‘Why didn’t I know about her, Dan?’ Katelin said.

He lay back down with a heavy sigh and stared at the ceiling. ‘Katelin, please, please retreat before we fall out. There’s something so fucking undignified about this.’

She regarded him through the mirror. ‘I do know that,’ she said. ‘I do know you think I’m being juvenile. But I’ve seen that woman’s lovely face on the inside cover of the best book I’ve read in twenty years. Show me a female who wouldn’t feel a stab of jealousy at the arrival of an old flame of this calibre.’

He understood her, he entirely took her point, and he felt for her, he really did. She was searching for the truth and being met only by disingenuous, weary patience. Yet Dan knew he had nothing at all to gain by full disclosure, only a landslide of further questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer.

‘It’s a strange coincidence, Katelin,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t believe that. It just doesn’t ring true.’

‘OK. Fine.’

‘I think she was important to you.’

‘She was a friend! I had other friends I’ve never mentioned to you either. Do you want a roll call from the class of seventy-nine?’

‘Yeah, a friend, and looking the way she did, and bright as a button, it never entered your eighteen-year-old head to have a crack at her?’

‘She was too good for me,’ Dan said, trying another tack. ‘Out of my league.’

‘Oh, great!’ Katelin’s voice rose with indignation. ‘Marvellous. So you started looking in the second division instead? How fortunate for me.’

Now he finally gave up on sleep. He threw back the covers and swung out of bed.

‘What you doing?’ Katelin said.

He came over to her and ran one hand up her thigh to rest firmly on her backside and the other up through her hair to hold the back of her head, then he pulled her close and Katelin said, ‘You’ve got to be joking! Some of us have a job to go to.’