When life gives you lemons, slice them up and chuck them in a dirty great G&T. I adopted this philosophy after my world unravelled like a moth-eaten jumper.

Saturday the 15th of May.

The day started like every other weekend when Jeff was away: I woke, stretched, argued with myself about staying in bed, lost the argument, rose, showered and dressed. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen, fetched the scoop and birdseed, and opened the back door.

A barrage of cooing hit me.

“Hi, guys. How are you doing?”

The pigeons stared with their unique blend of insolence and derision. Six of them waited on the lawn. Two had been regulars for some time, one with a wonky leg and the other sporting distinctive feathers, and now they arrived with younger versions of themselves which I could only assume were offspring.

Yes, I know: I’m feeding several generations of a pigeon family, talking to them, and privately naming them the Kray Pigeons as they have an air of murderous gangsters. I’m a few scoops away from Mad Bird Woman of Dexter Bay.

But that would be the least of my worries.

While the Kray Pigeons breakfasted, I made coffee, opened blinds and curtains and returned upstairs to do the same. In the small spare bedroom we use as an office, I noticed the computer was switched on. I sat gingerly on the old swivel chair – wobbly, creaking and inclined to dump you on the floor when you least expected it - and moved the mouse.

The Windows screensaver disappeared, and Jeff’s e-mail account took its place. “Hmmm…that’s odd.” My husband was super-protective of anything work-based, acting as though he wasn’t actually an accounts manager in Bayfield Engineering but secretly head of MI5.

I thought back to the previous evening when Jeff had spent an hour closeted in the office, and I’d heard him talking when I came upstairs. I looked around the door and said, “It’s late; you coming to bed?”

Jeff dropped his phone and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, well, I need to leave early tomorrow, so I thought I’d sleep in the back bedroom, save waking you.” I thanked him and went to bed, surprised and delighted by his thoughtfulness.

I looked at the e-mail folder and knew I should close it down and switch off the computer, but, somehow, the hand holding the mouse couldn’t manage this. Instead, the cursor hovered over the folder. “Sod it. What’s the worst that can happen?”

So I clicked the mouse and discovered the answer: six e-mails, at the top of a pile, the rest SPAM along the lines of an Accident that wasn’t your fault/penis enlargement/African prince asking for help, etc.

I looked at the six e-mails, all from someone called NicolaX, and a cold feeling settled at the base of my spine. Then, bracing myself, I opened the earliest message, dated the previous Monday:

Hey, are we good to go?

The rest, sent daily until 2am that morning, read:

I can’t wait!

Let me know the details.

You know how I feel…

This is it!!

I love you too.

I reeled away from the monitor, and the chair creaked, listed and dropped me onto the carpet like a sack of spuds. I lay half-propped against the computer table and stared at the faded, swirly wallpaper. We’d never decorated in here. Jeff said it wasn’t worth it; he didn’t care what the room looked like.

All those hours hunched over that keyboard, doing whatever he did at Bayfield Engineering. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t asked after his job, but Jeff was either vague or sprinkled his explanations with jargon and acronyms until my eyes glazed over, or I simply nodded and said, “I see. Great.”

NicolaX. Nicola. Who the hell…oh, God, not his secretary…? Tears threatened, and then a surge of anger drove me to my feet. I pulled the chair close to the screen, straightened the seat and sat down again. This time, I looked for Jeff’s replies and found none.

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I checked the Deleted e-Mails folder - it was empty. I scrolled through every last message, past reams of SPAM and saw no personal e-mails from Jeff. But then he had a tablet he used to contact friends and browse online, so he wouldn’t need to use this PC for e-mail.

Nicola – Bloody –X. No…this was for her. A safe method of replying to Jeff while he contacted her another way. The phone. That was why he’d jumped, dropped his mobile and told me he would use the spare bedroom.

My husband was cheating on me. I had no idea when this affair had begun, and now they were together at an engineering conference in Bournemouth.

I love you too.

My thoughts whirled like socks in a tumble drier:

I can’t believe it. This is my worst nightmare…although there was that one where Freddie Kruger chased me through Tesco wearing a Sooty glove puppet and holding a bowl of Angel Delight. I think it was butterscotch. Jeff is cheating on me with some floozy. I’m a bloody mug. Did I just use the word ‘floozy’? Nicola. Huh. I bet she’s ten years younger with enormous bazookas and legs up to her…oh, hell, I said ‘bazookas’…

What happened next? Would Jeff return and pack his bags or be the coward I suspected and phone to confess he didn’t love me anymore and he’d met someone else?

