‘OK, yes, I’ll be there.’ Why not? Another place I’ll need to look up, I think.

‘Perfect. Like you,’ he whispers. He has stepped forward so he is standing very close to me. I can smell cologne and the faint hint of beer. He kisses me on my good cheek and I squirm and pull away as politely as I can.

‘He can’t see us,’ Salvi whispers, too loudly, and he trots out of the flat and down the stairs with a jaunty clatter and slams the brown doors behind him. I catch Dad frowning and raising an eyebrow I cannot mistake for anything but disapproval, but of course it is easy for me to ignore it.

I like Salvi and he appears to like me. I’m going on a second date when dating has always been a foreign land to me, for which I’ve had no passport.

And a distraction is a distraction, after all.

CHAPTER 23

Wotton’s is cavernous and kaleidoscopic. Every colour in the spectrum – from shimmering amber to neon green to hot purple – has been elbowed and cajoled into this space, which, despite being huge and high-ceilinged, is jam-packed with a technicolour array of booths and banquettes and bars, in suede and leather and gold and steel, and presided over by two enormous multicoloured stained-glass murals. To the right, the mural runs floor to ceiling, with double-decker buses and cabs thundering along the Strand behind it to cast myriad and fluctuating shapes on to the faces packed and perched within. To the left, the glass mural is back-lit with panels of gold and red and green. Both are etched with a rainbow of hedonist creatures: drinkers and dancers and half-dressed revellers who raise glasses and snake arms around each other’s waists in a tableau of sin and stained-glass.

The wall facing us as we walk in looks like a giant version of ‘Simon’, that retro game where you press the moulded coloured panels to follow a lit-up sequence. I get the crazy urge to go over and press my bum against one of the padded, lit-up squares, just to see what happens, but that would bring attention to myself. I’m exposed enough as it is, just being here, but I’ve laid it on thick, my make-up, and although Wotton’s is brighter than the Dickensian, everyone around me looks flattered by the light here. I hope it will do the same for me.