Actually I hadn’t, but I took her in my arms and she pressed in closer. She started to hum as we artlessly swayed in a small circle. I didn’t recognize the tune. Her grip on my waist tightened and I grew hard against her. “You can do better than that,” she said.

I put some grind into the sway and for a moment I was back at the Brixton Academy with Lisa Pascal who lived on the Stockwell Park Estate and seemed determined to be my first ever, although actually she ended up being violently sick on Astoria Park Walk and I slept on the sofa in her mum’s front room.

Then I heard it, Johnny Green’s opening bars but with a swing beat and a voice singing far away: My heart is sad and lonely / For you I sigh, for you, dear, only. Simone was short enough to rest her cheek against my chest and it was only when I noticed that she was copying me that I realized I was humming the tune. Her perfume mingled with the vestigia of dust and silence and the words were clear enough for me to sing them softly. Why haven’t you seen it? / I’m all for you, body and soul.

I felt Simone shudder and put her arm around my neck and pull me down until she could whisper in my ear, “Take me home.”

WE WERE practically running by the time we got to Berwick Street and Simone had her keys out and ready for a front door that opened straight onto a steep staircase with dirty communal carpeting, forty-watt bulbs, and those pop-out timer switches that never last long enough for you to get all the way to the top. Simone led me up a third flight of stairs that doglegged around some bizarre retrofit put in back in the 1950s when this was a flat for French maids and “Ring top bell for models.” It was a steep climb and I was beginning to flag, but the sway of her hips dragged me up the fourth and final flight and we burst out onto the roof. I managed to get brief impressions of iron railings, bushy green potted plants, a bar table with a furled white-and-blue sunshade, and then we were kissing, her hands pushing down the back of my jeans, yanking me forward. And we went down onto a mattress.