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sent e-mail messages? Surely she wasn’t the first person to send a hugely embarrassing note to the wrong address?
    At first, and this seemed amazing to Lizzie later, she wasn’t all that perturbed. She’d felt sheepish, yes, and she could remember suppressing the urge to bang her head against the wall. But she certainly hadn’t panicked. As the day wore on, though, and she waited in vain for James to call in for his daily chat — a ritual he’d never skipped in the six years of their marriage — she began to feel distinctly uneasy.
    Every now and then, she’d nod decisively and go over to the phone. Once or twice she even dialed the number of his office in Chipping Norton. But they had a tradition that she never called him at work in case she interrupted a meeting with clients or caught him at some crucial creative moment. She only phoned him in emergencies — when she was in labor, if a child knocked out a tooth on the playground, that sort of thing.
    She didn’t want him to think this was an emergency.
    If only he’d just ring, she’d be able to say carelessly, “Did you get the e-mail? Isn’t it a riot? I bet I scared the pants off you just for a moment.”
    As the afternoon dragged itself toward children’s tea time and no call came, Lizzie’s mind began to race. The situation was beginning to look less promising with every tick of the clock. How on earth was she going to get herself out of the dog box this time?
    By six she had a plan.
    She put the children to bed a good half hour earlier than usual, warning them that if they dared come downstairs on any pretext whatsoever, they would never watch
Noddy
again. Then she launched into action.
    She’d decided that the only way to give the lie to the awful e-mail was to prove to both her husband and herself that she still fancied him rotten.
    This should be easy enough to do, she reckoned. Yes, she was a bit out of practice, but she was sure she could still do the dance of the seven veils or something similar. Better set the scene with the old wine-soaked candlelit dinner.
    If she’d had her wits about her, she’d have organized a babysitter and booked a table at a restaurant. Instead, she found herself rooting through chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and French-cut green beans in the freezer. At last she came upon a box of rock-solid green Thai chicken, bought from the local let-us-cook-for-you-we-do-it-much-better shop. Perfect. She managed to excavate it from its box, then dropped it with a clunk into an authentic-looking clay casserole dish before sliding it into the oven — so much more romantic than microwaving it seven minutes before they were due to eat. She didn’t have time to be messing with rice; they’d have to make do with defrosted naan bread. Then she jammed two bottles of white wine into the freezer before dashing off to have a bath, shave her legs, pluck her eyebrows, cover up the unicorn pimple, apply perfume to her pulse points, smear body glitter all over, and wind herself up in plastic cling wrap.
    She’d read once in a glossy magazine, in the sort of article that gives advice on how to seduce your man and spice up your love life, that no red-blooded male can resist the sight of a woman wrapped in a skin-tight strapless dress, especially one that is totally transparent, a la the Emperor’s new clothes. Such a dress, the magazine advised, was easily constructed from items you already had on your kitchen shelves, namely, plastic cling wrap and more plastic cling wrap.
    Apparently, if you looked both dressed to the nines (strappy heels, lots of makeup) and naked at one and the same time, you were guaranteed to drive your man into a frenzy, the likes of which you’d never witnessed in all the years of your marriage.
    Creating a dress from a roll of cling wrap was surprisingly difficult, single-handed, and the results were . . . interesting rather than seductive, as she’d been led to expect. To her own critical eyes, she looked like