And there is another presence, too. A shadow at the back of the room, a black silhouette beyond the restaurant plate glass, already waiting.

I can smell him, even, although I haven’t put the awareness anywhere close to words. It’s still only premonition, a cloudy scent stirring in the chambers of my head, but he is there.

I don’t know it yet but it’s not an ordinary night.

Mel sighed. ‘You know, Adrian always makes me feel that he would like me to pat his cheek and say well done, or on the other hand don’t worry. He needs approval all the time. It’s tiring.’

‘Maybe the reassurance he really needs is that you’re not going to leave him.’

‘I can’t give him that assurance, unfortunately.’

We have been here before. We exchanged smiles.

‘Fucked up by my happy family history,’ Mel shrugged, only half joking.

Mel has never married. She is the middle child of five siblings, petted by two older brothers and idolised by two younger ones. Her father was a fashionable gynaecologist with a practice in Harley Street, and her parents had a house in the country as well as a Georgian gem in London. The Archers took their children skiing in Switzerland every winter and to Italy for summer holidays, although all this was many years before I knew Mel. Her widowed mother now lives in some style in South Kensington and her brothers do the kinds of thing that the sons of such families usually do. Mel insists that her childhood was so idyllic and her father such a wonderful and benign influence that she has never found a man or an adult milieu to match them.

All this I know about her.

‘What was your childhood like?’ she asked me, when we first met and we were finding out about each other.

‘Nothing like yours.’

And this was nothing less than the truth.

Mel’s dark eyebrows lifted.

‘It was ordinary,’ I lied. ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ I said, ‘except that my mum died very suddenly when I was ten. I lived quietly with my dad and then eventually I grew up.’

‘That’s very sad,’ Mel said warmly.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. I didn’t volunteer any more, because I don’t like to talk about my childhood. The past is gone and I am glad of it.

‘What are you going to do?’ I ask now, eating my ravioli.

‘About Adrian? End it, or wait for it to end, I suppose.’

‘You don’t love him.’

‘No. But I like him and I enjoy his company, quite a lot of the time.’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

She looked at me, tilting her head a little so that the ends of her curls frayed out against the background of the restaurant’s shiny turquoise wall. If I reached out my fingertips to touch, I thought, I would feel a tiny crackle of electricity.