Before we moved into Clifton we had the house rearranged, a few walls knocked down, stained glass restored, radiators and Aga installed. The usual. The things you did in the early nineties if you had money. I built the deck and the kitchen, replaced some floors. Sonja chose the colours. I know that she was thinking of me when she made her choices because she chose well, she chose quietly. I would come home and find the hall wheat and terracotta, the bedroom linen and coffee. It is a house of long, deep sash windows and floating fabrics. It is a house large enough to dance in. A house large enough to forget each other in.

As the complacency deepened, so the routines of our lives became more ingrained. I have always woken early, always woken to the memory of my face turning red, worried into wakefulness by the scars I cannot see. I wake in the cast-iron bed made for us by Ian — a madness of curls and spirals, wood bursting from unexpected metal curves. All around me there is quiet space and this is Sonja’s masterstroke, creating a house where silence is what is deliberately sought rather than a given. In one corner stands a French-polished, walnut-veneered wardrobe with a smoky, copper-tinted mirror. In two corners of the room are the doughty elm chairs that I salvaged from a skip, stripped and restored. That is all.

I ease myself from the bed, careful not to wake Sonja, and go down to the kitchen to squeeze fresh juice and grind coffee. As the coffee filters I have my shower and dress in check shirt, jeans and Doc Martens — there is, after all, comfort in cliché. (There is comfort, too, in complacency.) I collect the papers from the mat and pour the coffee as Sonja stumbles down the stairs, unwashed, always amazed to be awake. We exchange a floury, sour kiss and she turns, her eyes still puffed half-shut, to the juice and gulps it down. In the summer we go out on the deck with our coffee, in the winter we sit by the Aga in the kitchen. Sonja turns on Radio 4 for the Today programme, apparently. We divide the paper and read. I light my first cigarette when I’ve finished my first coffee. For half an hour we sit and eat the breakfast provided by the deli the night before, pecan and maple twists or brioches or almond Danish. Then I fold the main section and sit back, looking at the blonde, tousled crown of Sonja’s head. This is the signal for her to smile vaguely, look up and, in recent years, take off her glasses

‘So — what are your plans for the day?’ she asks.

I bore her with the on-going sagas and demands of the jobs we are doing. It might be the stock we’ve had stolen, a bounced cheque, a stonemason caught smoking a joint on the job. Then I say, ‘And you?’