When she left the office at half past five, Ted was waiting for her in the café over the road. They had taken to meeting up like this for a cup of tea at the end of their working days. As good as his word, Ted had rung her after Brenda’s wedding, and they had met up for a drink and a chat. There had been no suggestion that it was a date of any kind, and this suited Evelyn. It appeared to suit Ted, too, because things had quickly switched from pub to a contemplative cup of tea before heading off to their own lives for whatever their evenings held in store. This tended to be very little for Evelyn. She was finding the daily grind of an office job surprisingly exhausting, and was fit for nothing by 6 p.m. She wasn’t sure how Ted spent his evenings, but she tried not to be too curious if he didn’t want to tell her. The mutual benefit of their arrangement appeared to be good conversation and friendship.

Evelyn sidled across the road, dodging between cars without waiting for the little green man, and went into the café. Ted was at their usual table next to the window, two mugs of tea and a plate of malted milk biscuits set out before him. Sometimes they were shortbreads, or Rich Tea and, on one red-letter day, chocolate digestives. It all depended on what Sanjeet, whose café it was, had left over after the day’s trading.

Today Ted was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On other days he wore a jacket and tie, and occasionally the brown wedding suit. Evelyn assumed his clothes reflected the duties of his day but she never pried, asking simply, ‘Good day?’ as she sat down, to which he invariably replied, ‘Fair to middling.’ Generally, when she arrived he would be scouring the small ads in the London Evening Standard, and today was no different.

‘You never know what you might pick up from the small ads,’ he’d told her when she asked why he scrutinised the back pages of the paper so carefully. ‘It’s like a whole microcosm of London life right there in those little boxes.’

They had shared more of the detail of their lives with one another now. She knew that he lived with his mother in a flat on the seventeenth floor of a tower block in Hackney. He seemed to be her only carer.

‘Mum’s not as young as she was,’ he’d told Evelyn. ‘She can’t manage the stairs like she used to and the lift is always out of order. I’ve told the council to move her somewhere more suitable but of course, nothing’s happened. Lord only knows what would become of her if I wasn’t there to do her shopping, but no one seems bothered about that.’

The council’s failings, many and varied, made a regular theme for his complaints, but Evelyn now knew that Ted was devoted to his mother and would happily spend the rest of his days fetching and carrying for her.