He shook his head and looked as if he was about to cry. ‘No, I’m entirely to blame,’ he said. ‘That was a non-consensual incursion on your personal space, and I should have asked first. I’ll totally understand if you feel that you need to take the matter further.’

She stared at him, remembering previous boyfriends who had treated her body like it was theirs to molest whenever they felt like it and how distressing that had been. But at the same time, this level of chivalry was a bit much. Couldn’t there be some happy medium? And who would she take the matter to, even if she wanted to? She was hardly going to report him to the Metropolitan Police.

‘I forgive you,’ she said. ‘But learn from this moment, Wilkes, all right? Be better. Do better.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I promise. I appreciate you.’

‘And I appreciate you too. But if I’m going to die young and beautiful, then I want it to be on a beach in Dubai with a frozen Margarita in one hand and a Cecelia Ahern in the other, not ladling out gunge to a bunch of strangers at the back end of Brixton.’

He smiled, his sanctimonious, ghostly white face glowing like a five-watt bulb. Elizabeth hated being one of those women who only felt valued if she was with a man, but the truth was that she’d had a boyfriend every day of her life since she was fourteen years old and couldn’t imagine being single, and Wilkes was, to date, the one she liked the most. It wasn’t just that he paid more attention to her pleasure in bed than his own – he preferred not to orgasm in her presence, believing it was a symbol of male dominance over women – or that he had the kind of empty mind and childlike expression that she found so devastating in a man. Nor was it his understanding of all the world’s injustices and his determination to address them. She was all in favour of that, naturally, although she didn’t think he needed to talk about them quite so often or to be constantly writing in a notebook that had the words Global Inequalities, by Wilkes Maguire (he/him) scrawled across the front. No, the thing she liked most about her paramour was that he was neither impressed by her wealth and privilege nor repulsed by it. In the past, some of her exes had come to her home and spent more time with her father than with her, luxuriating in the pulsating glow of his celebrity, while others had scoffed at the five floors and the expensive artworks, while partaking of the pleasures of all. Wilkes, however, never seemed to notice his surroundings. He was like a puppy, full of energy, desperate for attention and with a surprisingly weak bladder.