When I came back, five minutes later, they had obviously made it up again. They were all over each other now: he was kissing her, aggressively, with her head bent back at an awkward angle like a rag doll’s. She looked as if she was going to fall off her seat any moment, and her hand was flailing around for some steady port of call. On the way down, the blind fingers struck a vodka glass. It fell and shattered on the floor, the malign shards skittering across the tiles. They both surfaced from the beery whirlpool of their kiss, blinking.

‘We’ve had a spillage,’ he yelled. He raised his fingers above his head, snapping them and pointing to the floor. ‘There’s broken glass down here. Somebody clear it up.’ He was looking straight at me, his eyes glittering with hard, pissed malevolence.

I wasn’t in too big a hurry to race over there like an eager scullery maid with my pan and brush, kneel down next to him, and then have my face ground into the debris. It sounded like a recipe in the French restaurant where I’d gone with Phyllis: tonight we have mashed face on a bed of broken glass, with a blood coulis, the house speciality of our resident thug. I felt a thin jet of hysteria squirt through me. It always did when I got nervous. I almost wanted to laugh out loud.

Murdie glanced over, and absorbed the situation in a second. He had antennae for trouble. Years of working in bars had given Murdie a talent for instant invisibility, beyond price in moments such as these. He simply withdrew his personality as a snail draws in its horns. He became his pure function and nothing more. I had watched him do it before. He didn’t make eye contact, he remained scrupulously civil, but he didn’t utter a spare word. There was no dangling hook left out for a drunk to hang an argument on.

While the fella was still staring at me, Murdie nipped out from behind the bar with the pan and brush, and swept up all the glass. It was over in an instant: as far as anyone else was concerned, the brush and pan had simply danced up and done it by themselves.

When Murdie came back, and we were both turned towards the cash register, he whispered to me out of the side of his mouth: don’t stand effing rubbernecking around here, get you up to the other end of the bar.