There had been a time when she had vowed never to make that kind of commitment again. To any man. And she remembered the horror of that night before the wedding. I’m sorry, he’d said. Just that. I’m sorry. And she had shed tears of hurt and humiliation. Before gathering herself to break the news to all those who’d travelled for the ceremony. So many presents to be returned. The embarrassment of her friends who didn’t know what to say. The false comfort of relatives who told her they had never liked him anyway.

But things had changed. She was thirty-two now. Ahead lay a lifetime of loneliness. And with Bannerman, somehow, it seemed different in a way that had caught her unawares. Yet, as she had just acknowledged, she hardly knew him, and within her still lay the seeds of doubt and mistrust sown that night three years before.

The thés Slaves arrived in glasses wrapped around with paper napkins, a mixture of tea and some kind of spirit that the waiter set alight at their table. The flames licked up over the rims of the glasses, soft and warm. Bannerman looked across the table at Sally’s downturned face. The flames softened it and he thought she looked almost beautiful. He felt a tremendous weight of responsibility. It would be too easy to say yes, that he wanted her to stay. But he knew she would make demands on him that he was not sure he could fulfil. And his was the kind of life into which relationships did not easily fit. There was a space inside him, big and empty, that badly needed to be filled. But in that way he was like Tania. So often it was those who needed love the most who were the most difficult to love. And what kind of life could he give her?

‘It’s not for me to say,’ he said, knowing that he didn’t want her to go. ‘You really don’t know anything about me. Nor I about you.’ He blew out the flames in their glasses. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel better.’ And he thought what an empty thing it was to say.

They lifted the scalding liquid to their lips and drank it in tiny sips. It was strong, and the spirit filled their mouths like burning breath, before slipping over to glow inside them. She stared into her glass.

‘Is that just a roundabout way of saying that you don’t want me to stay?’

Bannerman said nothing. If that was what she wanted to think then perhaps it would be easier for her.

Then suddenly she said, ‘I’d like to spend just one night with you, Neil. Something’ – she hesitated – ‘to remember you by.’