We visited ECM on the last day of our three week holiday. ECM’s children were nowhere to be seen, and KJ had replaced PW as her husband. The set-up of their flat was also rather surprising. On the upper level ECM worked in a tiny artist’s studio, lined with black bookcases that held exactly the same set of books that every woman of my generation owns. The mezzanine was largely empty, save for a single bed in the middle and a flower border at the far end. The actual bedroom was downstairs, where it doubled up as a kitchen equipped with the latest gadgets. There didn’t seem to be a bathroom.

While ECM busied herself making a simple supper of vegetables tied up in paper parcels, TPR dug a new flower bed in the mezzanine room, and I lay on the mezzanine bed listening to Pink Floyd’s Wish you were here through Bose headphones.

I was trying to make sense of the furniture in the room that I had spied downstairs. Were those really two single beds? Why had separate sleeping arrangements become attractive to my friends so soon in their married life?