‘I love you,’ he would say.

But something about the waste of yet another day disturbed her, deterred her. She went down to the Berwick Street market and bought the fruit and vegetables for the week. It was on the corner of Broadwick Street, loaded down with tomatoes and lettuce and potatoes and peaches and beans, that she saw the huge headline on the billboard for the Evening Standard: FAMOUS FILM STAR: RAPE CHARGE. She walked over to the paper shop and saw Terence Blue’s face smiling up at her from the front page of the early edition.

She was so surprised that vegetables slipped from under her arm; beans lay on Broadwick Street, shining green on the dirty pavement and a peach rolled into the gutter. She knelt down among passing people, gathered the beans together, discarded the peach that had landed on a dog turd, managed to stuff everything else into her bag. She felt for some change, bought a newspaper, stood on the street corner and read in disbelief that Terence Blue, the film star, had been accused of raping an unnamed woman in a room in the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane on the Saturday night of the London Academy of Drama reunion. ‘But that can’t be true’ said Molly to the midday passers-by. ‘I know it can’t.’

She hailed a taxi.

At home, Banjo had gone; his saxophone had gone. The bed was unmade. He’d left a note, the way he sometimes did.

I love you I love you I love you, it said.

Once, in the beginning, they would say, because there was plenty of time, because they lived for the day, because it was merely a joke, a lovers’ ditty: I love you I love you I love you will you marry me but now, eight years later, somehow the subject of marriage was never mentioned.

Molly dumped the fruit and vegetables on the kitchen table, smoothed Banjo’s note with her hands, looked again at the bald account of the accusation of rape in the newspaper and the large smiling picture of Terence Blue, famous film star in his prime. She thought for a while. She remembered what she’d said, and regretted saying, to Anthony Bonham as they stood at the reunion together: he can’t do it any more, she had said.