Fascinated by the woman’s grace – by her straight back and the perfection of her short, blunt fringe – Adeline leant forward in her seat so that she could make out the rest of her.

She was tall, her legs sheathed in a pair of very dark black stockings. She had slipped off her shoes and her feet, though not exposed, had a visible delineation equally as graceful. The whole picture, from the top of her head, over the slope of her breasts to her rounded stomach and the neat skirt fitting in an A line over her generous hips was perfection – she spoke to Adeline about what she, if she showed steadfast dedication to her personal upkeep, could hope to achieve.

But this was, perhaps, only a dream. She was forty-two. If she had had the inclination to be beautiful it would have demonstrated itself by now. Instead she was ordinary – in a perfectly nice way, but ordinary none the less.

There was flesh on her body where flesh was want to be but also spaces of such youthful smoothness you would be pressed to guess her real age. She had a pair of honest, coffee brown eyes and blonde hair which was progressively thinning as she aged, but which looked passable when she had it freshly bleached at the hairdressers. She was generally kind, prone to be a little romantic, sometimes deeply jealous, but rational enough to suppress any nasty urges should they arise.

In sum, she was a normal woman – a woman who married at an ordinary age but who, extraordinarily, chose not have her children. She looked at Alex who was asleep beside her in the plane seat and the reason why she chose not to have children was answered in his face.

Alex was five years younger, but may well have been thirty-two years her junior. He grew older but not wiser, more mature and yet  consistently prone to making mistakes. He gave Adeline a constant sense of impending disaster, which, Adeline had early realised, was not the right environment for a child.

So this made her distinct, she hoped. She fervently hoped that with the changing of social mores, her decision not to have children would be highly regarded. “How wonderful for you,” people would crow. “You didn’t buy into all that bullshit.”

She leant her head back against the headrest and allowed herself to have a little fantasy. In her fantasy, she was seated at an old distressed kitchen table which a group of warm and funny friends had taken from inside a rambling country house and placed in the sun. They sat about it, all of them at varying ages, and drank cold wine while eating sweet fruit throughout the day and well into the night. There were no children to disturb this reverie – just the camaraderie of some lovely people, mellow and content and free of responsibility.

It wasn’t a fantasy that could be prolonged. A tea cart rattled down the aisle and nudged her shoulder, causing Adeline to bump against Alex, who promptly awoke. His eyes, sleep crusted, turned in her general direction and there was, vaguely, a look in them as if for a moment he didn’t quite recognise her.

“Your wife,” she reminded him. He made a little sound of amused acknowledgment and closed his eyes again, returning to whatever infantile dreams would, no doubt, preoccupy him for the remainder of the flight.

Adeline turned back to the woman who was seated further down the aisle. She now had one long arm outstretched and was accepting a glass of red wine. Her lips were already a little stained red which indicated this wasn’t her first.

When she accepted the glass she shifted her right hand across her skirt and Adeline noticed that a piece of paper which had been laying on her lap slipped down on to the ground and rested underneath her chair by the feet of the person behind her. Adeline craved that paper – desired its knowledges and secrets. She wondered if she could, if she kept her eye on it, slink across at some point and slip it in her hand.

No one would notice. The lights had been dimmed and most of the passengers on the plane were in a state of semi consciousness. If she was discrete she could collect it. She could disguise it in a mistake of her own. She set her heart on doing it, voracious, suddenly, for the words the woman may have written.