His attachment to Phoebe Griffin he regarded with a certain bemusement. On the face of it – and although her face was quite a pretty one, or so he considered it – she was not his type, not really.

He had met her first at a dinner at his Tante Evelyn’s house. He recalled that rainy night with a high degree of warmth, yet also with a faint sense of misgiving. By now, Phoebe and he had been ‘going out’, as the Irish said, for nearly four years. When he looked back over that time, he could find nothing substantial to regret or be resentful of, in Phoebe’s behaviour or his own. Phoebe was a modern young woman, and made no excessive demands on him, in terms of his time or of his emotions. She never used the word ‘love’ to describe what she felt for him, and he was grateful to her on that account. Which need not mean that she didn’t love him, or that he didn’t love her. But he set great store by restraint, in word as much as in deed.

The way he put it to himself was that they were together but free. He assumed Phoebe would agree with this formula, and therefore he had not deemed it necessary to test her on it. She was his girlfriend – another word that embarrassed him, but he could find no acceptable substitute – and he was fond of her. However, his work came first. He knew she knew that, because she had assured him of it. Or at least, he had assured her it was so, and she had not disagreed or raised an objection.

On the whole, then, he was content with the relationship, and saw no reason to alter it. Yes, there was that lingering question as to whether he should have waited in hope of finding someone more suited to his temperament. But he was not so naive as to imagine that there existed somewhere a person who would be for him the exact ‘Miss Right’.

He supposed he and Phoebe would marry, one day, but that day was still a hazily long way off. The fact was, he gave no more thought to the future than he, and his Tante Evelyn, did to the past. As a medical researcher, as a scientist, he saw himself as living wholly in the present. He often put it this way, in his talks with Phoebe – ‘I’m a being of the present tense’ – and her usual response was a smile. It didn’t trouble him that the smile at times struck him as enigmatic, or that it might, if he examined it closely enough, contain a trace of mockery. She was not difficult to comprehend, since she was driven by what drove everyone else, and how could he be mocked for characterising himself as a man of the moment?