I looked at Matty, amused, and waited for him to return my look, but he studied his plate of spaghetti vongole and said in a clipped kind of way, ‘No thank you, but she will. And can we have some black pepper?’

We sat in silence while the waiter went away and came back with a glass bowl of grated parmesan and then scattered it, slowly and carefully, over my pasta. He put the bowl down on the table between us, went away again – we both stared at our plates – and returned with a dark-wood pepper mill large enough to be a small statue in a town square. As he turned it over our plates, coal-black chunks of pepper fell from the end and the grinding blades made a squeaking sound like the iron wheels of a very old train creaking slowly into motion. I felt plunged into seriousness, all at once, as if I had been missing something important in the debate we had just had, as if I should have known what it was but was too dim to work it out. The squeaking of the pepper mill set my teeth on edge. I realised the waiter was going to keep going until I told him to stop, so I lifted my hand.

After the waiter had turned away, I plunged my fork into my spaghetti and began to turn it, then asked lightly, ‘How was your week?’

‘Okay,’ Matthew replied. ‘My shift pattern changes on Wednesday. I’ll be on lates for five days.’ There was a pause. ‘Yours?’

I nodded, my mouth full. I had chosen spaghetti carbonara and it was thick and creamy. I swallowed a large bolus of it, realising as I did that I hadn’t chewed it enough. ‘Good, really good in fact. I went and spoke to that girl …’ I began to update him on one of my more difficult students. She really hated English Literature – or maybe it was just she hated me. She would say things like ‘Books are boring,’ or ‘I don’t understand why we have to read made-up stuff, what’s the point?’

As he listened, Matty seemed to rally a little. ‘What’s she like at sciences?’ he asked.

‘Better, I think,’ I said, ‘that’s why I’m trying to work out whether she has a problem with me. I asked and her other subject teachers seem to find her fine.’

‘Maybe she’s just a bit ahead of herself, needs to specialise earlier than you allow them.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but she’s got to pass English Language at least.’

‘Do you want to give me those dates this weekend?’