewed the lid. ‘I’ll take one too.’ I held a pill between my thumb and finger. ‘Be a good boy’

Nathan observed it for a second or two. ‘Later,’ he said.

I should have pressed on: Let’s discuss your diary. Let us, together, sort out what is making you unhappy. But the expression that had settled on his face meant that my words aborted. It was not so much impatience and distaste, although those were mirrored in his face – and I was unsure whether they were directed at himself or at me – it was his obvious, disturbing, detachment. Nathan had removed himself from the kitchen, and I had no idea where to.