‘You don’t have a home in New York, you’re askin’ me to take you to the Plaza?’

‘I live in London.’

‘They say that’s some city, still civilized.’

‘Depending on what you compare it with.’

‘Me, I live in Queens, and it has to be better than where I was raised. The Bronx ain’t fit for human habitation no more!’

Simon rested his head against the seedy upholstery, his gaze on the skyline that was for him like no other; the pure symmetry and soaring strength of it never failed to take his breath away. He was home again.

In London, to where he had escaped for a change of scene, he felt the lonesome exile he was. After the three years he had spent there he’d been thinking of up’n running again when he met Marianne. Up’n running was right! A writer without ties could live anywhere, all he needed was an agent wherever to find him work, and a typewriter.

So it had been for Simon since his marriage broke up. Kids would have kept him in New York, provided too the stability of a sort even a divorced guy got out of being a father. He’d have had them to stay on the weekends and on their school vacations.

Minus that incentive to stay put, he had lived for a while in Madrid, lured there by his admiration for the author he had in his youth hoped to emulate, Ernest Hemingway. Me and all the other aspiring male novelists of my day, he thought now.

Marianne, though, had revealed that she had hoped to emulate nobody, just to be herself. In spite of that, her books had been compared in some reviews with the work of Howard Spring. There was about them, Simon had thought after getting one of Spring’s novels from the library, the same rich texture, and a social content that didn’t stop them from being a good read.

Again he ordered himself not to think about her and tried to give his attention to the cabbie’s continuing monologue about the changes time had wrought to their hometown.

When eventually he was unpacking his bag in the splendour he had hoped to share with her, he found that one of the numerous packets of tea she had asked him to put into it had split. Had she been with him they would now be laughing together. The white shorts he had brought to wear in Bermuda looked as if a swarm of black flies had settled on them.

Simon glanced around the bedroom. Opulent described it. The richness of the fabrics and the carpet. The ornate furniture. The perfume drifting from a vase of flowers. He had not stayed here before, but had chosen it as a setting for Marianne. She, though, would probably have giggled when she saw it.