‘I don’t think we were selfish. Look at what we gave up.’

‘I did that for my own conscience. I guess . . . I guess we went through with it in the first place because we wanted to be young for ever. I don’t mean that in a trite way, no one wants to get old, I mean we tried to achieve it by disclaiming all responsibility. We tried to step outside of time, never to work, never to worry. And it worked, in a way. I don’t feel I’ve ever moved on, I still feel the same inside as I did when we were together, the years haven’t touched me. Only it’s not the same. It’s like the difference between a warm, living body and a perfectly preserved corpse, frozen in ice.’

It was a dialogue punctuated with the sound of the bus rattling and the wind. I felt frustrated. This was the conversation I had been waiting for. This was my specialist topic, I knew it intimately; but somehow the ideas I had rehearsed through insomnia in the darkened theatre of my bedroom had lost their fluency, they were coming out all wrong.

‘Things were like that though, even when we were there. Frozen in time.’ When Jessica said this, I became wary. She had not finished speaking, something else was coming, but she paused. I felt a kind of trap had been set. I would either have to dispute this statement and suffer the stigma of being the one to start a confrontation, or else let it pass, and thus allow her to found her next statement upon it as solid ground. I decided to stall.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it was an odd kind of life, even at its best. An old-fashioned way of living, preserved beyond its sell-by date. All those picnics and tailors and titles and silver and candles. I don’t think I ate dinner by electric light once in twelve months. It was theatre, a kind of role-play. I think Francis had read a lot, spent a long time gazing at all those splendid portraits in his gallery, and had formed an idea of what aristocratic life was supposed to be. Then we all set about recreating it with him, like those people on TV who go and live on an Elizabethan-era plantation for six months, then come back and talk about their experiences. I think we did a pretty good impression of a golden past, but it was still just an impression.’

‘Your memories must be different to mine,’ I said at last.

Jessica was silent for a while. When she spoke again, it was in the small, insistent voice of someone determined to forge on with a disagreeable topic. ‘Do you ever wonder why Francis made us go through with it?’

‘We chose to do it.’

‘Don’t delude yourself, James,’ she said to me gently. ‘You would have robbed a bank if he’d asked you. I think I would too.’