He takes his phone from his jeans pocket, flicks to his photos and hands it to me. Kemp’s studio flat has the same kind of decor as the houseboat. A silly batik rug on the wall, bottle-green walls, a bed with a Thai gold and purple bedspread thing. A guitar he doesn’t play slouching against a wall. A didgeridoo. I’m sure I can spy his tragic fisherman’s hat, hung on a hook on a wall, just like it always was. Wherever he lays his hat that’s his home, it seems. He has re-created the entire houseboat in flat form. I can understand why he moved. I remember all too well the houseboat in winter. Condensation on the tiny windows. Kemp’s selection of blankets, including the treacherous electric one, with the frayed seams, which his grandmother had once owned. The other dangers in that houseboat: candles and Calor gas bottles and how close my heart was getting to a different kind of flame … Then I remember my sock. It moved with him?

‘Very nice,’ I say, handing the phone back. ‘Cute.’

‘I’ll have to show you in person sometime.’

He looks at me, with those lighthouse eyes, and I pile on another blush. ‘Maybe,’ I say. This should not happen. I don’t want to go where he lives, to see his things; his life. I took myself away from him for a reason and I won’t put myself back there.

‘Maybe?’ echoes Kemp, teasing.

‘I’m quite busy,’ I say, shutting him down.

I stacked all the postcards he sent me in my knicker drawer, a pile of misery. When he told me he was going away again, that last time, seven years ago – to India; to the pink palaces of Jaipur and the white palaces of Udaipur – I knew that temporarily taking back control of my senses, while I chucked postcards in my knicker drawer, was not going to work for me any more. I knew, on the night he told me – a night where we escaped from the pub and ended up sitting on stone steps in the moonlight, and I’d looked at him and despaired at how much I loved him and how hopeless it all was – I had to end our beautiful friendship. Later that same night I quietly left his bed and his houseboat at 3 a.m., while he lay on the floor in jeans and black T-shirt, barefoot, sleeping – the most beautiful man I had ever known – and as I crept across his floor he opened his eyes and looked at me, a serene and almost tender look that made me want to cry.

‘Just going to the loo,’ I’d said, as he closed his eyes again and I silently said goodbye.