But he has missed her. At times, over the years. On lonely days, the reels of their early courtship had unspooled in his mind as if he was watching them projected on to the blank wall of his cell. It is harder, now that he’s home, to locate those early happy memories. The later ones carry a heavier smell, rank with the stench of betrayal.

‘Sometimes when I enter a room in my house,’ he tells Leah, ‘I’m sure that I can smell her perfume.’

‘Today must be especially difficult,’ she remarks, and when he looks at her, confused, she clarifies: ‘Your birthday.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘Sometimes it’s the days of celebration that can be the harder ones,’ she says, and he knows from the clear manner of her delivery that she speaks from experience.

Anton has always preferred the company of women – the way they move, the way they speak. He is more at ease in their company than in that of his own gender. It was one of the aspects of his incarceration that he found hardest to bear – the boredom and brutishness of all-male society. Since his release, he has been aware of women in the street, in the park. He has spoken to them while buying his groceries, or conducting a transaction in the bank. But this is the first time he has been alone with a woman in almost twenty years. It lends the encounter a particular resonance for him, makes him acutely aware of every word spoken, every gesture made.

There is something indefinably gentle about this young woman’s presence. What he’d spied from a distance – a languid grace – now reveals itself as a softness, an empathy that is utterly captivating. Something has happened to her, he thinks.

‘I’m sorry your friend let you down,’ she tells him.

‘Thank you. But these things happen.’

‘What about your son, Mark?’

She means well, but the mention of this presses against the tender spot of his disappointment. And he realizes, too, that he would rather be here with Leah than sitting in Finnegans with Phil or making awkward conversation with Mark.

‘He has his own life to live. And I prefer not to go out of the house, not if I can avoid it.’

‘Why not?’

How to explain the wave of nausea that comes over him every time he steps outside his front door? How it is all too much – the unfamiliarity of places he had once frequented, the oppressive clamour of other people’s voices, the strangeness of everything from the self-service checkouts at the supermarket to the way the human race now seems inseparable from its mobile phones. He would be ashamed to admit these thoughts and feelings to anyone who doesn’t know what it’s like. But in a space made possible by the darkness, by the lull of her voice, he says: ‘Because I am afraid.’