She shrugged. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I could beat “house fell down”, even today. Although this morning I did think I was going to be homeless.’

The London question, of course – how did she make it work? And Kay’s answer: she shared with a friend, and went payday to payday. My answer, too, although not the sharing part, and that made for bigger gulfs between paydays. I made a mental note to cancel the standing order to Dave, or whatever lay behind the software construct ‘Dave’.

‘This morning? But not now?’

‘I’m back, baby,’ Kay said with an acid smile. ‘Reinstated.’ She put on a voice – a blustering, gruff ‘authority’ voice. ‘Regrettable error, premature, embarrassing, acted without full consultation, sincere apologies.’

‘Polly said that?’

‘The publisher said that. I was taken upstairs. But Polly did it.’

I bent over my pint, and frowned into it. ‘Aren’t you going to find it difficult working for Polly after this?’

‘Yeah. Awkward.’ She widened her eyes. ‘But I did see a side of her that I liked. After you left – I won’t recap the whole thing, but she had a stand-up row with Eddie. Said that she had been kept waiting for years to be editor, doing his dirty work for him, and he couldn’t even step down without making her do all the shit he didn’t want to do.’

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Polly get angry. She’s always so calm. It must have been building up a while. It was good. I think she might be a good boss, actually. She might be straight with people. Unlike Eddie.’

‘Eddie’s an arsehole,’ I said, taking a drink.

‘Everyone thinks so,’ Kay said. ‘I need to raise a glass to that. Let me get a drink.’

While Kay was at the bar, I unfolded the Standard to look at the story about my house. The splash picture was an aerial shot of the cratered street. A tattered veil of smoke or dust still clung to the heaped wreckage in the crater, like the caldera of a slumbering volcano. The story itself had a couple of quotes from Bella – edited for length, I imagined. The collapse had been attributed to ‘nearby basement excavations, weakened by heavy rain’. The street was still closed, it said, while the fire brigade investigated the safety of the surrounding houses.