Stanley: So there I was – Stanley Orville Cleve Williams – who was supposed to be doing his thang, only he didn’t know what his thang was.

So I dodged my way to the bar to replenish myself.

Jessie was this close to walking out when, looking to her right, she found herself glaring at a young man who was smiling back at her. Cheeky thing. How dare he.

Stanley: That’s when the barmaid caught my eye.

Still, he was waiting patiently for her to serve him at the end of the bar. Manners. Lot to be said for it. She kept her eyes on him, surprised that he didn’t look away intimidated. Instead he looked amused. She found herself resisting a sudden urge to smile back.

Young, copper-toned, crew-cut, cleanly shaven – she thought he looked too freshly scrubbed for the setting of Mingles. He wore a pale blue office shirt and a dark blue tie with gold flashes and no ring to show that he’d been tamed and made (theoretically) monogamous.

What a lovely young puppy dog.

‘What’s your poison?’ Jessie called out, ignoring the fisted fivers thrust in her face by agitated customers.

‘You!’ he shouted back, grinning.

The club went into filmic, soft-focus, slow-motion. The faint glockenspiel of glasses. The harmonics of subdued voices. She beckoned him over with a seductive index finger, drawing him into her magnetic field:

Be – Lauren Bacall.

Be – Mae West.

Be – Eartha Kitt.

Miaaooowww …

And she whorishly deliquesced.

Café Italia, Soho

‘I’m forty-five, but look thirty. Not vanity but fact, Stanley, dear. Wish I was twenty, if I knew then what I know now, etc. Have the emotional age of a three-year-old, or so every man I’ve ever married felt obliged to inform me. I’ve got the life experience of an octogenarian and a veiled woman going by the name of Salomé at the funfair at Roundhay Park, who, I may say, looked suspiciously like Mary O’Reilly what used to run chippie in Leeds High Street, told me I’d see in my ninety-ninth year, God forbid. Now, Stanley, when you boldly stared me out at Mingles. Sixteen. I was definitely sixteen again. Does that answer your question?’

Stanley and Jessie were seated on high stools beside each other in Soho’s Café Italia, which was crammed with late-night revellers with bloodshot eyes and boisterous chatter. Sinatra, Stallone, Capone – a gallery of expensive suits lined the stairs, their all-Italian-American smiles shining like beacons for those en route to the toilet. The décor hadn’t changed much since the 1950s: green and yellow linoleum tiles and long-panelled mirrors, which they were staring into while sipping copious amounts of the best cappuccino in town.