As I looked at her, I tried to gauge her financial situation. It seemed the quickest way to divining what she wanted. Her platinum hair had been recently cut and highlighted. Her fingernails were salon neat and unpainted, but glazed. The jewellery she wore was simple, a scuffed Tiffany’s silver pendant. Her black suit could have been tailored, but Jessica had always had a body that made cheap clothes look expensive. In the days when I had known her well, she had practised a policy of sartorial simplicity designed to exhibit her natural gifts, and I think to embarrass the girls who dressed up. I could not tell whether this policy had survived the passing of her beauty. I thought on the whole that choice had given way to necessity. There was no ring on her finger.

Jessica sat back in her chair and met my eye as if to say, ‘And what has become of you?’

‘So, you’re my two-thirty. I bill at two hundred and fifty pounds an hour. What can I do for you?’

‘You can give me a discount, for starters.’

We looked at each other with fixed smiles, headlights speeding towards one another in the dark. She relented first. ‘I need a place to stay for a few days. I don’t want to go to a hotel. I don’t want to go to friends. I don’t want to be found.’

She rose from my seat. Her movements still had the light accent of childhood ballet. Born of parental ambition, undone by a teenage growth spurt, a graceful precision was the last legacy of repetition and bleeding toes. To my displeasure I noticed that behind the chair sat a briefcase and a piece of fake Louis Vuitton luggage, its beige midriff distended with female packing. Jessica knew the difference that social leverage could make, and it would be that much more awkward to dismiss her if she had all the practical necessities already to hand. I wondered what the receptionists downstairs would think of my attractive female clients arriving prepared for an overnight stay. It was typical of Jessica to cause disruption simply by virtue of her presence. With an air of unimpeachable honesty, she addressed me eye to eye. The air was still filled with the faint metallic click of the toy she had set in motion on my desk.

‘Is there somewhere else we can go to talk? I don’t mean to be melodramatic, I just haven’t seen you in a long time, and if I’m going to get turned down I’d prefer to do it somewhere pretty. Don’t you have client hospitality or something? After all, I am a client.’ She grinned again.

We stood in the lift, and I watched as the two halves of my image slid together in the metallic panels of the doors. Jessica’s appraising look was still fresh in my mind, and I checked myself out discreetly. My dark hair was perfectly slicked; my blue eyes glowed even in the dull surface of the metal. My arms were thick from the gym. The slight bulge of flesh around my collar appeared again today. I raised my chin a little to tighten the skin. Jessica almost caught me in the reflection, and I looked away. The lift deposited us smoothly on the top floor, like riding up in the palm of a giant. The doors slid apart, and my image divided and disappeared. By the time we arrived Jessica was solemn, demonstrating one of those mercurial shifts of mood that had confounded her youthful suitors. The young men at Cambridge could never tell whether to court her as a child, a princess, an executive or a clown. Only the few of us who had become truly close to her had learnt to read her sudden shifts, like sailors at the mercy of an unpredictable sky.