On the 28th, Riccarda called from Rome. She must have got my message. Guys and Dolls was on at the National on New Year’s Day, she’d be back that morning, should she buy tickets?

Yes, I said. I was still sore and limping, and used my father’s tall umbrella as a walking stick.

We met at the bar, embraced and drank the champagne she had already ordered. After the performance she took me to a wine bar where a woman in frayed jeans, who looked like an Ethiopian princess, played an electric guitar and sang jazz and blues standards. Riccarda didn’t ask when I’d got back, or say anything about the two months we had been apart.

I looked at her red-brown hair, cut very short in the back now, her cat eyes and sculpted cheekbones. And I remembered everything, the smell and taste and feel of her. Instead of saying I missed her all the time I was away, and even more in the city where we both lived, I babbled on about India, but not about my longing to stay on there, to go back. Somehow I felt it would be a betrayal to talk about any of that. I talked about how, when we had been driving towards Fatehpur Sikri, I was seized with nostalgia when I saw the fields, and how I made the driver laugh when I was sentimental at the sight of piled up cakes of cow dung fuel. And I said nothing, nothing at all, about Marco being there in the back of the car.

On the bridge, light-headed with the champagne and the Chablis I had been drinking, I bent over to kiss her lips. She gave me her cheek, which was cold, and wet.

I asked if I should take her home.

‘I’m not going to ask you in if you do,’ she said. She was laughing.

We said goodbye at the Embankment tube station. I stopped a taxi for her, and walked to Trafalgar Square to take the night bus home.

* ‘Oh heart! Be free, and live!’

1982

Riccarda had settled in this city, with expectations, four years ago. Now her son was going to finish school in summer, and wanted to attend university in Rome, his native place. Where once she hated to leave London for more than a few weeks, now she couldn’t wait to get away. I knew her well enough to know she was planning to move back to Italy, and there was nothing I could do or say to stop her.