‘And, of course, you can afford it now.’ I snuck a sideways glance at her to see if she had registered the implicit sedition, but she either didn’t hear or chose to ignore me.

‘Also I’m going to Croatia with the family. Since he started working again Daddy likes to take a villa for three weeks, on the coast by Dubrovnik. It practically bankrupts him, but I think he’d rather look rich and be poor than live comfortably.’

‘Will you get bored?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Irritated maybe. All the sisters and steady boyfriends will be in attendance. They play tennis with Daddy and make rude jokes about my bikinis. And I’m taking friends.’ Then, quickly, ‘More friends of the family, you know? I’ve known them all since prep school, they still call my father “Mr Katz”.’

I packed more intently, trying not to let her see how much it pained me to think of her having something I did not: another life. I did not want there to be anyone who could lay claim to knowing her better than I did.

‘What are your plans?’ she asked. In terms of intimacy the conversation was on a level with the exchanges I had with my barber, a woman on Silver Street who always smelt of bubble gum. I decided to punish her for her insensitivity with a barrage of glamorous lies.

‘Me and some friends are going to St Tropez,’ I said recklessly. She didn’t bite, just nodded her head and breathed smoke. She trumped me with a lack of surprise. For most of her acquaintance, I realized, this might be nothing less than the truth. For me it was an obvious fantasy. I had processed the clothes and was down to the knick-knacks. Confronting the meagre collection of cufflinks and collar studs in my bedside drawer I thought how sparse my lifestyle would be without Francis to provide. The money in the Jersey account did not feel like mine, and even if it had not been officially out of bounds I would never in truth have thought to touch it. I pulled the drawer out and upended it on top of the neatly folded shirts in my overnight bag.

‘Has it occurred to you . . .’ she said after a while, ‘that it may not have been the best thing to send Francis off with all that cash?’

I could not muster the energy for this conversation. It irritated me that we could not spend half an hour in one another’s company without the subject of Francis bobbing to the surface. It made me feel like half of a couple staying together for the sake of the children. The packing accentuated the impression of weary domesticity.

‘He’s twenty,’ I said. I picked my anglepoise lamp up off the bureau and turned it over in my hand, pretending to wonder whether to pack it.

A flicker of annoyance passed over her face at this rebuff. She took a last furious pull on her cigarette, a deep drag as if she was leaving the smoking lounge for a transatlantic flight. She flicked the butt out of the window. This was deliberately antagonistic, as I had confided to her my obsessive fear that a stray butt in the gutter would ignite dry leaves and set the building on fire, obliterating hundreds of years’ worth of history. The rental agreement on my room stipulated no smoking.