‘No,’ I lie. I peel a small fin of cardboard from the corner of the menu and roll it between my fingers. Of course, I won’t tell him that something did, once. The night my mother showed up for the last time and I went to Finsbury Park with my sometime friend, Georgina. The first bad thing that happened to me. I check myself and smile brightly at Salvi. Try to lift myself. Try to look like someone he might be glad to be on a date with.

The waitress returns with our drinks plus a tiny double serving dish stuffed with green olives and slivers of red and yellow pepper. Salvi winks at her, grins at me. ‘What would you like to continue with?’ he asks. ‘Shall we get a meat and cheese plate, and share?’

‘Yes, please.’ It’s hopeless. My smile is hopeless. I have absolutely nothing to balance all this confidence with, nothing at all. The barrister and the unemployed loser … I’m an empty vessel … there you go, Dickens. I’m in the right place. Put that in your tankard and drink it. The waitress is staring at Salvi, but he is staring at me. I want to put my hand up to my face, but I worry I will rub off some of my careful make-up.

Once the waitress has gone, Salvi starts talking to me about some case he defended last month, a tale of a guilty-as-sin miscreant, aggravated burglary and driving into a cashpoint with some home-made armoured truck. He peppers his tale with jokes and enthusiastic bursts of laughter. Sometimes he closes his eyes.

‘You don’t mind defending those who are clearly guilty?’ I ask. I feel like a robot, firing out a series of dull, robotic questions.

‘Of course not.’

He treats it all so lightly, like it’s a game. Perhaps that’s what you have to do to work in law, I think. It’s all theatre, I suppose, like the street performances.

‘Here we are.’ It’s the waitress with the cheese and meats; I move my glass over a beer stain on the table to make room for the platter but I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat a thing. I wonder how many other women Salvi may have brought here on a date. Women he may have picked out of the crowd to throw batons up to him, then brought to this dark, beautiful place. I’m sure they’ve all been a darned sight more interesting than me …

‘How long has your dad been blind?’ he asks. ‘From birth?’

‘No, thirty-eight years. He was just starting out as an architect when he had an accident and lost his sight.’

‘Oh, that’s tough.’

‘Yes.’

‘Still, there’s a blind architect living in America, I believe; LA or somewhere. I read about him in the Evening Standard.’