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have taken up with a male model. But it was of little interest to him. He couldn’t even have said if he loved her any longer. If there was one thing of which he was certain it was that he didn’t want to lose her, had no intention of losing her. On the practical side, he had a mortgage to pay on this small but extremely expensive house, the repayments of which were considerably helped by her contribution. In these hard times you could never be quite sure what steps building societies might take to recover their money if householders defaulted. No, he couldn’t lose the thirty-three and a third per cent she put into it. Also, though no more than two years younger than he, she was a trophy wife whom he was proud to show off, good-looking, lovely figure, well dressed and clever.
    Today, apparently, she had gone to her Russian class. Freddy didn’t believe in the Russian class but he couldn’t be bothered to check on it. No need for that now he had his handy gadgets. He looked in the wine rack and saw that a bottle of Verdicchio was missing, a bottle he was sure he had noticed there this morning. No doubt she and Mr Mystery were enjoying it now, relaxing between bouts. Tomorrow, she had told him, she’d be at home all day, working on this piece she was writing on how to dress well during an economic downturn. Everything she typed on that computer, every email she sent, would be accessible to him when he put in a simple code after she’d gone to bed; everything she said in this room he’d be able to hear when he dialled the mobile number of the gizmo in the dried-flower basket. And then what?
    He would take steps.
    *
    P ieces you wrote for the newspapers these days had to be full of references, or at least make allusion, to television programmes, celebrities and pop music. Claudia was too young ever to have known anything else so she had no difficulty in comparing something to Coldplay, pointing out the resemblance of an up-and-coming model to Cheryl Cole and referring in a scathing yet amused way to Jonathan Ross’s latest escapade on air. These were the kind of things her readers understood. Most of them were under forty. Claudia had no patience with those writers who quoted Shakespeare or made reference to
Rigoletto
as if anyone likely to read their articles had ever been inside the Globe theatre or an opera house.
    Claudia began by writing about shopping. Could it cease to be the principal leisure activity of the British female both under and over forty? Her research into the subject had furnished her with a lot of shopping anecdotes, lists of excessive amounts spent by individual women, the most allegedly spent by any one woman in three hours in Knightsbridge, the stampedes occasioned by the 7 a.m. openings of new West End stores and, to show her compassionate side, a rundown on the suffering statistics of small children operating sewing machines in Chinese sweatshops. Now on to the difference the credit crunch might make to curtailing women’s shopping sprees, but first to pour herself a cup of coffee from the pot she had made before she began.
    Two more sentences must be typed before she took her break. Claudia followed a principle of
getting into the next bit
before stopping either for coffee or lunch. Once
getting into the next bit
had been done there would be less of a problem in
getting on with it
when she returned to work after half an hour. The coffee was black and strong, its surface made frothy by the artificial sweetener she had put into it, an additive she roundly condemned when writing about healthy diets.
    She shifted the coaster along the table surface before putting the mug down, slightly pushing aside the bowl of dried flowers. It seemed to her that they were less attractively arranged than usual but she must be imagining it. After all, who but she would touch them? Maria was far too lazy and to associate Freddy with any household task, however minor, was a joke.
    Her