“Should I be worried about your secret days?” I said.

“Very worried,” he said.

“What secret thing are you doing now?”

“Reading Fairer, Faster, and Firmer: A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum.”

“Are you jealous of me, then?”

“Of your next hour, yes. In general, no.”

“If it were in general yes,” I said, “I’d take you for supper to make up.”

“You could work on it.”

“I have to work on it and take you out?”

“I’ll take you,” he said. “Stockpot at seven?”

Stockpot was a place in Soho that served seventies-style comfort food with a handwritten three-course menu that cost the same as one course anywhere else. I knew already what each of us would have. Graham: three-color salad starter, me: avocado vinaigrette; Graham: chicken fiorentina and veg, me: poached salmon and veg; Graham: rice pudding, me: golden syrup sponge with custard.

Usually I liked Stockpot, but as Sabine breezed out of the building with her powder-blue scarf wafting behind her, I wished Graham had suggested somewhere sophisticated and French. In (Belgian) French spirit, I said “à tantôt,” blew a kiss down the line, and hung up.

Valentines Park was ten minutes away. Walking there, we listened to Fauré’s Requiem. It was Sabine’s suggestion; she wore one earphone, I the other. I’d not known her to listen to classical music before but she said it was the only thing for Valentines. Perhaps the music was responsible for the serious mood that came over her.

As we strolled through the grounds, past the ponds and canals, the green and coppering shrubberies, she told me that a poor family called Valentine had lived in a cottage here. Then the estate was bought by quelqu’un in 1696 after her husband, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died. The mansion was built for her. In the eighteenth century, another quelqu’un gave the grounds their features, and thirty years later, Charles Raymond—

“A nice name, no?” she said.

“Nice when you say it.” I pursed my lips for my best French impression.

“Charles Raymond,” she said, mocking my imitation, “bought the estate and made it more Georgian style. He planted the Black Hamburg vine. It was destroyed but a cutting lives on at Hampton Court. They gave it the name Hampton Court vine.”

“Original,” I said.

“In the nineteenth century, a Roman stone coffin was found here. Then, the council opened it as a park. It has been public for almost a hundred years. In the First World War, Belgian refugees stayed in the mansion. After the war, it was a convalescent hospital so that’s why there are ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“Yes, you believe in ghosts?”

“Not sure,” I said. “My mother who is alive haunts me more than my dead father.”

She took my hand. “When did your father die?”

“Before I can remember. I was a baby,” I said.

She kissed my hand and let it go.