But Peter didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I was happy.

“Delirious, Peter. Absolutely delirious.”

“Why can’t you just be fucking happy, Andy?” He rubbed at his eyes. “Just be fucking happy.” And for a horrible second, I thought Peter was going to cry.

“Look, I am happy. We’ve gone to the ball. We’re having a nice time, aren’t we?”

“We’ve never really spoken about what happened at the manor. Not just … I mean all of it.”

“Accidents happened at the manor. Just accidents. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

“There’s something, something I should tell you—”

“I grew up,” I said. I don’t know why I thought that was the correct response. Everything was getting away from me. “I grew up!”

“Is it because of Joe?”

The reflex, never buried that deep, surfaced in one white-hot second: I curled my fingers round the little bottle and lashed out with my fist, catching Peter on the brow.

Horrible. Horrible. I took off along one of the paths. I could hear him calling for me. Saying he was sorry. My breath was all wrong, sawing in and out, and I heard myself crying, distantly crying, the sound of a woman in distress. Someone should help that woman, I thought.

Emerging from the park, I found myself stumbling under the faded neon of the streetlamps in front of Buckingham Palace. Further on, there were guards up by the gates. The palace looked like an enormous wedding cake, white and clean and gleaming; a wedding cake or a doll’s house, a doll’s house built for a nation. I wondered which room the Queen was sleeping in? Or was she awake, peeping out from behind a curtain at the nocturnal subjects of her realm? I wondered if we ever kept her up nights with the worry of us.

There were steps up on the left. I sat down on them, or sprawled. The Mail was missing a tremendous opportunity for an upskirt pic.

Joe had been my mother’s last boyfriend. He’d made my life hell from the age of thirteen to fourteen, before going out one night in his car and never coming back. Joe was the reason I couldn’t stand Midlands accents and disliked beards and never took unlicensed cabs, in case one day I got in and Joe’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Joe was why I would never have a dog, because you owned a dog and put it on a lead, you told it what to do, and made it love and fear you, and that sort of thing was up Joe’s street, not mine.

When Peter arrived, I was gazing up at the palace facade, working out if it was possible.

“Easy.”

“What?” He sat down beside me and gently put my bag in my lap.

“To climb.”

“Think you could still do it?”

“Maybe not in these shoes.”