She’d been telling me about her theory for the last few days, without actually telling me what the theory was. If she ever wrote a self-help book, she said, it would make a fortune: the theory was simple, and perfect.

‘Hit me with it!’ I said. 31

‘Ok,’ she said, ‘here goes.’ She took a gulp of her drink and set her glass aside, then moved aside the tea light too.

‘People,’ she said, leaning in across the little table, ‘tell you everything.’

I waited.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘People – tell you – everything.’

‘People …’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tell you everything. All you need to know. Right away. Without your even asking.’

‘Ok,’ I said.

‘Just think about it. A time when you’ve met someone, for the first time, and think back to what they said. People will literally tell you what you need to hear. The whole relationship is already there. And you just need to choose to hear it.’

‘Huh,’ I said.

‘You see?’ she said, and she sat back, pleased.

‘Hang on,’ I said.

It had been my first week at the archive, but he wasn’t there – there’d been some conference, something. On the Thursday evening the other three members of the team and I had gone to join him at Toynbee Hall, where there was a drinks reception that had spilled out into the courtyard. I’d scrounged a menthol from some random girl, then realised he was standing beside me, watching me smoke it. I’d asked if he wanted some, and he’d said –

I closed my eyes while I tried to get it right.

He’d said –

I shouldn’t, I gave up a couple of years back. 32

Then he takes it from me and says, Just a drag, then, and something like You’re a bad influence, or I’m too easily led.

‘Penny for them, babe?’ said Rachel.

I opened my eyes. The bar was suddenly loud and I wasn’t sure if I felt drunk or just tired.

‘I was testing it out,’ I said. ‘Trying to remember – exactly.’

‘And?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ and I tried to make myself smile.

We’d discussed Szymborska and Miłosz, and he’d asked me, as everyone always did, why I’d chosen to write about Polish poets, when there were so many great Irish ones.

For once, I don’t know why, I’d told the truth.

‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘But maybe chance has been toying with me for years. Maybe,’ I’d said, ‘I have a Polish soul,’ and I’d said it extravagantly, so that he could laugh if he wanted to, but he hadn’t laughed.

‘I think the Polish and the Irish might be soulmates,’ he’d said, and we’d scrounged another cigarette and shared it, staying outside even when it began to rain.