On the walk back to the gate, we began to speak to one another again. It was easy and frank, and we might have been sitting over coffee after dinner in a nice restaurant rather than trudging through a cemetery. I asked Jessica some questions about her life. Both her sisters had produced nephews and nieces and huge houses in Surrey. She was her father’s disappointment. We came back towards the sound of traffic, and light from the street coruscated again on the gravestones. Her mother was dead, and I said I was sorry and was relieved that I meant it. I thought about her as I had known her: a slim middle-aged woman with a voice like gravel in a country-house driveway, holding on to beauty with whitened knuckles, who outraged everybody but always seemed to be invited to all the parties. It didn’t seem fair that she had died when so many less interesting people were still alive. I asked if Jessica was seeing anybody, and she told me that she had a boyfriend; ‘But it’s nothing serious.’ He was a banker and took her on expensive foreign weekends at a day’s notice. The thought that he made more money than me made me mildly uncomfortable. Money was usually on my side, it was a useful measure of my worth against others, and I felt a little betrayed. She always kept her passport and the contraceptive pill in her handbag, just in case. She told me a story about picking up the wrong bag at the airport in Valencia and finding it full of sex toys. I had pretty much exhausted my store of autobiography with prostitutes and law, but I traded her my father’s death for her confidences. She did not have to tell me she was sorry. She asked me if I had a girlfriend. No, there hadn’t really been anyone serious since university. She absorbed this information in silence. We did not speak about Francis, but we did not speak around him either, describing his shape as a blank in the middle of our conversation. We had made our offering. For the moment, he was appeased. I felt young as we came to the gate. I breathed deeply and felt my body invigorated as I swung myself up and over the cruel tips of the railings. The wetness made everything gleam. I felt my senses heightened; I could hear small and distant noises in the night. Grit from the wall got on my trousers and pitted the palms of my hands like the skin of an orange, but I didn’t care. My movements and my thoughts were light and inconsequential.

When we got back to the road and climbed over the fence, there was no one on the crescent forecourt. I didn’t immediately get the significance of this fact, and Jessica had to tell me that the cab driver had disappeared with my twenty. I was pleased; I didn’t mind about being cheated, I wanted to make use of this new sensation by walking. The two of us walked arm in arm up the highway for about half an hour, until we came to an intersection with a bus stop. Time and the cold had sobered us up, leaving behind only the protective varnish of the drink that I hoped would last until we went to sleep. I could still hear the dull slop of whisky in my hip flask, but I did not want to chance my mood on another swig. We waited for a night bus back into town, and all the time I felt freshly bathed like the city after the rain, lithe and happy. After a while, Jessica came under my arm for warmth. Her make-up was smudged and she looked white and tired. The chemical light of the street was unkind to her. Normally I liked women to be perfectly made up, but I preferred her like this.