Low life | 25 August 2012

Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl.

She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue light winked text messages from her all the way down. One said: ‘Lost my musth. It’s completely gone. Menopause?’

The apartment was called Stanhope Forbes, in homage to the leading light of the Victorian era Newlyn artists’ colony. Stanhope Forbes’s paintings of bustling late-Victorian fish quay scenes, with lovely girls in virginal pinafores, decorated the apartment’s whitewashed walls. The domestic appliances were state of the art — I couldn’t work out how to operate any of them — and the furniture was both contemporary and comfortable. Earlier in the week, she’d sent a photo of the lounge, excited about the possibilities offered by the low, comfortable-looking curves.