He’s partly annoyed and partly amused. This woman, Charley, is in her thirties, quite a bit older than Amy, and dresses like a seventies flower-power child. She doesn’t constitute a threat, in his opinion. In fact he can tell pretty quickly that she’s ready to approve, to encourage her friend in this little adventure. He guesses that she’ll give him the third degree and so by the time they’re all sitting at a table together he’s ready for her.

He goes along with it, putting himself out to make an impression without making it too obvious, determined to give nothing away.

‘That sounds pretty cool,’ Charley says, when he tells her what he does, though he suspects that she has no idea what his work entails. He talks instead about how he’s blown away by this part of the world, how he’s taking lots of photographs, working up his blog. It’s easy to make her laugh, to pretend that he finds her witty and attractive without overstepping the mark, but all the while his brain is darting to and fro, seeking ways of holding her out of his private life. He guesses that she’s definitely on Amy’s side in that she wants to encourage their relationship, rather than being in any way protective about her. She’s the kind of woman who thinks it’s cool to live on the wild side and this, oddly, has the opposite effect on him. Unexpectedly he wants to turn to Amy and tell her the truth: that he’s living in two worlds, both of them are equally real to him, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

He doesn’t do it, of course – he’s not quite that crazy – but it occurs to him that this Charley might be rather dangerous. She’s rather like the witch in the fairy story who promises the prince that he can have it all. Despite being able to see this, he’s still attracted to her. He wants to believe that she’s right, that his wish can come true and that he can have it all.

By the time they part they are all good friends, and if it weren’t for poor old Reggie stuck in the car they’d be making an evening of it.

Thank God for Reggie, thinks Cosmo, as they all say goodbye. He wonders what Amy will say as they walk back to the car but to his surprise she says nothing. She talks instead of the party she’s planning for her father’s birthday but she doesn’t invite Cosmo, which slightly surprises him. After the meeting with her friend he suspected that Amy would be ready to try to move things along but he’s relieved all the same. He doesn’t know how he would behave towards her father.