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about budgets or tactics, she
    would not be in the least surprised.
    And sometimes, when she was really tired, really low, she had thought that whatever happened to their marriage, neither of them could possibly afford to leave it, so inextricably entwined was it in their professional as well as their personal lives.

CHAPTER 3
    Octavia had sometimes been tempted to make up an
    interesting story about how she and Tom had met; it had
    been so extraordinarily dull, not good copy at all. Other
    people always seemed to have been blind dates, or met in
    operating theatres or on aeroplanes. Lauren and Drew
    Bartlett, the neighbours who were hosting the children’s
    party in France, had met through a shared divorce lawyer.
    Louise, Octavia’s best friend, had had a flirtatious letter sent
    over to her table by her husband at a ball. Melanie Faulks
    had met her onetime husband doing a charity bungee
    jump.
    Octavia and Tom had met at a lunch party, nowhere
    more original, more prophetic than that. She had seen him
    across the room and thought how absurdly good looking he
    was, and how well dressed (blue Oxford shirt, chinos and
    very nice shoes, brown brogues, Octavia always noticed
    shoes), and thought also that with looks like that he must be
    vain and immensely conceited. But later, when she was
    introduced to him (‘Octavia, this is Tom Fleming, he’s
    something to do with polities’) and he was shaking her hand
    and smiling at her almost diffidently, assessing her with
    wonderfully dark grey eyes, and they began to talk, she
    realised she was wrong, that he was very far from either
    vanity or conceit, seemed actually slightly unsure of himself.
    It was very slight, the unsureness, and he had a tendency to play upon it, but he was certainly far more likeable than she would have imagined. He also possessed that particular
    genre of charm that persuades people they are much more
    amusing and agreeable than they had realised; in Tom’s
    company silent people talked, dull ones made jokes,
    nervous ones relaxed. Octavia did not make jokes, but she
    relaxed and she found it easy to talk.
    She told him she had never met a politician before, and
    he told her she still hadn’t, he was far from being anything
    of the sort, thank God: ‘No, I work for one of those new
    inventions, a public affairs consultancy. Which means we
    dabble in politics a bit: try to influence politicians and civil
    servants on behalf of our clients, that sort of thing. It’s
    actually much more fun than politics, I think. What about
    you?’
    ‘I’m a lawyer,’ Octavia said, ‘a corporate lawyer.’
    ‘That sounds very grand,’ he said, smiling. ‘Let me get
    you some food while you tell me about it.’
    ‘Only if you tell me about public affairs,’ she said.
    Afterwards she thought how prophetic it had been that
    even their very first conversation should have been so
    workbased. And how genuinely enthralling each of them
    had found it. He asked her if she would like to have dinner
    with him, took her phone number.
    Flattered, but never expecting to hear from him, she was
    amazed when three days later she came home to a
    charmingly diffident message on her machine: ‘Octavia, I
    hope you remember me. This is Tom Fleming. I wondered
    if you were free one night next week. Give me a ring.’
    They had dinner, enjoyed the evening enormously, did it
    again, and then again; a month after the party, they were in
    bed, Octavia having been seduced as much by Tom’s
    interest in her and admiration for what went on in her head
    as his initially tentative physical advances.
    She was sexually inexperienced; had only had three
    lovers in her twenty-four years (a one-night affair after a
    drunken May Ball not included), indeed, had begun to fear
    she must be frigid, so generally uninterested did she feel in
    the whole business. She would read articles in Cosmopolitan about young women’s sex drives and wonder what was the matter with her, that she didn’t