It was after the fight with Grace. We sat on our bench at the Horniman and started again. Something had shifted in our relationship and we began to like each other again. At first we went for walks again in the Horniman grounds. Then later we explored more and more of London. We shopped in markets on cobbles behind Borough. We hung around Soho cafés and Whitechapel bagel shops and on hot summer nights we’d chew through hot salt-beef and rye. We went like tourists to Greenwich to see where Mean Time started. Every weekend gave us another chance to both escape and dive into the world. When I remember it now, I remember it imperfectly, memory filtering out the flies and grit of ordinary happy life. When I remember how we attacked our new lives, I see only the stylised memory. Diving into the waves and always coming up glistening. Camden Market, Portobello Road, St Paul’s Cathedral.

It wasn’t long before we began to look for a real home. Not the rented extravagance that we’d been living in near work, but something we could bed our roots into. Something that was capable of anchoring us, harbouring us, together.

Money was no object, or no obstacle at least. Work was so good at that time that it’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there to see it, just how idiotic it was. We had so much spare cash that it was unthinkable that we wouldn’t just buy something outright. So, we began to save. At first just a slice of extra cash diverted into a savings account. But then, after the first few thousand pounds, the lunacy of it hit us.

‘Well, what else shall we do with it? I’m not sticking it into one of your funds,’ Grace said, over takeaway Chinese food one evening. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Ra-ra skirt. Black tights. Her hair shining a clover-honey blonde in the low light. She touched her shell pendant absently.

‘Not the stock market. I’m not saying that, but the market’s about to become quite volatile. That’s what the modelling is telling us at any rate.’

‘What, then?’ she said, rubbing her chopsticks against each other to remove the splinters.

‘Maybe vary the portfolio a bit?’ I said. ‘We could take a selection of low-risk bonds maybe and you know, let the money work.’

‘No way. Inflation risk too high,’ she said through a mouthful of rice. ‘Not to mention the currency risk. And we’d be tying it up to the maturity date however long in the future.’

Currency was really Grace’s thing and I trusted her instincts.

‘But we’d get gilts, obviously, so there’d be no currency risk. It’s all sterling,’ I said.