For some time after she had gone, Anna sat at the table with her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to do or think next. Outside the huge windows of Carlucci’s, rain poured down through the sunshine, turning Farringdon – for the first and last time, you imagined – into a romantic film of itself. People hurried by, laughing; Anna watched them until the rain stopped. Across the road, an optician’s sign blinked and shifted: her eyes followed that. When the coffee machine hissed, her head turned that way. She listened to the people at the table next to her. Other people went in and out of the doors. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind her, laughing and shrieking. People never seem to grow up or change, she thought. After about half an hour, Marnie came back and said she was sorry, and went off again to work. Anna took the tube to Waterloo and was home by midday.

She went out into the garden to have lunch and found that in her absence vegetation had filled the beds at the base of the summerhouse again. It was taller this time. Thick bright green rubbery stems wove about in the sunshine, almost as if they were moving, ending in flowers like trumpets or Tiffany lampshades. At the base of the tangle sprouted those unearthly copper poppies; and on the earth between their stems, gelid organs in rose and pastel blue such as the cat brought in nightly. Small birds flew out of the vegetation, all colours but all single-coloured – birds from a child’s rag book, they peeped at Anna with their heads on one side. The summerhouse itself seemed to fall away upward in a distorted perspective, the parts of it leaning together as if they had been propped there loosely and abandoned, dilapidated yellow lapboard like a drawing of itself, looming against a sky too blue. She dragged open the door like someone determined to get to the bottom of things, but inside it was just a shed in anyone’s garden – dusty, hot, full of slowly bursting boxes, layered spiderwebs and a kind of archaeological time. Gardening things. Unused things. Things of Tim’s or Marnie’s, markers of the fads and bad decisions of long ago: a rolled poster here, too brittle to unroll ever again; there a small lay figure, its limbs arranged to represent a Degas dancer. Suddenly she was bloody sick of it. She could no more manage it than Marnie’s mystifying behaviour at Carlucci’s. She took her lunch back to the house, binned it and went to the de Spencer Arms instead. There she came across the boy with the dogs, without his dogs. He was sitting at a table as far away from the building itself as he could manage, his arms wrapped round one knee and his donkey jacket bundled up beside him.