Howard tried to persuade her to have dessert, but she was comfortably full and conscious of passing time. Instead they had coffee, dark and silty in dollhouse-sized cups, with a hard almond cookie, which seemed likely to fetch out a tooth and had to be abandoned for a cigarette instead. Everything about the meal was foreign and unsettling, suggesting that there were, just possibly, different ways of doing things. It was with some surprise that when they emerged once more it was to the fog of a London street rather than a sunny Italian piazza.

“I suppose I must be getting back,” said Jean, already squaring up to the emptiness that would take hold of her when they had said goodbye.

“Must you so soon?” said Howard as they loitered under the restaurant’s awning. “I could swear you only just arrived. Time does strange things when we’re together.”

“And when we’re apart,” Jean agreed, daring to look him in the eye as she said this.

“Let’s walk for a bit,” he said, taking her hand. “With a bit of luck we’ll get lost in the fog.”

Just a few minutes more, Jean promised herself, and then I’ll go home. She could feel the pressure of his hand, gently squeezing hers as they walked through the milky grayness. Other pedestrians, appearing as distant smudges, loomed into focus briefly as they passed before being swallowed up again.

“Where are we going?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know that if I stop walking, you’ll leave.”

“But you know where to find me again.”

They had turned into a narrow street, empty of cars, and walked the length of it before realizing it was a dead end, leading nowhere but to the back stairs of restaurant kitchens and a high brick wall at the rear of a theatre. There were empty wooden crates and steel dustbins on the pavement and in the gutter carrot tops and bruised cabbage leaves and other detritus of a fruit and vegetable market. As if given courage by their solitude, he drew her toward him and they stood pressed together for a moment.

“I must go,” Jean said, laying her head on his shoulder.

“I know.”

“Will you stay at the shop tonight?”

“Yes—there’s a camp bed in the workshop. It’s like a bed of nails but it’s better than the empty house.”

“You must miss her terribly. I wish I could help.”

“You do help.” He put his hands on her shoulders and moved her away so that he could look at her. “May I see you again soon?”

“Of course.” She laughed lightly to disguise a bubbling up of emotion that might embarrass them both. “You can call me at the paper. Or at home, but of course that’s not so private. And now I really must go, only I don’t know where I am.”

She looked at her watch and gave a yelp of alarm. Four o’clock. It would be five, perhaps later, before she reached home. She could imagine the reception that awaited her.