At first I thought Jerome was surprised by my offer but then it dawned on me that no, he wasn’t surprised, but flattered. The idea of having an assistant appealed to his vanity. I hadn’t realised that he carried his self-importance so close to the surface.

‘You know, someone to go through the scraps of paper and order them for you?’

He blushed, a little. ‘I think I’ll be able to manage, thank you.’

‘Well, if it gets too much … what with teaching and marking, conferences and overseas travel. Etcetera.’

He caught my eye, and I could see that being flattered had developed into being annoyed. My offer to help had been interpreted as a dig at his previous habit of offloading work onto me. He suspected that, deep down, I thought he was lazy.

‘James Salter,’ I said, to steer the conversation back to safer ground. ‘The famous frotteur of words.’

Jerome relaxed. He was the one who first brought the frotteur reference to my attention. It originated from an interview with Salter in the Paris Review, and the only reason I knew about it was because Jerome had his copy signed by Salter himself and had shown me the author’s spindly signature, fine pen strokes that looked on the verge of disappearing.

‘Have you seen Archer?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Of course.’

Jerome’s response surprised me because he tended to keep his distance from Archer at work. I think Jerome knew he couldn’t compete, that, by comparison, he was a lightweight.

‘When did you see him?’

‘Yesterday. I called in after work.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jerome. ‘Renate’s working overseas so I’ve been going over to see him. Just like I check in with you.’

‘Oh.’

Hours and days slipped by. First evenings, then weekends, lost their relevance. I fired off more and more emails to potential employers, careful always to maintain a tone of enthusiasm and optimism. I placed a notice in the university online bulletin, offering tutoring, editing and proofreading services to international students and graduates. I realised that my initial success in scoring an interview at The Corner Shop was far from ordinary and that it had given me a false sense of hope. More and more my applications went unacknowledged. I haunted my inbox, checking and rechecking notifications in case a reply had slipped through. Once or twice I received rejections to my morning emails by noon the same day. Though uniformly polite, they were frequently careless with details. One rejection got my name wrong, turning Siân into Sin. If I had a well-paid job that mistake might have made me laugh, but as it was I couldn’t even summon up the energy to flick back a grimacing or disappointed emoji.

I had been sitting at my table for hours, wondering if ‘unemployment’ or, more specifically, the ‘unemployable’, had a distinct smell, when my thoughts turned back to Jerome. I recalled what he’d said about checking in on me. I’d always regarded us as colleagues, or friends and equals, but now he clearly viewed me as one of the less fortunate, a kind of pity project. He wasn’t so much visiting as carrying out a service.