Paul’s room is white-painted and neatly arranged, like the rest of his flat. There are belongings laid out, lines of books and a few framed photographs, but they have an almost marginal air, as though he doesn’t look at them with full attention. The place gives an impression of being only half occupied and I sense that it also stands as a metaphor for his life.

‘I’m always waiting and watching for something to happen,’ he told me earlier. Then he added, ‘Maybe something has, now.’

‘Does it annoy you when people ask what you are thinking?’ he asks. I can hear his voice outside us both, in the common air, but also the matching vibration from within his ribcage. It’s like being given a private piece of him that seems more intimate than sex.

‘No.’ I smile. My mouth pulls minutely against the skin of his chest.

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘About how tender this is. And how natural and important it feels for skin to touch skin. It’s as though some vital element that’s essential for us to be happy can only be absorbed directly through our pores.’

‘An osmotic process.’

‘That’s right.’ A memory is stirring insistently in my mind. ‘I was thinking of my father and mother, too.’

The old man is still stalking me. But suddenly my mother is there with him, as if this act of pairing with Paul has opened another door, allowing couples instead of just broken-off individuals to pass through the eye of memory’s needle.

‘Go on,’ he says. He settles his arms round me.

‘We went to the coast for the day. It must have been Brighton, I think. I can remember walking on the pier and seeing the sea a long way down through the chinks in the decking.’

It was a bright, windy day. Strands of hair blew across my mother’s face – light-brown hair the colour and softness of mouse fur. (Did I think that then, or am I overpainting the shade and texture now?) She laughed with her head back, picking the threads away from her mouth. She was wearing lipstick, which she didn’t usually do, a wide belt that emphasised her hips and canvas peep-toe sandals powdery with whitener. She looked pretty, but my father was the magnificent one.

He was tall and his laugh was as loud as the waves breaking under the pier columns. The other couples and families who passed turned to look at him but he didn’t notice them. He only noticed us. ‘My two princesses,’ he said.

I had been walking between them, holding their hands. I must have been six or seven. I wanted them to swing me, but my mother said I was too big and heavy for that now.