Newcastle was full of people and friendly. They walked arm-in-arm between the art galleries, crossing the Tyne by the Blinking Eye Bridge. Then on to the restaurant. Kate could smell the leather of Stuart’s jacket and the city, sweet and enticing, all around her. Mardle only smelled of salt and fish and seaweed, and there was no adventure in that. The restaurant was tiny and cramped and they sat in the window, looking out onto a steep cobbled street. Stuart joked with his friend, the owner, about the background music and ordered a bottle of wine. Then he took her hand across the table. The candle threw odd shadows across his face and for a moment she felt that she was sitting with a stranger. There was a heady excitement in that too.

‘I’m so sorry about Margaret,’ he said. ‘I know you were close.’

She was disappointed. She’d hoped for something more romantic. At least a declaration that he was as obsessed with her as she was with him. She was sick of talking about Margaret, sick of the drop in her stomach every time the realization hit her again. She just wanted to forget about it. Move on.

‘It was dreadful,’ she said. Kate didn’t quite know how to explain out loud how she felt. ‘I don’t want to sound callous, but in a sense I have more options now. I can think of selling the house, for example. I know we’ve talked about it before, but really it would have been impossible when Margaret was still alive.’

‘A new start,’ he said. It was almost as if he was talking to himself, playing with the words, turning them into a riff.

‘Yeah.’ She found that she was grinning.

‘I could take early retirement,’ he said. ‘I’ve been teaching for long enough.’ He poured more wine. His face was flushed.

‘What would you do?’ She couldn’t imagine him as a pensioner, weekly walks in the hills, watching television in the afternoons, though the thought of him being free during the day when the kids were out of the house excited her again.

‘I’d manage your career – properly, not just the odd gig, like at the moment,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘We’d get you writing again. Performing. If you sold the Harbour Street house we could get somewhere smaller in town – a new start for the kids too, a better school. See if we can persuade Ryan to stay on for A levels.’

She thought that he’d been thinking of this for a while. ‘Are you saying that we should move in together straight away?’