It seemed a peculiarly old-fashioned way to go about things. These days you expect everything to be distributed digitally, hard copy a thing of the past, though the envelope was delivered in a modern enough way, by courier service, even if driving up in a big van early in the evening to deliver nothing more than an envelope seemed a bit ODD.

The sender was unknown to me. I took the envelope with me into the kitchen, where I’d been enjoying a mug of tea when the doorbell rang. I sat back down and opened the thing, finding an only slightly smaller brown envelope inside. Ripping it open I tipped the contents onto the table, and it was when I saw the photographs that I realised an ill wind was about to blow.

The faded colour suggested age; the hairstyles suggested mid-80’s. One woman featured in every photo, reddish blonde, permed and outrageously big hair, smiling in almost every picture. She looked very different now, but I had no trouble identifying her as my wife as she had been roughly 30 years earlier. I’d like to be able to say that it was possible to date the photos by the style of clothes, but in truth my wife was wearing very little.

There was a sheet of folded paper in the envelope too. I unfolded it, fingers trembling slightly, to read the anonymous computer print-out.

Everyone has a past. I don’t know how much you know about Tina’s past, but the photos speak for themselves. There’s plenty more where they came from. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to jeopardize your wife’s new career move, any more than she does. I’ll be in touch.

That was all, but it was enough. The threat was as thinly veiled as Tina’s young body in the photos.

I spread the pictures out on the kitchen table, until a large portion of it was covered by a total of 22 graphic sexual images; I counted them.

The actual content of the pictures didn’t bother me. Does that sound strange? Well, like the note said, everyone has a past. My wife was 49, I was 54. We’d been married nine years. I had a messy divorce behind me, and three kids who my ex-wife refused to let me see, though she was happy enough to collect the child maintenance payments. By now the two eldest had reached the age of majority, and we were engaged in renewed bridge-building, but that’s a different story entirely.

It stood to reason that a woman of 40 would have a past. That past, Tina had led me to believe, was extremely uneventful. Ever since her teens, she’d been determined to be a celebrated author. She’d taken a series of low paid, dead end jobs so that she could concentrate on her writing. Writing meant everything to her, and she’d never married. It’s often the way that we don’t get what we want until we’ve almost given up on it. When I met my wife, she was coming to terms with the idea that her dreams wouldn’t come true. Nevertheless, I encouraged her to keep writing, if only because it gave her pleasure, and suddenly the pieces fell into place. That’s why Tina wasn’t at home this particular evening; she was up in London for a series of meetings in advance of the publication of her second novel, one which all concerned believed would constitute a massive breakthrough. A huge publicity drive was being planned; TV, radio, the internet, magazine articles, the works.

Which was why this note and these photos were doubly unsettling. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. That may have been the case in the past, for rock-n-rollers, but in our own squeaky clean age, particularly for someone with serious literary ambitions, I wasn’t at all sure.

Now, spread out before me was evidence that my wife’s life hadn’t been as uneventful as she’d made out. Exactly what it constituted evidence of, I wasn’t sure; these were graphic images shorn of context, but all the same.

Before we proceed, I need to make one thing clear. I did not feel particularly shocked or betrayed by the idea that my wife had a different kind of past to the one she’d told me of. Age and experience have taught me that if the past isn’t exactly a different country, with some influence on the present, it’s nevertheless the present that counts. There were certainly things in my past I was happy to leave behind and not dwell on, or discuss with anyone, even the one person in the world who was dearest to me. So I could easily understand why Tina had kept quiet about what appeared to be a very active sex life – closer examination of the photos suggested that each one was taken on a separate occasion.

After mulling things over I decided there was very little do be done until whoever had sent these photos had been in touch. I made no mention of them when I spoke to Tina later. I didn’t want to unsettle her when she still had important meetings ahead of her. There would be time enough to talk things over when she returned home.

Contact was made sooner than I expected. After work the next day, I strolled to the nearby car park and found a woman leaning against the boot of my car, arms folded. She was wearing long, black boots with black leggings, a purple puffa jacket done up against the cold. Scattered, medium-length hair with blonde highlights and carefully applied make-up couldn’t stop her looking a little the worse for wear. I asked the obvious question. “Who are you?”

“Let’s get in out the cold,” the woman said, tilting her head back.

Fine, I decided, unlocking the car for her to get in on the passenger side as I took my place behind the wheel. “Now will you tell me who you are?”

The woman didn’t turn her head to look at me, but stared straight through the windscreen at a row of small shops beyond the confines of the car park. “How did you like the photos?” she asked.

