At her desk, Isobel laughed in relief, and they arranged to meet next day. She dressed up for the occasion in a cotton summer top and striped skirt, white patent leather belt, sandals; by the time she left the office it was bright enough for sunglasses, and she’d thought happily that she looked like a girl in a film hurrying to meet her lover. Then she’d sat alone in the cafe for forty minutes, digesting her disappointment, feeling overdressed as a doll. How could he? When he texted her later she wouldn’t even look to see what he said straight away, she was so hurt and offended. She didn’t want to read that something had come up, or that he’d forgotten, or been unavoidably detained in a meeting.

— Where were you? he wrote.

With hasty fingers she replied with the same question. Of course, there were two Prêt à Mangers in Trafalgar Square. And so their unlucky pattern was set. Both of them really, in the rest of their lives, they swore it, were very competent people. But when Blaise invited her round to his place, to cook for her, and they both intended – without either of them hinting it or even suggesting it by a significant look – for it to be the first occasion they slept together, she got some sickness bug. Blaise had to wipe the hair from her forehead as she hung vomiting over his toilet – and he’d prepared such a lovely meal, buying everything fresh from the farmers’ market. He might have given up then, Isobel thought. And perhaps she had seemed almost insanely persistent; she hoped that he didn’t begin to dread her. Aspects of his character which she might not have liked – his deliberateness, a certain unassailable privacy, some self-satisfaction – gained power over her because she was afraid she’d lose him. Blaise was self-sufficient like a much older single man: already he’d started collecting things and knowing about them, wine and antique books and clocks. He said he was conservative with a small c, voted Lib Dem and read The Economist and the Financial Times. – I suppose you’re a Guardian reader? he enquired sympathetically. She tried to tell him about Alex. — My father’s very brilliant. He’s special.

— Oh, what does he do?

When she said he was a primary school teacher she saw Blaise stop believing in the brilliance. — But he’s an inspired teacher, she explained. — And he could have been a poet or just about anything, except that he carries this burden about with him from his Czech legacy, because they had to leave when he was a boy and his father never recovered.