She’d got over the embarrassment years ago, he had never seemed embarrassed so in the end why should she? Years ago he’d been doing the music for a show she was in; she hadn’t expected to love him: he was a kid. She admired his music, she might have a quick fling with him, but he was a kid. His name was actually Edward, but everybody called him Banjo, even his Granny, for some long-forgotten musical reason lost in his past. I think it might be because I called a violin a banjo when I was about three, he told her once, but everybody’s forgotten exactly. But as the quick fling became longer she began to observe: many of the men of Banjo’s age were gentler, less aggressive than the men she knew of her own age; they had different priorities, didn’t seem to feel that they must achieve in the way men she knew did. She saw that they could talk about feelings without getting embarrassed, saw that in his flat he cooked and cleaned and polished things and that he actually enjoyed it, saw that many of his male friends were also domestic in a way that would be simply unthinkable to men she had known before. Perhaps it was only Banjo’s friends, the men she met through him, but she thought it augured well for the next generation of women, these men who would share; some girls would be lucky. But the age difference meant she would be careful not to love him. The press would make a meal of it.

Then one day she saw Banjo kissing a white carpet.

He had bought it for the flat he was living in at the time and he was so pleased with it that he’d lain down on it and kissed it. And she had decided that it was such an eccentric and somehow curiously endearing thing to do that age had nothing to do with it: she loved him because he was loving. And now she could not imagine, ever, caring for anyone else like this: this wasn’t immoderate passion or passing foolishness or love at first sight or even sex (although of course she realised that’s what everyone thought it was: a woman of a certain age with a toyboy). The press did indeed make a meal of it for a few days until something more interesting came up: LOUISE LOVES TOYBOY the headlines screamed when they’d been photographed coming out of a trendy restaurant, kissing. (As if Molly McKenzie herself did not exist, only her soap opera character.) But she and Banjo had learnt to live with it over the years and seldom went to trendy restaurants any more.