He reads her disbelief in the silence. She is better equipped than the women of his past. With Rachel, with Johanna, where the dialogue would continue, You don’t sound fine, followed by increased irritation on both sides, Jules knows that I’m fine is a closed portcullis, and that attempting to storm it will only lead to his unleashing the boiling oil. Even when his carriage is empty, he can no more be drawn into personal discussions on public transport than he would run naked through Tesco’s. Jules’s understanding of the portcullis is the reason she’s his wife.

Call me when you’re close to home, she says. I’ll come and pick you up. Did you get some lunch?

When he’s done with the pleasantries Jules requires to reassure herself he will not, any time today, become the cause of major transport delays on the Southeast rail network, he opens the diary again.

More God. A great deal about God. It is not his area of expertise. He was raised in the pretence of Christianity by parents who understood the practical benefits of Sunday School. To be found in church themselves only for christenings, weddings and funerals, they nevertheless appreciated the grounding in morality that a general familiarity with the Bible might distil. He remembers the Reverend Holinshead once giving him a chocolate digestive. He remembers the story of the Good Samaritan, colouring a lot of pictures of bearded people, making stiff leafy crosses for Palm Sunday, little else. Religion was a web of fables decorated with a weekly dose of singing and praying. But God – whatever that is – was not something he experienced. Nothing that might inspire awe occurred, if you exclude (and he had tried) the unholy view of the vicar’s young and miniskirted wife bending over to pick up crayons. He can only have been six, seven, but he felt stirrings. Perhaps his later sexual appetites might be blamed on that far-too-early awakening, so that all his sins might be traced back to the revelation of Abigail Holinshead’s untouchable buttocks. His inability to stay with Rachel – the very seed of Flora’s creation – or Johanna – the source of Tom’s fury. Ask and it shall be given you, Mrs Holinshead had whispered as she returned crayon after crayon to his pudgy hand. So perhaps he had asked for it. Nevertheless the young woman’s misjudged combination of apparel and motion had influenced him more profoundly than any nugget of religious instruction. God was simply a word, and the more copiously it was defined the more thoroughly it slipped his understanding. God the creator. God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God is love. What could any of it mean? The concept was nebulous, unknowable.