I found a parking spot on Old Compton Street and we walked to Frith Street while I told her a brief history of the Bar Italia.

‘The Bar Italia has been in the same family for three generations now and they have their own secret blend of coffee that was invented by a man called Signor Angelucci who used to be next door and because their Gaggia coffee machine doesn’t have a water filter no salts are run through it—’

She stopped me with a look.

‘Max?’

‘What?’

‘You’re babbling, just a little bit.’

‘I’m nervous.’

She placed a kiss on my mouth. It felt good. Our mouths fit so well. Ridiculously, thrillingly well. I folded her in my arms and when she spoke her voice was muffled against the lapel of my old wedding suit.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be nervous with me.’

We came apart and she slipped her arm through mine and we walked down Old Compton Street into Frith Street like a proper couple, a real couple, and it felt so natural and right and she smiled when she saw the green neon sign that announces the Bar Italia.

We sat holding hands under the large poster of Rocky Marciano that the champ’s widow Barbara gave to the Bar Italia after he died because Marciano had always loved it here. But I didn’t tell her about Marciano’s relationship with the Bar Italia in case it led to some babbling. I kissed her mouth and drank a triple espresso and Tara had a cappuccino, and nobody took any notice of us because AC Milan was playing Inter Milan on the big screens and we were just another couple, lost in the backstreets of Soho.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said. ‘And you don’t know me.’

‘You know me.’

‘What were you like as a boy?’ she said. ‘Did you get bullied?’

I thought about it.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was a bit different because I lived with my grandmother. But I had a friend who was adopted. Jackson. My parents were gone and he never knew his mum and dad.’ I smiled at the thought of Jackson Rose as a kid. ‘We stuck together,’ I said. ‘For years.’

‘I was bullied every day,’ she said. ‘I went to a normal school. Horribly normal. They – some boys, a little gang – they said I sounded like a seal when I talked. You know? That noise seals make? They said that’s what I sounded like when I talked.’ She squeezed my hand, frowning at my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

I wanted to hunt them down.

I wanted to find them.

I wanted to be in a room alone with them for . . . oh, thirty minutes should do it.

‘But it’s all right now,’ she said. ‘So don’t look like that. Smile again. Please?’

‘OK.’