But when Robin thought about cohabitation, the image that presented itself was of the third and last home she’d shared with her ex-husband. Robin knew it had been a lovely house, in an eighteenth-century terrace that had been built for shipwrights and sea captains, but she couldn’t picture it in any detail now. What she mostly remembered was the leaden feeling of constriction and misery in which she’d spent too many of the days she’d lived there.

