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‘Yuck, I’m not taking any drugs.’

‘They’d probably be a lot more effective. You look terrible.’

‘I don’t, do I?’ she said, turning to Daniel for reassurance.

‘No you just look sick. You always look beautiful to me,’ he said before kissing her hard and long on the mouth - a most inappropriate gesture for a Tuesday afternoon.

I stuck my finger down my throat to gag. ‘Can’t you two refrain from the public snogging for a few seconds?’

‘Yes, I agree,’ said Mum. ‘Besides you’ll give Daniel your cold.’

‘Anyway,’ went on Emma, ‘the naturopath said this will work just as well. It’s a natural fever remedy.’

‘Yeah, they probably crushed up some Panadol tablets and added them to the lawn clippings.’

‘Ha ha, very funny, but what else can I expect from a pill pusher like you.’

‘You know, my company has developed some very important treatments for diabetes and heart disease. Ask your brother how well he could do his job without these pills.’

‘Spoken by the girl who sells a drug to give old men stiffies.’

Touché.

It was hardly my dream product but I had undergone a bit of a re-education in the preceding months. When I’d first taken up the role, I’d had the sneaking suspicion that impotence was just nature’s way of tapping old fellas on the shoulder and telling them it was time to pack away the tackle, pull up stumps, put the cue back in the rack - choose your sporting metaphor - and leave their dear old wives alone to get their sexual thrills in remaining years from the daytime soaps and bingo. I have since been reliably informed, however, through focus groups and other forms of research, that erectile dysfunction affects much younger men than I’d originally believed and can actually be a major source of marital distress. So it seems the old dears may be more up for it than I’d thought and I am doing a great public service selling a drug that gives old men (or not so old men) stiffies.

Mind you, not all the wives are pleased with us. Apparently these drugs - there are a few different brands on the market - have allowed womanising husbands to extend the use-by date on their philandering by several years. What I couldn’t understand was where they found the partners for their out-of-wedlock flings. In the unlikely event I was to have an affair, I decided, I would damned make sure it was with a young stud who could produce erections on demand, not some ageing Lothario who required a chemical stimulant to get a hard on. So while I’d come around to the idea that these drugs could have an important place in loving and committed partnerships, the thought of them being used by these sleazebags left me feeling a bit ill.

Anyway, I informed Emma of the research (leaving out the bit about the philanderers), but all she said was, ‘Eww, old people shouldn’t even be allowed to have sex. What a disgusting thought.’

‘And how do you define old?’ enquired Mum with interest.

‘I’ve never really thought about it. I guess anything over forty-odd.’

***

Fortunately, I had been getting a bit more of it myself by this time, which is just as well as, according to Emma, I didn’t have that many years left. Perhaps my regular gym visits were paying off after all. Unfortunately, the resumption of sexual intimacy hadn’t translated into any renewed closeness outside of the bedroom. Even without the spectre of his past infidelity hanging over me, I had long since begun to prefer the times when Tony was away with work, because he never seemed more absent than when he was physically present. He was less critical of me these days, which could have been interpreted positively, but somehow I didn’t see it that way; it was almost as if he no longer cared enough to complain.

I didn’t know how much of it was me and how much was unhappiness with his professional situation. For the first time ever I began to hear him complain about going to work. The grind of the job: long periods away, frequent calls for overtime, the unrelenting jetlag and the routine of flying same routes - China, India,