When he had driven away at last she felt sleepy, and thought she could lie down on the bed to rest: in all her clothes because she’d never taken them off. But the moment she put her head on the pillow – with her knees up and her hands clasped calmly between them, closing her eyes – a great grey panic, crowded with very specific images and ideas, seized her and smothered her. She had to sit up again quickly to recover. Her heart leaped in her chest so painfully that she was sure she must be having a heart attack – which would solve everything, she thought melodramatically.

In a reckless moment Isobel had texted the man she’d drenched in beer on their first date. He’d done his generous best to rescue that afternoon from its sticky beginning, making a joke of it; clearly though, once he’d delivered her home, he hadn’t wanted to take a chance on her again. She hadn’t heard a word from him. If she’d had any sense, Isobel thought, then she’d have felt the same: been relieved that she worked for the Department of Communities and Local Government and Blaise for the Foreign Office, so that their paths would probably never cross. Isobel was in a project on youth homelessness; he said he spent a lot of time counting Afghani Taliban and marking their positions on a map. Yet she felt regret for some affinity between them which hadn’t had time to show itself – probably existed only in her hoping for it. She felt as if they’d known each other as children, although they hadn’t; she had liked something stolid and gauche in him, and how he had been as scrupulous not to open doors for her, or help her off with her coat or pay for her, as a man like him in another generation would have been scrupulous to do those things. Blaise was shorter than she was, pudgy around the waist, with woolly gingery hair and clever eyes like chips of blue glass, set rather far back in his head; he’d seemed awkward in his jeans and she guessed that he’d always look better in his suit, tie loosened and shirt only half tucked into his trousers. He was one of those thirty-year-old men rushing headlong into middle age, with their boyishness still alive in their faces.

He had replied to her text almost at once. She’d expected a painful interval of waiting while he composed the right gently regretful let-down; imagined him wincing over it in front of one of his maps stuck with Taliban-pins, in a dingy office with an eighteenth-century fireplace.

— Do you fancy throwing a coffee over me? he wrote.