‘I think we deserve a round,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ll get them in.’

Hitchens was excited. ‘Their selection of real ales is first class,’ he said.

I saw Tara Jones slip outside. I placed an order for a sparkling mineral water and a triple espresso and followed her. She was staring up at the sky. I looked up at the white wash of moonlight on the dome of the cathedral.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘I wasn’t looking at St Paul’s,’ she said.

And I saw what she had been looking at.

The giant black silhouettes of the cranes standing out against the night sky, those huge constructions that dwarfed even the highest shining towers, the cranes that would build tomorrow’s skyscrapers.

I drove her home. It was surprisingly easy to arrange. Nobody looked at us twice when I offered to give her a lift back to Canonbury. But she was distant in the car and when I touched her arm she just shook her head.

‘You don’t want to be that guy, Max,’ she said.

‘What guy?’

‘The cynical romantic. The man who gets his heart broken early on and spends the rest of his life moving from one married woman to the next. Taking no chances, risking nothing, leaving all these wrecked marriages in his wake that, most times, never even know that they’re wrecked.’ She shot me a brief look. I smiled at her beautiful face. She didn’t smile back. ‘Women will come to you,’ she told me. ‘All kinds of women. Don’t make the mistake of only wanting what you can’t have. Don’t become that man, Max. I mean it. You’re better than that.’

I laughed.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.

But I did and she could see it in my face.

We had reached Canonbury Square and she told me I could let her out at the corner. I said that I would drive her to her front door and she didn’t argue with me. But of course I understood that I could not kiss her goodnight in front of her home.

The door opened as she went up the path and I could have looked away but I forced myself to watch. Her husband appeared in the light of the doorway, shirttails outside his trousers and a glass of red wine in his hand, the successful money man at the end of his busy day, and I saw them briefly kiss. More of a quick peck between two sets of lips than a proper kiss. There was affection in the gesture, and familiarity, and even love – the kind of quiet, understated love that comes with the years.

But there was no hunger.

There was nothing like our coffee-flavoured kisses in the Bar Italia.

What she had with her husband was very different.