I stared at him. Then I began to laugh. I laughed and laughed until I cried. And then when I cried, I found I couldn’t stop. My make-up dripped in black rivulets onto the cream leather, my nose began to run. Charlie shifted slightly in his seat. Then he stared out of the window at the lights of London, at the glitter of the night Thames and the majestic Tate Britain opposite, twiddling his ring.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually, as I began to calm myself, fishing out a monogrammed hanky and offering it to me. ‘Perhaps that was rather crass. I must say, though,’ he patted my leg through the thin silk of my crumpled green dress, ‘I’ve never found you so attractive. You’ve got a kind of vulnerability these days that I’ve never noticed before’.

I blew my nose loudly. ‘That you thought you could exploit, you mean.’

‘Hardly, darling. I’m not a predator.’ He stood now and reached for the phone. ‘Where’s that bloody cab?’

Charlie didn’t say goodbye as I fled into the lift, and he banged the door shut so hard behind me that it rattled in its frame.

The next morning, feeling hungover and rather queasy, I took Digby to Greenwich Park in an attempt to clear away the cobwebs of the previous night. I tramped up the hill to the Observatory and then across the wild and matted grass to look down on the city, seriously worried about the implications of rebuffing Charlie, especially in the circumstances. I was distracted by the delighted squeaks of a tiny blond boy in an enormous green coat, kicking through the autumn leaves beneath the chestnut trees. The top layers of the pile were a gorgeous mixture of golds and reds, russet and shades of orange. But underneath, as Digby joined the toddler to scavenge there for treasure, there was just nasty rotting mulch. I called the dog away as the boy’s father scooped him up, and wandered home again.

Opening my father’s gate, I stopped in my tracks, confused. Had I got the wrong house? I stopped to listen, a sickening pain searing through my stomach.

For the first time in years, the piano was being played. My mother’s image twirled through my foggy head, and for a peculiar moment suspended in the midst of memory, I thought she might actually be in there.

I dropped the newspapers I’d just bought and flew up the path. Someone was playing the piano and my flesh was crawling with loneliness and need and the knowledge that no one was here to catch me any more, to salve the wounds.