For a second they thought about it, both of them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of her body, his hand dithering at his side.

‘I think I’d like to walk.’

So that, he told himself as he slumped into the back seat of the cab and felt it move off into the darkness, was dating in middle age.

31

As the taxi came to a stop he roused himself from a fitful, half-nauseous doze. He paid the driver and hauled himself arse-first out of the car, taking care not to slam the door.

It took him a moment or two to acclimatize: a dull suburban street bathed in watery green light so insipid that it felt like he’d stepped into some random CCTV footage.

‘I chose to live here?’ he asked himself, his sluggish eyes running up and down the lines of modest post-war semis in search of the particularly modest one he’d rented.

The front door stuck slightly. It needed a bit of shoulder-work to open it, just as it had when the estate agent showed him and Sam around last year. Hadn’t seemed like much of a problem at the time. Still wasn’t.

The central heating was on and the hall smelled of airing clothes. It wasn’t the kind of smell he enjoyed coming home to, but at least it was domestic. There were a few envelopes on the mat. He stepped over them and headed for the living room.

Pale laminated wooden flooring, off-white walls, Swedish furniture in greys and creams. To mitigate the sense of living in a mid-priced furniture catalogue he’d hung a framed Kandinsky print over the fireplace, and between two Nordic armchairs by the window he’d set a small table with a glass vase containing half a dozen oversized balsa-wood tulips, hand-painted in bright colours. A moment of madness, bought in a rush, like everything else.

He let himself drop onto the bizarrely uncomfortable sofa. For a while he lay there, trying to focus on the light switch by the kitchen door, then on the door handle, any fixed point… but the room kept on spinning. Normally he would have dragged himself upstairs, forced down three or four glasses of water, and crawled into bed. But tonight was different.

Willing the effects of the beer to subside, he reached down to the floor and got his laptop. As Windows booted up with its irritatingly cheerful jingle, he tried to get comfy, letting himself slither down until he was almost lying there. Then he did what any self-respecting person would do in the circumstances: he googled her.