They had hardly got in the door when Sarah turned to kiss him. It was not a gentle kiss. It was hungry and urgent. He felt her arms around his body, felt them sliding down his back. He cradled her head in his right hand and leaned into her. Slowly he lowered his hand to her breasts and began to caress them. She murmured softly as he slid his hand inside her sweater, but did nothing to resist him.

Eventually she eased away from him gently. ‘Come on.’ She took his hand and pulled him towards the bathroom.

‘What?’

‘Got any candles?’

‘Er…yes…I think so. Somewhere.’

‘Well you find them. I’ll run a bath.’

Gary’s feet barely touched the ground. He found the candles. He also found a bottle of chilled white wine. They had their bath, and it was at least two hours before he got round to cooking the sole Veronique.

Simply to sit next to someone who was enjoying watching what you were watching, and who was hopefully enjoying the fact that they were watching it with you, was enough for Christopher. Puccini’s music filled the air and saturated their senses. ‘Do we have to go?’ Maria asked at the end.

Christopher laughed. ‘I don’t think there’s any more.’

Maria looked disappointed. ‘No. It’s such a sad ending but, oh, that music!’

‘Blame your mother,’ said Christopher as he walked her out of the Opera House towards his car.

‘What?’

‘It’s probably because you’re half Italian that it touches you so much.’

‘You’re not Italian, and it touches you.’

‘Yes, but I’m a romantic.’

‘Ah, I see.’

They talked animatedly on the way home, about the opera, about Maria’s afternoon with her daughter, about Fragonard’s painting of the girl on the swing in the Wallace Collection, which Christopher said he loved, but whose sky Maria found too threatening. ‘You wouldn’t have got me up on that swing with those thunderclouds.’

When Christopher dropped her off she invited him in for a coffee. He was hesitant. ‘If you’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Come on.’

She got out of the car before he could walk round to open the door, then led him into the house. They talked easily while she put the kettle on and gathered cups and saucers in the kitchen, then she motioned him through to the small sitting room at the front of the house where they sat and drank their coffee. It was a tiny room, decorated in soft yellows that glowed warmly in the light of table lamps. Christopher sat in a cream armchair, Maria on a small two-seater sofa.

‘Perhaps we could do it again?’ he asked tentatively.

‘Rude not to,’ she replied.

‘Only next time we’ll go out and eat. Then we’ll have more time to talk.’

‘I might run out of conversation,’ she said.

‘Do you really think so?’