Mrs Delaney, to her credit, took Eve’s part. She brought them the bill, and when Sandy Hair kicked up too much of a fuss she just knocked off the cost of a bottle of wine, but without conceding the point. Maybe some vestige of sympathy with the workers still clung to her from her hippie years. Or maybe she just knew how hard it can be to find really good waitresses these days.

It took me a while to work out what it was I liked about Eve, and when I did, I wasn’t sure what that said about me. It was her air of dislocation, the feeling that the current of life had suddenly picked her up and swirled her off to somewhere out of her control. Most people had harbours, and anchors, and moorings, but Eve was floating on the sea with her eyes wide open, holding tight to her son’s hand.

She brought her son into the restaurant once, because the childminder was sick and there was nowhere else for him to go. His name was Raymond. He sat in the corner of the kitchen and played solemnly with some dough that Francis gave him. I watched him making dough-pebbles and then some funny-looking dough-men, with big unwieldy heads and stringy arms and legs. Francis put them on a baking tray and stuck them in the oven to cook for Raymond to take home, but a party of twelve people came in and we all forgot about them. We opened the oven when Francis smelled something burning, and there they were: a huddle of little burnt bodies, hapless midgets who had overnighted in Pompeii.

Francis was annoyed at himself and swept them into the bin with a snort of irritation as if to erase all evidence of his mistake. I saw Raymond’s face fall. It wasn’t the burning he minded, I think, so much as the discourteous disposal.

‘I’ll make you some more and send them back with your mother,’ I told him, and he stared back at me with his oddly lucid, grey-green eyes.

‘I made those ones myself,’ he said, with the air of someone quietly stating an obvious fact.

When Eve was taking him home later, holding his hand, I saw something like a broken stick of charcoal hanging loosely from his side trouser pocket as he ambled out the door. He had fished one of the blackened bodies out of the bin.