It was disconcerting, hearing her use his Christian name. And the seriousness of her expression communicated a need that confounded him, made him want to turn away.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ he asked, getting to his feet.

‘No, thanks.’

Alone in the kitchen, he stood for a moment, leaning on the counter, replaying what had just occurred between them. It was all perfectly innocent, and yet he had suddenly become aware that it was just the two of them alone in the room. He had felt the heaviness of her steady gaze.

When he brought his coffee back into the studio, he found her peering into a cardboard box full of old T-shirts.

‘Are these yours?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘I used to buy them at gigs,’ he explained. ‘Tour T-shirts, you know. I sort of collected them for a while.’

‘Do you ever wear them?’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. I was half thinking about framing some of them and hanging them up in here.’

He didn’t like to admit it, but Ross’s contempt for the studio’s furnishings had gotten to him, the sneering way the other man had joked about installing a pool table and a beer fridge. Privately, he had worried that Ross thought him unmanly. Effete.

‘I like this one,’ she remarked, taking a black T-shirt from the box and turning it towards him so that he could see the red warning-sign logo and instantly recognized it.

‘That’s my Radiohead T-shirt,’ he explained. ‘It’s from their OK Computer tour. I was at their gig in Dublin, 1997. You weren’t even born.’

She held it against her like something precious, one hand smoothing the fabric down over her belly and hip.

‘I like it,’ she said, flashing him a smile, a hint of mischief in it. Her earlier seriousness had dissipated, and he welcomed the return of her naturally sunny disposition.

It occurred to him that the last half-hour spent with her had been more meaningful than any exchange of views he’d had with his own daughters – or his wife – in quite some time. That she should recognize things about him that they had failed to see – it moved him. He realized that he enjoyed her company.

‘Why don’t you keep it,’ he said now, nodding towards the T-shirt.

Her whole face lit up with unabashed pleasure.

‘Really? You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

It occurred to him that she must have realized that this was the T-shirt from the Radiohead concert where his relationship with Abi had been kindled. He felt a slight creep of guilt. But it was just an old T-shirt, he told himself. A fragment of nostalgia forgotten in a box.

10

Colour streamed through the lens as Beth pointed the phone while Corinne posed: the pastel shades of the ice-creams she held in each hand, her frosted pink hair lifted gently by the wind, behind her a swathe of blue sky.