The Last Anniversary

‘Every day is a gift, Jake. Of course sometimes it’s a really horrible gift that you don’t want.’

It is so strange that you can end up having such polite, awkward conversations with somebody with whom you once shared such intimate moments.

But wait a sec, there probably is no party! That’s what people do when they’re having affairs. They make stuff up! She’s probably in a hotel! In a Jacuzzi! Drinking champagne with some hairy-chested dickhead, probably in real estate! And champagne goes straight to her head! And she’d be impressed if he told her it was Moët, when it was probably Great fucking Western!

‘Well, you don’t seem very surprised, Sophie. I was! Although, at the same time, I wasn’t. It was like I knew it but didn’t know it, if you know what I mean.

Oh, but it’s Callum she wants to kiss. She wants to kiss him very, very, very badly. She needs to kiss him. It’s a need, not a want.

‘“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,”’ quotes Veronika. ‘George Bernard Shaw.

But then she just got tired of hating him and started loving him again. It was easier.

If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties.

You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes

‘Building your dream home is a fast-track to divorce,’