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until the unthinkable happened. Ava left Eric for Brian, a man they had played bridge with, a man they had known for years, whose own wife had died of cancer a long time ago.
    It came completely out of the blue. Joe was at the office when the phone rang and he heard a series of short, sharp sobs. For a man who had never seen his father cry, it was possibly the most shocking thing Joe had ever heard. ‘She’s gone,’ his father kept repeating. ‘She’s gone. What am I going to do?’
    ‘Of course I knew,’ his mother said when Joe got hold of her later that day. ‘I’ve known for years about your father but I didn’t want to know, I pretended not to notice. I kept thinking that if I kept quiet he’d eventually give the women up, and I kept hoping that maybe it wasn’t true, but I’ve heard all the rumours, I know there’s no smoke without fire.’
    ‘But he loves you,’ Joe pleaded, devastated that his mother had actually left, that the only security he had ever known could be shattered so quickly. ‘He’s devastated. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
    ‘He’ll get over it,’ she said sadly. ‘I love him but I can’t live with the lies any more. I can’t live with the phone-calls saying he’s just going to the pub, when I know he’s with another woman. I don’t want to live with him going into the other room and whispering when his stupid mobile phone rings. He’s nearly sixty for heaven’s sake, and he’s still at it, and I’ve had enough.’
    Ava had married Brian – a very nice, but very dull accountant – and Eric had finally got used to being on his own.
    ‘You’ll be fine,’ Joe had said to him in the beginning. ‘Think of what a wonderful time you’ll have now you’re a free man, think of all those women who are dying to meet a handsome man like you.’
    But Eric hadn’t ever really been fine since Ava left. It had shocked him to the core, and it was only once she had gone that he realized not only how much he loved her, but how much he needed her.
    Eventually he met Carol, a divorced woman in her mid-fifties, and they settled down together. Joe doesn’t spend enough time with either of them to know whether or not the Aunties are still around, but he rather suspects they are. What leopard, after all, ever manages to change its spots?
    Joe had sworn he wouldn’t do the same thing as his father. Even as a young boy he had vowed he wouldn’t have a series of Aunties, wouldn’t hurt his wife like his father had hurt his mother, wouldn’t spend his entire married life lying to his partner.
    But really. Did he ever have a choice?
    Joe does love Alice. Truly and absolutely. He loves her as much as a man like Joe can ever possibly love a woman. He loves her and wouldn’t ever want to hurt her. But he also loves women, and he has come to justify his love of women by thinking, as his father did before him, that it is merely satisfying a physical urge, that as long as he does not hurt his wife, as long as his wife never finds out, what harm can it possibly do?
    There was only ever one woman who didn’t understand the rules. Sasha was Joe’s first transgression after his marriage, and had she not made it so obvious she was interested, had she not blatantly pursued him, perhaps he would have managed to stay off the slippery slope. Not for ever, you understand, just for a while longer.
    Sasha was supposed to be a one-night stand. He had two hours of frantic, animal sex, then slunk home feeling sick and guilty, creeping into bed next to Alice, resolving not to let it happen again.
    He left early the next morning, unable to look Alice in the eye, and returned home that night with a large bunch of white lilies to hide his relief at not being found out. He’d got away with it, and although he hadn’t planned to see Sasha again, if he had got away with it once, surely he could get away with it again, and Alice would never need to know.
    But after four months of secret trysts