I stared at the e-mails, and anger resurfaced. I opened Jeff’s profile, clicked on Settings, pretended he’d forgotten his password and followed the process to change it. Now it was jeffhasatinypenis.

Then I dropped my head into my hands and burst into tears.

♦♦♦

Sometime later, I trudged downstairs, discarded my cold coffee, and made another pot. I sat at the breakfast bar and brooded until no coffee was left and my eyelids were twitching. The sun sparkled through the kitchen window, highlighting the Kray Pigeons lined up along the sill and contrasting with my descending mood.

I needed to talk to someone who wasn’t a bird. Grabbing my phone, I swiped through my contacts. “Sue? Hi.” Then I hesitated, hearing background voices and traffic noise from my oldest friend’s phone and suddenly remembering Sue and Colin had gone to London for a long weekend. “Ah, er, how are you?”

“Yeah, great, just walking down Oxford Street.” Sue paused, and I heard her apologising to someone. “I’ve never managed to walk and talk on the phone without – oops - sorry – it’s kinda busy…Marnie? You still there?”

“Yeah, no worries, we’ll speak when you get back.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, everything's fine.”

“Tell your voice that, then.”

I forced myself to laugh and sounded like a hyena with laryngitis. “Okay, Columbo. I forgot you were away. You two have a great time, and I’ll phone you on Tuesday.”

“You sure?”

I reassured Sue that everything was great, ended the call, grabbed my jacket, phone and bag, and escaped from the house. I walked towards the beach and met Mr Simpkins, my elderly neighbour (army, retired, widowed, misses the war). I managed a smile and tried to walk around him, but Mr Simpkins stepped sideways and blocked my path.

“Café’s re-opened,” he announced in a voice suggesting this was the equivalent of a second wave of the Black Death.

“That’s nice.” An Italian family had owned the café on the seafront for the previous forty years, but they’d retired to Florence, and the building had lain empty for six months.

Mr Simpkins leant towards me, moustache bristling. “I’ve seen the fellow, he’s coloured.”

“Really?” I gritted my teeth. “Coloured?”

“Yes.”

“What colour? Blue like a Smurf? Or green like those women off Star Trek?” I pretended to ponder this while my neighbour stared, eyes popping.

“Are you alright, m’dear?” Mr Simpkins asked finally, “Is it lack of sleep?”

“What?”

“With your husband leaving so early.”

“Huh?”

My neighbour sighed. “Your husband left at three o’clock this morning. I was up making cocoa. You don’t sleep so well at my age, what with all my –”

“Jeff left the house at three this morning?”

“With his suitcases, yes.” Mr Simpkins gaped at me, and then his lips formed an ‘O’. “Ah, oh, dear. He’s left you, hasn’t he?”

“He’s gone to a conference.” I stormed past and strode down to the seafront, muttering about nosy, racist neighbours and faithless, pathetic husbands. I passed the café, now painted blue and white and called Sea Brew, and carried on to the end of the promenade, then stopped and leant on the rail, looking out to sea.

I’d met Jeff soon after we left our respective universities. I studied English while Jeff’s qualification was Accounting, and I’d thought him reliable and dependable – ha, the irony –and someone who would keep me grounded. Jeff had called me ‘his mad girl’, and not always in an affectionate tone…at least, not lately. Now he phoned his friend Ollie – best man at our wedding – and joked about the madwoman he was living with and could he swap me for Ollie’s wife, Cheryl?

I moved away and began walking, hardly noticing my direction as I travelled back in time in my head. I’d gotten my qualification but didn’t know what to do with it, and I never wanted to be a teacher: I imagined trying to instil a love of literature to a roomful of hulking teenagers and came out in hives.

“They’d eat you alive,” Jeff said, and I’d been forced to agree. “You need something less public.”

So I worked in libraries and then a publishing house as a copy editor, which fuelled an ambition to write a novel. At the same time, Jeff held down several accounting jobs in various firms, and we rented flats whenever he moved companies – which averaged out at once a year.

Was that normal?

I considered Jeff’s work history and concluded that my early assessment of him as dependable was clouded by my inexperience and his over-confidence and fantastic hair.

Fourteen years later, he still had great hair.

And a new woman.

I stopped dead and took a deep breath, willing myself not to cry.