She lifted his hand and kissed his palm. ‘I must go, Adrian. I’ve got a client coming in, oh God, minus two minutes.’

‘When shall I see you again?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got to think. This isn’t what I do, you know.’

‘Is it your boyfriend?’

‘No.’ She shook her head decisively.

Adrian put a hand on her round knee and slid it up her skirt a few inches. In a few seconds, he thought, he would start to cry.

‘I’ll go mad,’ he said. ‘I promise you that I’ll go mad. Let me see you this evening. Not a cheap hotel. Just for a drink or something. Just so I can have you in front of me like this again. Oh God. Just looking at you … I’d do anything … I’ll tell Irene –’

She jerked away from him. ‘Don’t ever, ever, tell me what you’ll tell Irene.’

‘Frankie –’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’

‘I didn’t mean –’

‘This was a mistake. I’ve got to go. I’m running late.’ She stood up, her chair screeching loudly.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said desperately. ‘At least let me call you.’ But she was gone, clipping up the stairs away from him.

Adrian picked up the bill and stared at it. His hands seemed large and clumsy; his breath was hot in his throat. He fumbled in his wallet for the last of his cash and left a generous tip for the waiter who seemed to gaze at him with contempt as he left, pulling himself up the stairs like a drunk man, lurching back out into the street, gazing around him as if he was suddenly in a foreign land and had no idea where to go next.

Irene taught a woman of about her own age for an hour and a half on Thursday afternoons. Ruth was a geriatric nurse and she had only found she was dyslexic when her nephew had been diagnosed by his school, a year ago. Then she realized that the way words swam on the page wasn’t normal and the difficulty she had with forming letters wasn’t just clumsy incompetence; that the way she could never remember sequences – the months of the year, her times tables, telephone numbers – perhaps wasn’t because she was stupid after all, ‘thick’ as they’d called her at school. ‘I’m wrongly wired,’ she said to Irene the first time they met, as if it made her happy to think of her tangled internal circuitry. ‘That’s all it is. Why did no one ever tell me?’