Why had she said yes to his dinner invitation without thinking twice? As if whatever was going to happen between them was inevitable and there was no point in stalling. It had been that way with Ralph. But she was then just a girl. Not a mature woman in control of her own life.

‘I couldn’t get you out of my mind,’ Simon said.

No, stalling would not feature in this relationship. Nor had one of the flippant replies other men who had crossed her path received from her sprung to her tongue.

Instead she remained silent, studying his face in the candlelight, noting its lived-in look, the fine lines beside his grey eyes, and the vertical creases above the bridge of his nose, denoting as those on her own face did that concentrating was how he spent his days.

‘You believed what I just said, didn’t you, Marianne.’

A statement, not a question, as if he too had no doubts.

‘I had that trouble about you.’

‘Have you been to New York?’

‘Several times, to see my American publishers. And I now have cousins living there.’

‘It’s a city that has to be seen through a New Yorker’s eyes, and you must do that with me.’

‘You might find me too objective to see things through your eyes,’ she warned him with a smile.

‘And you have plenty to learn about me, I guess! Like why and how I became a ghost writer, though I’d set out to be what you are – a story that would figure large in my autobiography if I thought it worth writing, which I don’t.’

Was that quizzical expression born of an inner self-deprecation? If so, the second love of Marianne’s life was in that respect a replica of her first. And how often had she guiltily attributed to her success Ralph’s finally giving up on his own hopes?

But she had met Simon at a later stage in his life. When the damage, in whatever form it had taken, was long since done, she reflected while hors d’oeuvres were served to them from a trolley and the wine poured.

By now, according to Arnold, Simon had made a name for himself, though his name didn’t appear on his books. Success of a kind, and he probably made a lot of money ghosting memoirs in an age when politicians and pop stars alike saw themselves as worthy subjects for public consumption. In Arnold’s case he doubtless had posterity in mind!

Success of a kind because it had to taste bitter, given Simon’s failure to achieve what he had set out to be.

‘Your brother mentioned that you’re widowed,’ he said while they ate.

‘Did he also tell you I have a son and a grandson?’

‘No, and it hadn’t occurred to me that you might be a family woman. You don’t look like one.’