I had developed the art of listening on one level while letting my mind roam freely on another. Along the way at intervals I had learned to throw in ‘Aye’ and the odd incredulous echo – ‘an orange? Jesus’ – and the technique served me well. The trick was to keep an ear out for key words and interrogatives, and respond to them like a sharp tug on a harness, otherwise you could come badly unstuck. This particular evening Phyllis was talking on again, and meanwhile I was thinking with a mixture of remembered pleasure and encroaching sadness about the time when Eve and Raymond and I had walked through Chalk Farm and bought ice-cream cones even though it was bitterly cold outside because this one shop had flavours we had never tried before. Pastel-coloured, sharp-sweet sorbets that chilled the flesh inside our cheeks. And then Phyllis suddenly said down the line: ‘Well, is there anyone in London you’ve got your eye on?’

The question brought me up short. What had prompted this? Maybe I’d mentioned Eve in passing and she’d somehow picked up on it. My love life was new territory for Phyllis, as something self-consciously bold in her tone suggested, and I didn’t want her to make herself comfortable there.

‘My eye on?’

‘Yes, your eye on.’ She was unusually persistent.

As my situation stood with Eve, it was poor timing for romantic confessions, like admitting to someone you had sat an important exam just as the news came in that you’d failed. It was best to be evasive.

‘Och well, you never know.’

She correctly interpreted my equivocation as assent.

‘Well if there is and she’s important,’ she said, ‘don’t let her get away.’

When she said that I briefly recalled the image of a snarled car on a damp country road, and what Phyllis knew about someone getting away.

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ I said more gently. ‘Thanks for thinking of me.’

After that she went back to talking about her difficulties with the business bank account for the shop, and I returned to thoughts of the ice-cream parlour. I couldn’t remember which flavour Eve had chosen that night, although she had talked about how good it was. It seemed terrible that in such a short time already I couldn’t remember this little thing, and I realised that many more details about Eve – all the tiny facts that, massed together, made up her full reality – were destined to slip away from me now, one by one, with no chances to replace them. And then another sentence drifted over from Phyllis that ended with the words ‘burned down the photo-shop’.

A small electric shock, transmitted through the ear.

‘What did you say, Phyllis? It’s a very crackly line here.’