At the end Chris applauded enthusiastically. Then he got up from the window seat and came over to stand behind Tamsin at the piano. Leaning over her shoulder, he began to riffle through the thick stack of books and manuscript paper on the music stand. Tamsin breathed in the tang of his unsubtle aftershave: a brash, commercial brand which she professed to dislike, though now she found herself responding to it pathetically, helplessly, just as the adverts promised she would. A lyric from one of the ‘101 Golden Oldies’ songs drifted treacherously into her head. It’s not the pale moon that excites me … oh no … it’s just the nearness of you.

She coughed loudly to break the spell. ‘What are you doing, are you looking for something in particular?’

Chris let go of the music and stood up straight. ‘Doesn’t matter. Bit cheeky of me really, I was just wondering if you had any Chopin. He’s my favourite, I think his music blows everyone else’s right out the water. But you’re probably sick of people getting you to play stuff for them.’

‘No no, it’s fine, I can play you some Chopin,’ murmured Tamsin. ‘I know a couple off by heart, actually…’ She ran her hands silently over the piano keys, sketching out the music in her memory. Her acquiescence was out of character: usually, Tamsin had no time for Chopin fans. She considered most of his music too obvious and too easy, a cheap thrill for people who didn’t really know how to listen. But right now Chopin seemed like the perfect choice. How bold and brilliant of Chris not to care about picking something so unoriginal!

She played the E-flat major nocturne with lashings of rubato, thinking, as the simple melody filled her up, that all those years spent championing Berg and Webern were a sham, that this was the true music, the best music, the only music. With each swell her awareness of Chris’s proximity intensified. The fact that she couldn’t see him heightened her sense of a connection formed by the music alone, a beautiful, invisible bond joining her mind to his.

When Tamsin finished playing this time, Chris didn’t clap. For what felt like several minutes they remained silent, Chris standing, Tamsin sitting, the back of her head no more than an inch from his stomach.

Very gradually – almost imperceptibly – Tamsin began to move. It was less a case of deliberately leaning back than of simply allowing her head to respond to the charge that was drawing it towards Chris’s unseen body. And all the while she was justifying the inevitable contact to herself: what did it matter if the back of her head touched Chris’s jumper? Hardly an erotic configuration. It could have happened by accident, after all; she couldn’t see him, so how did she even know he was there?