They chatted about his shift as she thought of how to say it. She filled the gaps when he fell silent; this was one of the things she did, a role that fell to her in their division of labour. Being talkative by nature, she normally didn’t mind. She explained the machinations of the prac rotations in her program. The details were intricate, Machiavellian even, although later she would forget how intense the whole thing was, the need to jostle for a place in a cut-throat competition.

‘Don’t let them rattle you, Pheebs,’ he said. ‘It’s mind games 101. Get what you need, get out. Simple as that.’

No one got past Jimmy’s guard. He was the son of a gambler, and this gave him the advantage of an impassive poker face. A second-generation poker face, he sometimes joked.

Their usual M.O. when she met him after work was to go to her room, in halls at Goodenough. They’d walk past several bookshops, and often stopped to browse. He usually dragged her into Emerson’s Book Arcade, a triple-storey townhouse that stayed open the latest and was filled to the rafters with second-hand books of all ages. Jimmy had grown up in London but his family was from Shanghai, and it was his habit to skim the Chinese-language section, running a finger along the spines. The shop bored Phoebe, who liked new books. Tonight she was glad when a brief return of the rain gave her an excuse to hail the bus and skip the session in Emerson’s.

‘Wasn’t that weird?’ she said cheerfully when they were safely on board. ‘The shower came out of nowhere. The clouds looked like they were clearing.’ She heard herself talking, she knew her chit-chat was inane, and from his distracted look she could see he had tuned out. She clamped her mouth shut, thinking, Well, why don’t you carry the conversation for a change? If I didn’t have to do this I could seem enigmatic too.

She wanted to tell him there and then, get the breakup done and sorted, but no – there were too many people around them, swaying silently in the aisle, and anyway it would be awful in the overly bright lighting from the light-sabre-style tubes that ran along the ceiling.

Did ambience matter for a breakup? It shouldn’t, yet it did. Well, she couldn’t help it if she had standards.

They got off after a few stops, at Lamb’s Conduit Street. They walked until they reached the edge of Coram’s Fields, where an iron picket fence marked out the perimeter and a sign pointed the way to the Foundling Museum. When they reached the brown-brick college, she turned and said abruptly, ‘I think we should break up.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Okay. That’s probably a good idea.’

‘Really?’