‘I’m sorry, love,’ she says, her heart beating wildly. But when she looks back, the lights have changed, and the woman is pushing the pram across the road, safely moving her two children along.

Matthew holds his hand to his chest, refuses to let her have it again. Back at the flat, he retreats into his room, claiming not to be hungry. She sits on the patio, tired and unsettled by the afternoon’s events. Why isn’t Jake here with me? she wonders. After the news she has broken to him, surely he should be at her side, celebrating, or at least reassuring her.

Movement at the top of the steps makes her start. She has forgotten about Anton, about the earlier awkwardness, but now as she sees him retreating back into the house, having spied her on the patio, she feels a stab of shame at the hostility in her manner earlier.

‘No, wait,’ she calls, getting to her feet.

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll leave you be,’ he says, mustering his dignity in a way that makes her feel remorseful.

‘Anton,’ she says, coming forward and putting one foot on the step, looking up at him. ‘I wondered if I might have those pieces after all – the nocturnes?’

He begins to smile now and, after a moment’s hesitation, he holds out a hand to her, and as she presses her foot to the step and starts to climb towards him, she briefly wonders what spark of misplaced intuition had made her so reluctant and nervous. There’s no harm in him.

He stands back and opens the door so she can go in.

10

Anton

He’s in the sitting room, eating rashers and eggs in front of the TV, when she comes. On the screen, some scantily clad idiots, their faces impastoed with make-up, foxtrot and tango to the delight of the baying crowd. This is what passes for entertainment, these days. Charlotte would have liked it, he thinks. Anton remembers her rigid schedule of soap operas, her Changing Rooms fixation. ‘If it was up to you it would be David bloody Attenborough night after night,’ she’d sneered at him once. Accusations of cultural snobbery while she leafed through one of her magazines, the trashy ones she liked, with lurid headlines over the featured articles: Sex-mad Monster Raped Me In Front of Kids!; Stepdad Ran Off With Babysitter, Leaving Me With His 100k Debt! She’d sit at the kitchen table, a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray by her coffee, casually perusing these barbarous accounts, her face blank. ‘My little indulgence, Anton,’ she’d tell him, whenever he tackled her over it. ‘Not doing anyone any harm, is it? My one little weakness.’

A lie, that. There were other weaknesses. He remembers.