Bush. Pussy. How strange and wonderful it was, that we were the same! It was Greg’s penis that was the interloper. Yet he had been inside her many, many times, like a former picnicker in a much-loved wood. A long-dead picnicker, with an unsettling connection to me.

Another wonderful thing—why had I never realised this?—she and I had no rigmarole. No diaphragms (in the early years of my marriage), no Viagra (latterly), no cumbersome preparations, sometimes no undressings. None of that kerfuffle. Our lovemaking flowed in and out of our days, with no beginning and no ending, clothed and unclothed … our lips, our fingers, our breasts, our electric skin. Sometimes our lovely moist pussies that answered each other, and sometimes just our mouths and our stroking hands. It was the most natural thing in the world. It seemed bemusing that a big cock barging into one’s body was considered natural when women had been there all along, in plain sight. Why had I been so dense?

This ardour sailed us through the squally moments, and there were bound to be some of those. Azra was not the easiest person to live with, as she herself admitted. Like all of us, she was a mass of contradictions. Whilst berating me for leaving on the lights—what about the planet?—she habitually washed up under the running tap. That sort of thing. It seemed petty to even notice this and I kept quiet—it was her flat, after all. Besides, it was only temporary. Soon we’d have a proper house together with our own space. It was only a matter of time.

And by mid-March we’d found somewhere to rent, near the seafront in Deal, and arranged to move there at the end of the month. We’d then look around for somewhere to buy.

How blind we were! Blind to the gathering storm as we sat there talking and laughing, entwined together on Azra’s shabby green sofa. We talked a lot about the past, as if we’d only just met and needed to catch up with each other. She described her early memories of her father: how, aged four, she clung to his back when they went swimming; how one day he vanished and another man walked out of her mother’s bedroom, zipping up his trousers. We talked far into the night while down in the street police sirens wailed. Often we forgot to cook, and went out to eat—never at Yassar Halim, where I’d seen her with Greg; we avoided that.

I remember sensing a tremor in the air but presumed it was just me, feeling jittery about the future. Such is the solipsism of lovers. Why people romanticise them I’ll never know.

So the news took us by surprise. Events moved fast, and on 23 March 2020, the country went into lockdown.

Five

Five