It was in Paris that Jenny talked to me a little bit more about Jerome. Jerome was essentially a good person, that was her starting point. It wasn’t particularly what I wanted to hear but I listened more acutely when she told me again that he had been quite controlling of her at times. She told me that one of the things she liked about me was that I wasn’t like that, that I was more relaxed. It was true, I didn’t ask her where she went in the evenings when I was working in the Crown, who she was with, what she had eaten, how much she had drunk, but now I felt like she was interviewing me properly for the role of her boyfriend even though I already was her boyfriend, and had been for over a year, warning me about the things that she didn’t like. And in that moment I began to worry about where she did go in the evenings when I was working in the pub. I worried about who she was with, what she had eaten, what she had drunk, but I said she had nothing to worry about, I was relaxed, I trusted her, I said, and the smile on her face, the smile.

The sex between us was satisfying, not because we were in Paris, together, but because we were eating a lot and sipping on wine and Pernod and the sex was lazy and comfortable and Jenny talked to me afterwards as we lay in the white cotton sheets. I could love her and we could have sex but it was more than two unconnected events or emotions, it was more. Jenny would lie across my chest after the act and I would feel her hair on my bare skin and it felt like she had surrendered herself to me, totally, but it wasn’t a surrender in the sense that we’d been through any kind of battle. It was more a realization that she had allowed herself to be mine forever.