I wondered in my irritation who had written his script, but then he kissed me and that was that. I didn’t care any longer where we ate, what we ate or even whether we ate at all.

‘You haven’t said hello, good evening, or even nice to see you,’ he said after quite a long time.

‘Hello. Good evening. Nice to see you.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

He let go of me and rummaged in the bags. ‘I have everything,’ he said, pulling things out of the bags like a conjuror takes rabbits and ribbons from a hat. ‘Candles – you can deal with them. That will be your only chore. Champagne – Californian. I hope that’s OK with you. A nice Côtes du Rhône. Trust me. Pâté, pie, salads and mousse au chocolat, some Brie and a neat box of chêvres. I presume you have coffee and here’s a bottle of brandy. What do you say?’

‘Cool.’

He picked up the champagne and began to fiddle with the wire. ‘I love this moment,’ he said. I fetched two glases and held them out towards him. ‘This moment of expectation, before anything or nothing happens. Like the moment before the curtain goes up in the theatre or as the conductor raises his baton and waits for silence from the audience. Sublime expectation.’

The cork popped in a civilised fashion into his hand and he filled the two glasses, the wine foaming over the rim and down over the fingers of my right hand.

We swigged our first glasses.

‘Skoal!’

‘Sláinte!’

‘Santé!’

‘Mud in your eye!’

‘Gezundheit!’

I laughed. ‘Nah. That won’t do.’

He took my hand. ‘Clara.’

‘Yes?’

‘Clara.’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

He kissed my fingers one by one, licked the champagne from them, smiled. ‘I have to tell you something,’ he whispered.

‘Be my guest.’

‘I am forty-two. I no longer like to make love on the floor, or up against a wall, I prefer a bed. Have you a bed?’

‘Now?’

‘Oh, I think so, don’t you? Food tastes so much better after love. This will be the perfect hors d’oeuvre. After that you can light the candles and I will make the food, and after that …’

‘After that?’

‘Who knows, darling Clara.’

I had dressed carefully for going out and he undressed me just as carefully and I never asked him all those questions that should be asked. I never even thought about such questions. I thought about nothing and the lights came on in the street and shone down, silver into my bedroom, and his eyes glittered in the silver light, I thought from time to time, when I was able to think, that maybe he was a god. We moved together from silver to black and back to silver again.

We moved.

I don’t remember what we talked about later on, by the light of twelve candles. I had pulled the table over to the window, so that we could look out at the tree and the shadows of the branches in the light from the street-lamps. I remember that and the twelve candles and the reflection of the candles in his eyes, flickering as he leant towards me. When I come to flesh out these notes, I will have to invent that conversation. The little laughs, the hints of intimacy, questions, answers, the silences that seemed at the time to mean so much. The small misunderstandings of pauses and glances, the lies. I do have to say lies; the lies had to be there, either spoken or by implication and I, who had always prided myself on my capacity to ferret out the truth when faced with another human being, allowed myself to be bamboozled.