Putting my face closer to the light box, it is like looking at the night sky, if you imagine you’re looking at it through a very tiny window or maybe a skylight in an attic. Or through two windows, because what we’ve got here are two bits of the night sky that aren’t necessarily next to each other. I’m not sure how I feel about him meddling with the universe. It doesn’t seem ethical. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my dress. ‘What star sign am I?’ I ask him brightly.

He looks up, frowning. ‘What?’

‘My star sign. Have a guess,’ I encourage him. I scoop up and shake my Lauren Bacall hair then let it fall over one eye. ‘The hair is a clue.’

‘Virgo.’

‘You’ve already said that! Virgo? Why would a Virgo have hair like mine? It’s a mane! I’m nothing like a Virgo. I’m a Leo!’ I nudge his foot. Charlatan.

‘Good for you,’ he says cheerfully.

I look at him doubtfully. He seems a down-to-earth kind of person and not the kind of guy who’d be selling myths about horoscopes.

‘Can I ask, do you believe in this kind of thing, star signs and stuff?’

‘No,’ he says.

‘Eh? Oh.’

‘You?’ he asks.

‘No! Per-lease. Of course not.’ That would make Mick and me completely incompatible, because he’s a Scorpio, like my mother. ‘I mean, obviously I read my horoscope, who doesn’t? But I don’t believe in it as such. It’s just for fun, isn’t it?’ I’m expecting him to argue the case for the defence, but he looks at me impassively and doesn’t reply, and I worry I’ve offended him. ‘Obviously, I don’t know the science behind the constellations,’ I add. ‘I mean, what’s the point of knowing about the stars?’

‘Navigation?’

‘Oh, navigation,’ I reply as if it goes without saying.

He takes a cloth out of his pocket and as he wipes my fingerprints off the wood, he says, ‘Luckily, Fern Banks, not everyone is cynical like us.’

Cynical? I don’t know where he’s got the idea I’m cynical.

As he polishes the Perspex, which is as blue as his eyes, he says, ‘It’s nice to believe in something, though, isn’t it? Everyone likes a guarantee; the belief that things are meant to be and they’re not just random occurrences. It’s good to believe that you’re destined to meet that person for a reason – the reason being true love, right? Otherwise …’

‘Otherwise what?’

He looks at me from under those dark, straight eyebrows. ‘It could be any man, couldn’t it? Any man with a decent income.’

Now that is cynical. Despite the stops and starts, I feel I’ve been keeping up with the conversation up until right now, when suddenly he seems to be talking about something else entirely.