I bash his compliment away and return to blasting the walls with the steamer. Yesterday I’d told Valentine I was divorced. I didn’t go into details – Valentine didn’t want any. He wasn’t interested in the whys and wherefores. ‘That’s just background noise,’ he dismissed it with a shake of his head. ‘I’m here to listen to the main act.’

‘OK, that should do it.’ I turn off the steamer.

‘Once when we were courting, we went to Paris to go dancing,’ he continues, chipping away at a stubborn layer of paint. ‘We rode all the way there on my scooter.’

Honestly, this is fascinating. Is it my imagination, or was dating then so much more romantic than it is now? ‘On a scooter?’

‘Well, there was no Eurostar in them days.’

Putting down his scraper, Valentine pulls out his wallet from his trouser pocket and slips out a small black-and-white photo he keeps inside. Climbing down a few rungs, he passes it to me. It’s of a young couple on a Lambretta in front of the Arc de Triomphe. She’s wearing a gingham dress nipped in at the waist and a headscarf, knotted under her chin; he’s in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up at the elbows, and braces, with a thick quiff of dark hair.

‘Is this you and Gisele?’

Valentine nods. ‘Over sixty years ago. She was eighteen, I was nineteen.’

I turn it to the light to examine it. ‘Look at your hair. And her waist. It’s so tiny!’

‘I used to be able to get my hand right round it when we were jiving.’ He gives a little jig, and I grab the ladder as it sways.

‘Be careful!’ I cry, but he seems unconcerned.

‘I remember we went to these underground cellar clubs playing jazz and bebop – nothing like we had here. It was like a different world . . . Saint-Germain.’ He smiles at his terrible pronunciation. ‘Gisele is French, of course, but I couldn’t understand a word, although I didn’t have to, as nobody was talking. We all just danced and danced till we couldn’t catch our breath and our feet had blisters.’

Holding the legs of the ladder, I look up at Valentine; only he’s not seventy-nine years old and in my spare bedroom peeling back woodchip; he’s nineteen and in that club in Paris with Gisele, dancing up a storm.

‘It was dawn when we finally left. The sun was coming up over Notre-Dame.’ As he turns to face me, his eyes are shining brightly.

‘It’s a lovely photo.’

‘I wish I’d taken more. Now everyone takes so many photos. I see the young ones with their phones, snapping away.’

‘Yes, but how many are they going to look at, sixty years later?’

I pass him back the photograph, and Valentine looks at it again.

‘I never thought she’d agree to marry me, you know. We met and then I had to go away to do my National Service. I imagined she’d meet someone when I was gone, that she’d forget all about me.’