I wasn’t going to answer that. “What do you want?”

The woman took her time answering. “I’ve booked a hotel room a week on Saturday,” she said. “It’s a hotel in London. I want you to deliver Tina to me. Seven o’clock.”

She had her hand in a pocket, bringing out a small card as I said, “Why should I?”

“You’ll do it if you want what’s best for Tina,” the woman said, handing me the card. It contained the name and address of a hotel, along with a room number, date and time.

“What’s this all about? Do you want money?”

The woman gave a hollow laugh. “Money? No, I want something much better than that.”

She was unzipping her jacket as she spoke. I didn’t understand, and was trying to formulate my next question when she handed me a CD-ROM in its case. “You may find this interesting,” she said. “Maybe it’ll spark a few memories in Tina. I assume you’ll be talking to her about this.”

“What will happen if we don’t go along with this?” I tried.

“Work it out,” the woman snorted, re-zipping her jacket, before opening the door and getting out. “Tell Tina that Lulu sends her love,” she said, slamming the door behind her.

Tina had plenty to tell from her trip to London, and I listened intently, asked questions and displayed my enthusiasm. But there was no way the issue of the photographs and Lulu could wait for long. Not knowing quite how to broach the subject, in the end I just laid it out, the way you rip off a plaster quick in the hope that it won’t hurt.

My wife scanned the photographs and the note for a long time. “It was another life,” she murmured at last, looking away, as if she was afraid of what I might say. “I couldn’t tell you about these exactly. It all blurs together. They were pretty wild days.”

I decided not to ask what “wild days” involved, but I meant it when I said, “What’s past is past.”

Tina looked at me with relief. Then she said, “Except it’s not, is it? I thought I’d left all that behind. But now…”

The obvious question was, “All what?” But I had to tell about the meeting with the woman in the car park too.

“Lulu?” my wife said when I’d finished. She said it with such surprise that it was obvious it wasn’t what she’d expected.

“And who’s Lulu?”

My wife gave a little sigh. “There’s no point in holding anything back, is there?” she said.

I gave a little smile. “I promise not to hold anything against you,” I said.

That put Tina a little more at ease, but she insisted that we put the kettle on before she told me.

“Back at school,” she said nursing the hot mug, “Lulu and I were inseparable. I wanted to be a famous writer, and she wanted to be a famous photographer, possibly even a film-maker. After school we kept in touch, but we moved in opposite directions, so we didn’t see anything of each other. I took a job as a waitress in London, but it was a horrible job and it didn’t pay much. I didn’t necessarily need much money either, but I thought that if I could somehow make more for doing less, I’d have more time left over to write. Then I saw an ad somewhere. I forget where, probably in some magazine someone had left behind. Anyway, it said they’d pay good money for ‘the right girl’. I must have been terribly naïve, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. All I cared about was the promise of ‘good money’. In the ad it said you had to have a portfolio to show. That involved expense, but I was sure Lulu would help me out.”

“And she did?”

“Oh yes. Of course. She did it for free, on the understanding that I’d put in a good word for her if anything came of it. I don’t know if she was as naïve as I was at that point. I don’t think so. I think she just wanted to get ahead any way she could.”

“Presumably the photos turned out alright?”

My wife smiled. “They were magnificent. They were also very innocent, fully clothed. Nothing risqué. But magnificent. So I sent them off, and a short while later I was invited to a meeting. I had to go to this grotty little office in a Soho back alley.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Oh yes, it really was that clichéd. I met with a couple of really creepy men who left me in no doubt whatsoever that though they thought I was 'the right material’, I was expected to pose fully nude. That freaked me out; the idea of undressing in front of a stranger’s camera. But I wanted the money.” My wife paused. “So I said I was happy to pose nude, but only if it was Lulu behind the camera.”

“That must have taken some nerve.”

My wife screwed up her face. “I don’t think they were used to girls making those kinds of demands. They must have seen something in me, though, because eventually they agreed.”

“So what happened next?”

My wife sighed. “One thing led to another,” she said. “The money wasn’t as good as it might have been, but it was miles better than waitressing, for less work. I was called back for more shoots – and Lulu was so good that she always got to do the shoots. Whatever doubts I’d had evaporated. I got used to posing nude.” She looked down. “I started to enjoy it.”

“And things just spiralled?”

Tina nodded. “When they first asked how I felt about videos, I thought long and hard about it. First it was just solo stuff. Then it escalated. The first full shoot with a man was nerve-wracking, but it was incredibly exciting too. Lulu was behind the camera; she was always behind the camera.”

