‘But it is. It is. I badly needed the pretence, you were more mature, you held it all together.’

That was true when she was with him, when she was there, but not after she came here, not when she was repeatedly failing the PLAB – failure a new experience, an alien state – and the children were so small. It had taken all her strength to crawl her way out of that, to turn around and start from scratch, then make something of herself.

He went on praising her abilities. ‘Remember the time when we went to Saint Catherine?’ This was the college trip she had organised. Forty students, many of whom had never been away from home. She had been too distracted by her leadership role to appreciate the place, to be truly in awe. The burning bush seen by Prophet Moses, the place where he received the Ten Commandments. She remembered rocks the colour of sand, the way the monastery nestled in the gorge. Now she was standing in a monastery too, one that was converted and secularised, made frivolous and lucrative unlike that living, working monastery up in the rugged hills of Mount Sinai.

After she put the phone away, she felt as if she had time-travelled. A part of her had been with him in a firm and complete way. The years scrunched against each other, a folded fan, slim and easy to hold up, to control. To put away? To put away all these years: David and the children, the work and the friends, a whole life she’d built. Impossible. But for a short time she had been sucked into a connection with the past, electrified by every word said, by every word implied and not spoken. She had felt all the clichés – alive and rejuvenated. Even now her body hummed, the body that had never left the loch.