He’s still wearing those leather bands around his wrists. He’s still got that silver necklace with the tiny half-pearl shell on it. He’s a laid-back man. Handsome, ordinary, extraordinary. Like if the boy next door grew his hair down to his collar and got sexily scruffy and looked you in the eye one day, over the fence, in a way that suggested he not only knew all the dark contents of your soul but was going to have a go at dragging them into the light.

If only.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’

‘So, how are you keeping, Vince?’ Kemp asks Dad.

‘I’m keeping well,’ says Dad. ‘Prue here is taking me round London for the summer.’

‘Fantastic,’ says Kemp. ‘One of the capital’s best kept secrets, this place. I can’t believe I haven’t discovered it before.’

‘Don’t tell anyone about it,’ says Dad.

‘Ah,’ says Kemp, with another laugh, ‘better destroy my photos, then.’

Dad laughs too. He always did like Kemp. Not as much as I did, obviously.

The laughter hangs in the air for a while then, inevitably, fades away. We’re left with nothing. Silence and regret – all mine – hang between us like a gossamer hammock. I feel I should break it, but I don’t know what to say. What could I possibly say, after all these years? What should I say that won’t give away how much he meant to me?

The silence goes on far too long.

‘OK, well, nice to see you,’ Kemp says eventually.

‘And you.’ I am brisk, pleasant. I can’t look at him any longer.

‘Really nice to see you,’ he repeats. ‘Bye, Vince.’ He turns, shakes Dad’s hand again, then turns back to me. ‘OK, then.’ He gives a small shrug. Runs one hand through his hair. ‘Bye, Prue.’ And, with a quick smile, Kemp bounds away from us, his camera swinging at his hip, and up the stone steps of St Dunstan in the East and out of my life again.

‘Bye,’ I whisper.

‘Good to see him again, after all this time,’ says Dad. ‘Nice bloke. A good friend of yours, wasn’t he, at the time?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘No romance, though?’

‘No, Dad, no romance.’

Of course there was no romance. Dad is forgetting who I am.

‘Right, then,’ he says, clapping his hands. ‘Seen enough? Shall we go for a little wander around the area? Maybe head up to Monument?’ He sounds so uncharacteristically chirpy.

‘OK,’ I say. I don’t mind. I’d quite like to walk around a bit more. I’d like to clear my head, but I don’t think I can – not now. All I can see is Kemp. All I can think is Kemp.

We come out of London’s best kept secret and turn on to St Dunstan’s Lane. We head towards St-Mary-at-Hill and Monument Square.