“I preferred you obnoxious,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said. He drained his coffee, and stood up from the table. “How about this. Let’s both of us go away and find something separate to do for a couple of hours and then meet at the pub for lunch. I’m going to get the car washed. And if you don’t have anything else you’d rather do, you might want to walk up to Herringe’s, because I was in there the other day and I saw some possible handles for your drawers.”

“Handles?” Emma perked up a little. When she had moved in with Matthew, Fee had given her a small chest of drawers that had once belonged to Grandma Jojo, its prettiness marred by the fact that it lacked two of its original handles; she had been hunting ever since for a set of suitable replacements.

“They’re nickel, like you’re looking for,” he said. “About the right size, and I thought looked rather suitable. Why don’t you go up there and take a look?”

“I’ll see you at the pub at one,” she said. “But I’m afraid your obnoxiousness quotient has just fallen crashing through the floor.”

“Sorry,” he said again.

He was a nice man, Emma thought gloomily, walking through the sleepy Saturday morning to Herringe’s Hardware, a small shop tucked away on a back street between Canonbury Road and Highbury Corner. Not many men visiting a hardware shop would think to look for their girlfriend’s furniture accessories. He was a very nice man indeed, in fact, and not only to her but to her family, which all boyfriends were not. But was fixing her sister’s computer and keeping his eyes open for drawer handles worth twelve months and more in rural North Dakota?

Herringe’s was another relic of the old Islington, a meticulously ordered place with brooms outside the door and within a gleam-ingly regimented array of tools and electrical goods neatly aligned under the stately and impassive eye of Mr. Herringe. Emma loved Herringe’s, where her family had been shopping for all of her life. Mr. Herringe greeted her now with the magisterial nod that was his customary greeting for high and low, and directed her to the card hanging on the wall that showed the array of drawer knobs and handles. She saw immediately the ones that Matthew had seen: they were three inches long and reassuringly solid, with a subtle scalloping at the ends. They would be perfect, she thought. Perfect for her chest of drawers, which had traveled from America to be in London. Which now sat happily in the bedroom of the small and cozy flat that she and Matthew shared and that she loved so, whose windows trapped the elusive London light and turned it silvery and pale.

“Ron! Darling!”

Emma looked up in surprise: she had not even known that Mr. Herringe had a first name. But clearly he did because here he was, ducking his head and smiling a little bashfully as Alice Weathers light-stepped in, wearing a long black coat and the merest hint of Chanel, and bestowed on him an enthusiastic double kiss.