There was a long pause. We drained our mugs. “More tea?” I asked.

Tina shook her head. “I don’t want to lie,” she said. “I’m not going to give one of those sob stories about how I was tricked into this awful business. I learned a lot about myself along the way, about pleasure, about my body, about abandoning myself. Nobody forced me to do anything. I could have walked away at any time, but I didn’t want to. Not just because of the money, but because I really was enjoying myself.”

My wife looked apprehensively at me, as if afraid of what I might say. I laid my hand on hers and gave a light squeeze. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not one to judge. You know that.”

Tina nodded. “Anyway,” she said, pulling her hand away, “back then what was produced in the UK was pretty tame stuff by anyone’s standards. Lulu and I started making monthly trips to Amsterdam; working weekends we called them. In the end we chose to move there. It was easier. I never told you, but I actually speak Dutch fluently. That’s how I got that job in European sales, you remember?”

I smiled. “We learn something new every day,” I said. “Go on, say something in Dutch.”

My wife looked amused. “Clean or dirty?” she asked. Then she said something that was incomprehensible to me.

“Which means?”

“You’re the best husband a woman could wish for,” my wife said.

“You’ll make me blush,” I joked.

My wife looked down at the table. “I’m the one who should be blushing,” she said. Then she sighed, picking up the tale again. “By the time I turned 30, both Lulu and I were growing tired of working for other people. We set up our own company. Doing administration meant that I did fewer shoots, but we never lacked for others willing to give the business a try. We made a living, but not much more. People imagine there’s all this money sloshing about in pornography, but it’s like every business; a few huge actors and a lot of minnows. We were minnows, doing low-budget, shoestring stuff. I put all my writing ambitions to one side. I didn’t really believe I’d make it anymore, and I was making a living doing something I enjoyed. It beat the hell out of cleaning or factory work.” She shrugged. “I don’t know that there’s much more to tell,” she said. “When I was injured in the road accident and became hospitalized, it gave me time to think, and write again. I’m not sure if I would have gone back to the old life or not if I hadn’t met you when I was convalescing. In the end it all became simple. I wrote to Lulu, telling her I was pulling out of the company and that she could keep my share. I just didn’t care. Not that it was worth much. Fortunately my language skills landed me a good job, and, well, that was that.”

There was silence for a while. This time I did get up and put the kettle on. When I’d poured new mugs of tea, my wife said, “Tell me. If you’d known all this about me, would you still have married me?”

This was no time for dissembling. “I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t.” My wife kept anxious eyes on me. “But I do know that I’m not about to throw away years of happiness because of something that’s happened in the past. You’re my wife now, and we’ll get through this together.”

Tina breathed a long sigh of relief.

“So why is Lulu doing this?” I said. “Why now? Does she need money, do you think?”

“You said yourself she said she wanted something much better,” Tina said. Then after a little pause, “There’s only one way to find out.”

Something in her voice alerted me. “You want to go along with her demands? Why don’t you just call her?”

My wife gave a little frown. “It should be easy enough to find her number,” she said. “I mean I haven’t been in touch with her for years, but I assume she’s easy enough to find.”

“But you don’t want to,” I said, catching the reluctance in my wife’s voice.

“I just… It wouldn’t do any good. I know Lulu. If she’s set her heart on a plan, nothing anyone says will make her stray from it.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. To me it seemed very simple. If Lulu and my wife went way back, surely there must be some way of appealing to old friendship? But I also knew that my wife had a stubborn streak herself. If she had made up her mind that appealing to Lulu wouldn’t work, then I was unlikely to sway her, and I certainly wouldn’t do it by pushing her.

There remained the CD-ROM. Neither of us were in a hurry to see what was on it, though we knew that we must. Instead we had a bite to eat and tried to converse about normal things before setting up the laptop on the coffee table in the lounge and nestling next to one another on the couch in front of it.

There were five files on the disc, all of them named by a date. My wife sighed. “Might as well just try one,” she said, clicking on the icon named “3 April 1988”.

As the video began to play, I was once again struck by how odd it was seeing this Tina I’d never known. She had the same smile as in the photos, dressed in the standard cliché of a school girl’s uniform.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” my wife asked.

I shrugged. “I’ve seen the pictures, I’ve heard the story,” I said. “I’m hardly likely to be shocked.”

“Don’t bet on it,” my wife said.

That made me wonder, so instead I observed, “You look awfully young.”

“I was, what, 22,” Tina said. “I could still just about get away with impersonating a school girl without looking like mutton dressed up as lamb.”

“You look...