When I turn back, there’s Salvi, standing outside the grand, arched entrance with a young colleague, a woman, short brown hair, gamine, with the look of Mia Farrow, though this woman is tall and willowy. Is it Jennifer Dixon, the new clerk he mentioned? She’s not quite how I imagined. She is wearing enormous Jackie-O sunglasses that cover half her face. She is wearing capri pants and perilously high heels. Yet, she and Salvi look friendly. She tilts her face down towards his and he gives her a kiss on the cheek, lingering perhaps a little too long. He takes a finger and raises her sunglasses a little, at one outer rim. She shakes her head, a little cross, and pushes them back down again. Then she walks away and gets into a cab that sweeps in to pick her up.

I’m already crossing the road.

‘Salvi! Salvi, hi!’ I am slightly out of breath with nerves. I’ve dressed up for this. I’m wearing the jacket, again, plus a cotton fifties skirt (not a London bus in sight) and a cute white capped-sleeve top. I hope I look a little like Audrey Hepburn, not a budget chorus member from Hairspray. I had this whole ad hoc meeting in my mind as a rather romantic encounter. Me dashing to meet him, him looking surprised and delighted, his face breaking into a great big grin and his eyes lighting up. Us going for an impromptu cosy lunch somewhere, in a deep dark bar where barristers hang out. A bottle of red wine and a few furtive snogs. His hands underneath the jacket, moving down to my waist …

‘What are you doing here?’ His eyes are narrowed and glacial and he looks at me as though I am a piece of dirt on the bottom of his shiny, prohibitively expensive shoe. A carbuncle on the face of a cherub. A blight on the world. My heart chills, humiliated and confused and fallen. I’m back there again, aren’t I? Back in that place. The look on his face and his cold words conjure up the look and the words of every boy and every girl who ever threw taunts at me. The stares. The scowls. The cruel laughter. Ugly. Pig. Put a bag on it. I feel both the claw of Shaun the Waltzer charioteer and the heavy press of Jonas’s body on mine in that hotel bed in Tenerife. Why is Salvi looking at me in such a terrible way?

‘I know you’re busy, but I thought I’d come and meet you for a quick lunch? Maybe.’ I’m stuttering, stammering; an instant wreck. ‘Did you get my text about the Blondie tickets? I’ve got yours here. I hope you can come with me – it should be great …’