"From September, it will be just the two of us at home"

MY husband and I are outside the house, trying out a pair of matching sun-loungers that he’s just bought.

He says he chose the ones with the floral fabric out of deference to my aesthetic, which might make me feel obliged, out of deference to his feelings, to like them. But the loungers are hot pink and egg-yolk yellow, which would push me past the point of doing anything out of deference to his feelings, even if 27 years of marriage hadn’t already put paid to that sort of nonsense.

“What’s wrong with pink and yellow? You’ve got pink and yellow all the way down the path,” he says, and points down at the garden, where I have ameliorated the dustiest of pinks and the palest of yellows with dense green foliage and the white of a thousand Oxeye daisies.

Colour is not his thing; he is out of his depth and he knows it. But being out of his depth or — to put it another way: wrong — does not come easy to him.

Some women will defer to a man’s opinions on a topic when he’s obviously wrong, so as to avoid bruising his delicate ego. But since there is no delicate ego at issue and I am not one of those women anyway, I tell him the chairs are absolutely hideous.

“Comfy though,” he says cheerfully, settling into his chair with the paper.

I stand over mine, debating whether or not to order him back to the shop but the sun is shining, and the house, empty of offspring, is uncannily quiet. I have a book in my hand so fascinating I’d read it standing on my head if I had to, so I settle into the hot pink and egg-yolk yellow without looking at it, and gaze up at the blue.

“This is what it’s going to be like from September onwards,” he says.

I stare at the Grecian sky, then at him, unable to account for this odd, meteorological soothsaying.

“We’re going to have an empty-nest,” he explains. “From September, it will be just the two of us at home. For the first time in 27 years. Do you think we should prepare for it?”

“Prepare how?” I say, squinting at him with suspicion.

“Maybe we should find some areas of common interest before it happens,” he suggests, putting down the paper.

“How long is it going to take for you to stop trying to get me to like tennis?” I say. “I’m never going to join that bloody club, empty nest or no empty nest.”

“Well what about walking...”

“Fast, one hour tops and on the flat,” I say, “so you can forget Carrantuohill.”

We read in silence for half a minute.

Putting down the paper again, he says, “Birding. What about birding?”

“What’s birding?”

“Bird-watching. I’ve already got binoculars.”

I regard him closely. I think he’s being serious, though I can’t be absolutely sure.

“With or without white socks and sandals?”

“Without.”

I consider birding; could be worse, I think, could be dogging.

“Yes,” I say, “birding it is. Though we seem to have survived perfectly well without areas of common interest so far.”

“That’s true,” he concedes, dropping his head into the newspaper again.

“Good book?” he says, after another 30 seconds.

“Very.”

“What’s it called?”

“A Harem Within.”

“What’s it about?”

“True story of a childhood in a Fez in the 1940s,” I say, “told by an Islamist woman called Fatema Mernissi, who grew up in a domestic harem.

“She left it eventually and became a socialist feminist writer.”

“Oh,” he says, with that highly distinctive jittery look he gets when he feels he’s coming perilously close to the edge of crashing boredom.

“What are you reading?” I say, waiting — with my highly distinctive jittery look — to be told something about Messi — a genius — or some Liverpool striker who bit an Italian defender and got a four-month ban.

But instead he says, “The family section from the Guardian. The one you’re always on about. Never read it before. An article about empty-nesting. I think it’s making me nervous. Can you pass me the sports section?”

“Gladly,” I say passing it over. “You’re making me nervous too.”