I said it. The ‘s’ word. I said it softly and I meant it kindly, to be received with a comprehension that I was being understanding, receptive, cajoling. But did Dad see it as a challenge? A hurdle to overcome? Something in him seemed to shift.

‘OK, we’ll see how we feel,’ he said, letting his hand fall from the door frame. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Good boy,’ I replied.

He was quiet on the walk into Chalk Farm station. He was quiet on the tube. He was quiet on the sunny walk from Tower Hill to St Dunstan in the East, a beautiful courtyard garden flanked with the windowless remains of the tower and spire of a medieval church – destroyed by German bombs in the Second World War. Fairy-tale ivy trails run rampant over the Gothic window arches and blackened white stone edifices. Trees – rising unbidden and unchallenged between paving stones and ancient cobbles, their curious branches winding between the defiant arches and pillars – seek the sun. Peonies crouch in sprawling clusters and count themselves pretty in wild flowerbeds. It is the most secret of secret gardens and it is beautiful.

As we stepped inside, down a series of stone steps, and I gasped at the beauty of the place, Dad clutched at my arm.

‘Is it still the same, Prue?’ he asked me, almost frantic. ‘I need to know it’s the same!’

I described it to him, everything that I could see. Every detail of the blackened walls and the arches and the ivy. Every intricacy of the Gothic windows – proud and resolute and beautiful – as best I could. I told him about the Japanese tourists sitting in the stunning glassless stone frames and taking photos of each other. Of the couple entwined on the grass in one hallowed corner – a tangle of denim and white T-shirts – both reading books but reaching up to kiss each other at intervals. Of another couple, arms wrapped round each other, taking a selfie by the semicircle of benches in the courtyard.

‘A place for lovers,’ Dad says to me now, as we continue to walk slowly around the gardens. ‘The most beautiful place in London.’ He is serene now he knows it’s just the same. He is smiling. ‘The Great Fire of London got it first,’ he adds. ‘In sixteen sixty-six. Then the Nazis, of course. But beauty remains,’ he says. ‘Beauty remains.’

I look over at the face of the pretty girl in the corner reading Iris Murdoch, as she lies in her boyfriend’s arms. His face when he looks at her. This place is magical, I think. An enchanted space that London keeps as its secret. A dream. It’s for people like her. This girl. Beautiful, youthful, loved by somebody and full of her own dreams, who the universe nods at with a smile and sees to it that they mostly come true.