‘I’m afraid of wanting him too much. I’m afraid I’ll love him so much that I’ll die if some night I wake up and he isn’t here. I told him to stay away for a few days, so I can slow everything down.’

I could imagine how it might feel. Mel was so used to being in control of her own life and the men she spent her time with. She had been so certain that none of them would ever measure up to her father, let alone assume a bigger role. This late exposure to the paradox that love made you cravenly vulnerable as well as invincible must indeed be frightening.

‘Can you understand what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of Stanley. For a while, after he had gone, I did indeed feel that I would prefer to die rather than live without him.

‘I don’t think Jasper understands.’

‘No, perhaps not. But aren’t you putting yourself in a lose-lose situation, Mel? You’re afraid of the loss so you go right ahead and precipitate it, have I got that right? This way you end up without him, whereas the other way you never know. And I can’t see Jasper going down a similar route. Can you?’

She laughed now. ‘No. He’s so positive.’

And confident, I thought. That was one of his attractions. ‘Listen to me. This is my advice. Go ahead and risk it. Open your heart up to whatever is going to happen. It might be the greatest passion since Antony and Cleopatra.’

‘Or whatjacall’em, thingy and thingy in Sleepless in Seattle.’ Mel had a surprising fondness for soppy films. When she was ill, she liked to lie in bed and watch Love Story. I had always thought that she allowed herself to be sentimental in her imagination and stayed tough in real life.

‘Or on the other hand it could just break your heart. But it’s better to have tried it, isn’t it, than never to have been there at all?’

It was so easy to give advice, I thought, and I was the worst exemplar of what I preached. What passionate risks did I take nowadays, in my tidy life with my anxieties about children and work, and my safe web of old friends? And yet my skin did feel thinner now, and the scented fumes were rising in my head. Maybe everything was changing. Maybe I wouldn’t be content any more to let Mel do the living, with her red lipstick and electric hair and appetite for everything that was new, while I sat on the sidelines safely and watched her.

Mel sighed. ‘I know all that, Sade. But I’m still scared.’

‘If you weren’t afraid, it would mean that he wasn’t important enough to you anyway.’