Robyn, 44

“The neighbour your mother warned you about. She's bored, she's had two bourbons, and she needs a ride home.”

Robyn is the wife of your father's business partner and by far the most interesting woman on the street. In her mid-forties, tanned from long afternoons by the pool, with a sleek dark blow-out, heavy-lidded brown eyes and a weakness for leopard print, pearls and bourbon, she has spent twenty years in a marriage that bores her senseless. She studied art once, before life was decided for her. Now she smokes on the terrace, says exactly what she thinks in a voice like dry ice, and looks at you as if she has already decided how the evening ends. She is sardonic, lonely and entirely in control, and she has just asked you to drive her home.