While they were waiting for the meal to arrive, she phoned her answering machine. No messages. She pictured her house, drab and empty, dust gathering in corners, dead flies on the window sills, a musty smell in the folds of the curtains, teddies propped on the pillows, dressing gowns hanging from the hooks on the door, slippers in pairs, the alarm clock by her bed still clicking its green numbers round. In three, four days’ time, she would be home again, waiting for her daughters to return, the dead spaces to fill up with sound, and this strange period would be over, a dream in bright colours.

They ate their meal very slowly. Small mouthfuls, sips of red wine. Other tables emptied, filled up again with new arrivals. He asked about her work and she told him. She tried to describe dyslexia, the wrongly wired brain, the treachery of words and how they sprang shut like traps, the looming fog that children experienced, stumbling helplessly through the intricate lexicography of the world. She told him about her time in Africa, heat and decay and glittering sunlight, how she had felt free there, independent, and herself at last. She talked – because suddenly the memory returned to her, a bright fragment, like a stone shining in a rock pool – about an evening when she had sat outside her house, after the sun had abruptly set, and listened to children dancing just out of her sight: the soft thud of their bare feet on the baked mud; the rhythmic clap of their hands; the mingling coo of voices. About her mother’s stroke that had recalled her to England in November, fog settling. Her mother’s vain struggle for words. She drank more wine and said – she heard the words she spoke with surprise – that Adrian was right to have gone. They’d trapped each other into a version of themselves that they didn’t want; their marriage had hardened into a kind of hollow shell. Luke listened intently. It was like unpacking small, cherished objects and laying them before him.

She liked him because he didn’t speak. He didn’t try and charm her, or fool her. Because there was nothing flash about him, nor vain. Because he was private and self-contained and cool and he didn’t need saving. Because when she left, in two days’ time, he wouldn’t suffer and neither would she, not really – not with that terrible, burning regret and the forlorn sense that she had lost something that she would forever want to recapture. Women are always wanting to go backwards, she thought; the tug of nostalgia and desire are hopelessly mixed. But she wanted to go forwards, and Luke was simply on her journey, just as she was on his. This watery, landlocked journey that was taking her home.