She tilted her head. ‘No, I’m not married.’

It had been his idea to move on, some time later, after enough drinks had been consumed that the stairs on the way out of the bar seemed steeper than when they arrived.

Outside, it was still light, the sky swollen with heat and toxins; when she asked Ivan the time, he told her it was nearly six.

‘Shit,’ she said and he looked taken aback.

Recovering herself, she added, ‘It’s just that I left my things at work, and it’s too late to get them. I just need to make a call.’

Moving away from him, she let her hand hover for a moment over Tom’s number, before opening a new text message instead.

She was drunk. Even if she hadn’t intended to continue onwards with Ivan, she would need to stop and eat before she got home. That was how she justified it to herself as she typed, as if it was still not a done deal: Have to go to a work leaving drinks, won’t be too late.

She was still dithering about whether to send it when she heard Ivan moving behind her and hurriedly added Gx. Send. And then it was done.

‘So you grew up in London?’ he asked as the waiter poured the wine, a pressed white napkin folded over his forearm.

They had moved on by then to a sushi bar overlooking the city skyline, the sort of overly fashionable, eye-wateringly expensive place no one Tom knew would ever choose to come, which was exactly why she had suggested it. Still, if they were spotted there, she could claim to be taking a foreign businessman for a working dinner, in line with her job at the FCO. The job Tom still believed she had.

‘Yup,’ she took a sip of her wine. ‘North London. And how about you, where do you live?’

‘Everywhere, nowhere …’ he smiled. ‘My work means I move between London and Moscow, mainly, so I have an apartment there, and here I have a house in Richmond. You know it?’

A sense of relief ran over her; he was wealthy enough that he could easily reside in Hampstead proper, which was just a couple of miles from her house. The distance between their London worlds, her north to his south-west, was so pronounced that regardless of the physical space between them he might as well have said he lived in Tokyo.

‘Actually, I don’t know it at all, really. I’ve been once, maybe. But not for a long time.’

Their eyes met and her skin flushed so that she looked down. The effect of the gin and wine she had drunk seemed to have plateaued so that she was in a state of otherness that was beautifully calming.

‘You still live in North London?’