I think I hung up before saying goodbye. I feared that if I opened my mouth I would tell him what a patronising bastard he was, though with the wisdom of the passing years I will admit that he was not such a bad stick. It wasn’t his fault. None of it was. He liked men, that was the thing. And he needed to look respectable while he enjoyed their attentions and built his career. It had all worked out rather well, truth be told. Stefan’s father could never acknowledge Stefan was his – he had too much to lose. But when I told him I was pregnant he did what he was so very good at and solved the problem. Found a junior civil servant with a secret he wished to hide and arranged for us to be introduced and wed. Then he funded my disappearance to the country. He sent flowers when Stefan died. I still have them, pressed into the pages of a poetry book I had sent him when I was still a student and which he had in turn returned to me, stating that the gesture had been inappropriate. It wasn’t his fault that he fathered a child. Not really. He just wasn’t strong enough to keep saying no. And my goodness he said it plenty before I got him into bed. I love hard, that’s what Flick says. I fall for people like they’re going to fill some great gap in me. I grow consumed by the thought that if they could just become mine, my life would fit the shape it should always have fitted. And when they let me down – when they fail to be what I need them to – that love turns into a bitter, acid thing.

I pulled on my woollen hat and stepped into the evening air. It was a little after seven. The clouds had cleared just enough to give me a glimpse of the promised moon amid a sugar-sprinkling of stars. The moon looked like an orange split in two. I had never seen its craters and patterns so pronounced. It was the kind of moon that I could imagine prehistoric people worshipping with fire and sacrifice and it would not have surprised me if I were to hear chanting or saw a procession of flickering torches heading towards some forest clearing where a virgin in a white dress was staked to a tree.