On our first date, in what would become our favourite Italian restaurant, he fed me with his fork. While I was mid-sentence about something, he reached out a hand and rested it on my left upper arm and said, ‘I love your shoulders, they’re very elegant.’

I said nothing. Like most women, I had not been trained in how to receive a compliment with anything other than self-deprecation.

‘You have one either side of your head, as well,’ he added, returning to his food, ‘which is very clever of you.’

‘I am nothing if not symmetrical,’ I replied, and he looked at me as if I was the wittiest person in the world.

*

He wanted to meet my friends straight away. He said he wanted to know what made me tick.

People – by which I mean the women friends in my social circle – were very excited, and often told me so. As far as everyone else was concerned, it was only a matter of time.

*

Not long after Matty and I started dating, Rosaria and I had a conversation, on the phone. I was walking to school. I had set out early because it was a nice day and so I could afford to talk and walk, to dawdle. Rosaria was at a bus stop. She worked as the Catering Manager of a pharmaceuticals firm out at the Orton industrial estate.

It was a Monday morning. She had rung me for an update. Isn’t this one of the best bits of a new flirtation or relationship, reporting back to your closest woman friend? Later comes the phase when your loyalties start to shift, when talking about him behind his back starts to feel a bit wrong, but for now, with Matty’s status in my life still so uncertain, I felt no compunction in giving her the full details.

I had told her Matty and I had gone to the cinema, then back to my place and shared a bottle of red.

‘So, go on …’

‘Rosie!’

‘No, go on!’ Her voice was shrieky with glee and I imagined the other people at the bus stop, looking at her. There was no filter with Rosaria – how she was in private over a glass of wine was exactly how she was while waiting in a queue for the number 20 to Orton Southgate. ‘Tell me, tell me now!’

‘Well, seeing as you ask, yes …’

‘And?’

‘What do you mean, and?’

‘And how was it?’

I allowed a dramatic pause. I had turned off Thorpe Road. There was birdsong. ‘Fantastic …’

A shriek from her. I was bragging, and loving bragging, and she was loving me loving it.

‘Yeah, well, you know, he’s a doctor. Let’s just say he knows his way around …’ This was not an exaggeration.