‘It’s just, I think maybe we could do with . . .’ She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands and scrunched them in her palms. ‘I mean, I guess I just think it’s kind of a good offer, Lou. Maybe just for a while.’

If ever there was a time I’d prayed for George to say something inappropriate and distracting, it was in the long, injured silence that followed. But he was mute, mug of milky tea poised, little finger crooked, if you can believe it. Waiting to hear if his love’s young dream was about to come true. Dom continued to smile kindly and confidently, having absolutely said what he meant and meant what he said. Lou’s and Wolfie’s eyes stayed locked, with that same strange contradiction dangling between them.

The pounding in my ears stopped abruptly, and from somewhere very far off there was a creak as the universe shifted gear. Eddy for renything.

14

Danny

When we arrived back at Belsize Park in the early evening, my plans to dash out on an urgent errand (the Lamb and Flag, obviously) were immediately thwarted. Dom was having none of it. I was assigned to make up a bedroom for Lou downstairs, and he said he and George would take care of Wolfie’s, upstairs. Our guests, who were both looking a bit shell-shocked, were directed to the kitchen to relax. Which at least meant nobody was going to witness me get beaten in a fight with a fitted sheet.

In the end, though, the sheets went easy on me and I even did a cursory dust of the windowsill with the bottom of my T-shirt. As a final flourish, I decided to drape another sheet from Dom’s meticulously ordered linen cupboard artistically over the jumble of boxes in the corner. The bedroom had been mine for about a minute and a half after the ousting from the junior solicitors’ flat, when Dom had shown up in a rented minivan to collect me and Gentleman, a suitcase of clothes, six Walkers crisp boxes of badly packed belongings and two tea chests. And while a couple of the crisp boxes had made it over to the shed when I’d relocated, the rest of my stuff had stayed exactly where it landed – despite regular assurances to Dom that I’d sort through it and put it into some kind of order in a cupboard any day now.

The boxes were full of very important things I couldn’t bear to part with, like a threadbare London 2012 Olympics cap, a programme from the 2009 Ashes Test in Cardiff when Monty Panesar made his hundred, and a small glass bottle of sand from Ibiza to mark that time I’d decided I was destined to be an international DJ. I only know that because they’re a selection of things that once made a break for it through a split in one of the boxes. No doubt there are also plenty of other far less useful items that I’ve collected and forgotten along the way.