‘I had started to get feelings for you.’

‘What sort of feelings?’

Kemp looks ambushed. He taps at his pint glass. ‘Well, like I said, feelings that I saw you as more than a friend. But I didn’t get a chance to ask you, because you ran out on me. I knocked for you a few days later. I brought the hat. I’m sure you were in, but you didn’t come down. You didn’t reply to any of my calls, or my texts. You just disappeared on me. I knocked one more time, just before I flew to Mumbai, then I gave up. There is a limit to my thick skin, you know, when it has been carved into. Well, more like hacked at with a great big knife …’

He grins at me, but my mind is whirling and whirling like the cogs have been electro-charged. Like a big fat light bulb has been switched on in my head, throwing everything he’s just uttered into sharp relief. I understand. The images I once indulged in – of us in a rickshaw or eating a pavement curry – were not the ones he had in mind. The look he gave me in the middle of the night, on the houseboat, which I had mistaken for tender friendship and briefly, almost imagined – mere seconds ago – as something sweetly and infinitely more heart-soaring (fool!) – was very much something else.

‘I get what you’re saying.’

‘You do?’ He looks relieved. ‘Well, that’s—’

‘May I summarize?’

‘Er … OK … if you wish.’

‘Right. So. What happened was, you decided you really fancied girls with huge birthmarks on their faces, after all.’

‘Well, I—’

‘Or there’s always paper bags, isn’t there?’

‘What?’

‘Let me finish. You decided because I was there, available, around all the time, clearly desperate for anyone, anyone at all – it would be pretty easy to slip things up a gear and make what we had going on “Friends with Benefits”.’ Oh, I get it all right. My face. My black marks. The stuff I had told him about Jonas. My mother. Cherry. How dark my recesses were. ‘After all, you knew my history. You knew what you were dealing with.’ Thank goodness I had never told him about the night at Finsbury Park … ‘And you—’

‘Prue, you’re not listening, I—’