‘There’s plenty of human nature here at home,’ Liz had offered, in a tone and with a gesture that embraced the restaurant with its office-outing birthday table, its assorted couples, its solitary elderly diner with his book, its family gathering, its amiable smiling proprietors: the street life outside of dreadlocks and strollers and buskers and cruisers and crooks and drifters: the enshrined Campden Hill dignitaries to the west, the Bayswater backwaters to the east: the brutal and grand dwellings of Czech and Soviet and Indian diplomats: the Peking Ducks and Pizza Parlours of Queensway, the terrorist hotels and bed and breakfast doss houses of the dangerous shabby fire-gutted North Kensington squares, and the mean streets extending north to the grim terraces of the Mozart Estate and multiple murder, to the converted terrace houses of first-time firstbaby double-mortgage young buyers.

And Stephen had taken all this in, and had shrugged his thin shoulders, and had said a little wistfully, ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’

Liz had not thought that Stephen really intended to write a play. He did not write plays, he wrote novels, and they were not, in her view, particularly strong on dialogue. All this talk about a play had been just talk. A blind, a screen, an act of bravado, a dramatic gesture. That was what she had thought then, and that was what she thought now, as she tried to force her mind back over old history. But he had meant to leave, and he had done so. ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’ That is what he had said. Those had been his very words. They rang in her ears. What had he meant by them? It came back to her that she had thought then of saying something rash and blind like, ‘You could stay for me.’ But neither the invitation nor the inclination to do so had been strong enough, so she had said nothing.

She was glad now that she had said nothing. If he would not stay for Hattie Osborne, who was allowed to live in the flat on Primrose Hill that none had ever entered, why should he stay for his dining companion Liz Headleand? Let him go, let him depart.