But if he was such a fool, then why had Eve loved him, if she really had loved him – was her judgement really so bad when it came to men, as her mother was fond of saying? There was that feeling of disconnection about her that once reminded me of a woman floating on the sea. Did she just allow herself to be loved by anyone who drifted along and threw her a lifebelt? That’s the problem with love: the thing that pulls you towards someone in the first place is the thing that slowly spoils them for you ever afterwards.

So maybe it was only chance that she loved me, maybe I just happened to be hanging around at the right time. If I had stayed in Belfast, who might Eve be with now: one of the slavering customers who kept coming into the restaurant to chat her up, or someone like twitchy Francis, with her hanging off his arm like a gangster’s moll laughing at his jokes as he pushed her from bar to bar?

Perhaps if I went away for even a month I would come back to find Eve with someone else, looking at me as though she only dimly recognised my face and didn’t care much anyway. It wasn’t true, I knew that, but maybe it was true. And then I would look at her sleeping face on the pillow beside me, her mouth gaping half-open like a gormless child’s, and feel a wave of pointless tenderness. Sometimes I would rearrange the duvet over her to keep her warm. Then I would shut my eyes and try to sink back into sleep.

Now and then I thought that, Jesus Christ, it had been much easier when I was on my own. With nothing to lose, there’s much less to go wrong. You can hang on to the bare fact of nothing and feel a kind of security. Once you have something, you’re always in bloody freefall.

Every so often I called Phyllis at home, although I usually preferred to write rather than talk: there were fewer unreadable pauses. I gave her my work number for emergencies, but I didn’t give her the one at the Whartons’. I had unspoken concerns, although I couldn’t quite sharpen the thought, that someone might try to force it out of her.

She told me that she had bumped into Titch’s mum, who said that a wee package had been left on her front step, wrapped in sparkly paper and with Titch’s name written neatly on it. When she opened it up, inside were two boxes of Jaffa Cakes, and a floral ‘With Sympathy’ card in which was written, ‘Get Well Soon Titch. Your “friends” are thinking of you.’