At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

And then about six months ago, something started happening to me.

At first it was just that my waistband was tighter. I am eighty. I put it where you put everything at eighty.

Then my good trousers would not do up at all. Then none of them would.

By about the August I had gone over entirely to loose dresses, because my middle had got noticeably bigger and nothing else would go round it.

And by the autumn I could not bend down to the bottom oven shelf, and I could not sit comfortably in my own armchair, and I was sleeping propped on four pillows.

I told myself it was my age about four hundred times.

And then on a Sunday in the October, Soraya said something.

She is fifty-two and she has been married to my Dov since 1998 and she has never once in those years asked me a direct question about my body.