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His tie hung, like a noose, half undone around his neck. Sweat darkened his hairline and beaded across his forehead; transferred itself to Janine’s cheek when he bent forward to kiss her.

'I was about to start dinner.' Janine turned sideways to pass him so their bodies would not meet.

'Can I do anything?'

'No. I'll shout when it's ready.'

She waited until she had reached the hallway, and heard the bedroom door close, before she wiped the touch of him away with the back of her hand. The walls – cream like the carpet – stared blankly at her. She remembered moving in: the shock of the house’s pale expanses after her shabby flat with its yellow kitchen and purple bedroom. She had felt like a child wandering into a grown up world – found the idea of belonging to it both frightening and hilarious. Recently she had found herself remembering that flat: the throws from Camden Market draped over sagging furniture; the cool breaths of air that sneaked in through the window frames. It had taken her a year to convince David to hang the two prints above the chest of drawers: intense squares of blue, the line between sea and sky picked out in a fragile collage of ripped paper and paint. His only other concession was the front door, with its framed patchwork of coloured glass. Janine held out her hands to catch the splotches of red, yellow and orange. David’s briefcase yawned open on the floor. A magazine had been half pulled out and now flopped over the edge, its pages fanned open. She picked it up. Homes and Gardens: a feature on transforming lofts and attics into airy studio spaces. Janine felt a knot of anger, tight and ugly as a walnut, form at the base of her chest. She dropped the magazine onto the chest of drawers – so he knew – and marched into the kitchen, pulled open the French doors that led out from the dining area onto a raised patio. It was seven o'clock and still hot. The garden heaved with colour. The hedge dividing them from next door flung out rebellious fingers, and daisies littered the too long grass. Before David, before this house, her experience of gardening had been confined to a series of basil plants on her kitchen windowsill, and a rubber plant in the lounge that reminded her of O level art classes. She had thrown herself into it: reading books, trailing round garden centres, even listening to Gardener’s Question Time. She remembered the thrill of watching daffodils she had planted poke sharp green fingers out of the soil; the Clematis stretch its arms around her carefully selected trellis. But now – now it made her tired. The more she cut and pruned and weeded the more it grew and grew and grew. She wanted something Japanese and controlled – pale grey gravel.