When they were close, she felt her heart hammering in her chest. When he touched her, she felt a pull that started low in her stomach and spread right through her. He had whispered in her ear that it was all right, this was the sixties, everyone was doing it, weren’t they? She should see the parties he went to. No one cared and she shouldn’t either.

She had known he would leave her and that her love could never match his dreams, but she had wrapped up her fears and kept them hidden. After all, how could she stop him? He was meeting people all the time, out there, wherever he went: painters, sculptors, a French woman who told him she would introduce him to artists in Paris. It had been so vague: the woman, where Johnny met these people, the rendezvous in cafes and studios in Soho. Connie didn’t know what was true and what was not, but she believed in him, and had given him all the money she had saved. She had even taken a necklace that had belonged to her mother and asked Harry to pawn it for her. She had helped to send Johnny away when all she wanted was for him to stay.

‘I won’t forget you,’ he had whispered on their last night together as they lay in each other’s arms on the pile of blankets they had brought to the attic for the purpose.

She kissed him and told him that she would wait. Head on his chest, she listened to his excited heartbeat. He would be free, he told her, to live and to create. ‘And when I’m established you must come to Paris.’

‘I’d like that,’ she had replied, smiling and touching his face, although her insides were churning. Would he remember? Would she see him again?

Now, she reached the flat and pushed back her tears. Why hadn’t he written to her? She needed him more than she had ever needed anyone.

Breathing deeply, she opened the door. Her heart sank. Kenneth and her father were talking in the living room and the air was thick with smoke. Connie tried not to think about how it would cling to the lace and the tapestries her mother had chosen, or the fact that, of the flowery armchairs the two men sat in, Kenneth had taken her mother’s.

He was poised with one leg crossed over the other, in his habitual white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and dark trousers. She could see his prison tattoos, a mix of unintelligible numbers and shapes etched on his knuckles and along his arms. He’d been inside for more years of his life than not, although now, according to him at least, he was on the straight and narrow and had no intention of going back. No surprise, her father said, considering the enemies he’d made. He was forty, ten years younger than her father, although he looked older. Skinny, with hollow cheeks and furrows around his mouth, he walked with a dark wood cane topped with a silver handle – although most people said the cane was an affectation and there was nothing wrong with his legs.