Evelyn shrugged. ‘Where to start?’ she said. ‘Never met the right man. Always busy at work. Wrong time, wrong place. Take your pick.’

‘But you do want to get married, have kids and all that?’ he asked.

No one had ever asked her that before. She was thirty, so perhaps people now assumed she wasn’t interested in a conventional married life. But she was. In fact, the idea of never having any children made her unloved heart beat harder in her chest. She had always assumed that it would just happen when the time was right and she found it distressing that it was beginning to look like it might not.

‘I do,’ she replied. ‘I really do. But I have things to do first.’

At this point other people would probably have sucked their teeth and shaken their heads and made some unhelpful comment about not leaving things too late, but Ted just nodded as if this was a perfectly sensible way to carry on, and Evelyn felt herself warming to him for his understanding.

‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

There was a pause in which Ted seemed to close down. His smile faltered and he cast his eyes low to the floor before he spoke.

‘There was someone,’ he said. ‘Anni-Frid.’ He paused, swallowed. ‘But it didn’t work out.’

Evelyn watched him carefully, dying to ask questions but worried that it might scare him off. In the end she just said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he shrugged.

‘It was a tragedy, really,’ he continued, his gaze still firmly on his pint glass. ‘But she went off with a bloke she worked with. Benny. He wasn’t much to look at – short, beardy. I told her she should take a chance on me but in the end, she picked him. Suppose that’s the name of the game.’

He looked up now, his playful eyes peeping out under his lashes, and then he grinned and Evelyn realised she’d been had.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she said in mock anger. ‘I was building up some proper sympathy for you then.’

‘Sorry,’ he smirked. ‘Couldn’t resist. Actually, I was married once but it didn’t work out. We were both too young. Amicable split. No hard feelings, but I’m not looking to make the same mistake any time soon.’

Was he marking her card, Evelyn wondered? Not that it mattered. Despite her overall life plans, Evelyn wasn’t looking for a husband, or even a boyfriend just at the moment. She was going to be far too busy for anything like that.

At that point, the disco burst into life with a Boney M. song and immediately people headed for the space in the middle of the floor. There was to be no ‘first dance’, then. If Evelyn ever got married, she would definitely want to be whisked around the dance floor by her new husband with all her friends and family watching her.

She realised that she felt suddenly and inexplicably weary and she stifled a yawn, but Ted saw.