‘We’ll stay up all night. It’ll be like old times.’ She said, ‘You might even have fun.’

My flat, designed to accommodate no one but myself and infrequent visitors whose opinions were irrelevant, was not the most hospitable place. Jessica cast a critical eye around the apartment. She lifted the single crystal tumbler from the surface of the table, sniffed the residue of dirty brown liquid and made an exaggerated moue of surprise and disgust, wrinkling her nose. I did not remember putting the bottle back in the kitchen, but was relieved that I had. She inspected the apartment with the judgemental eye of a mother-in-law.

The bookshelves, painted a cream that was chipped in places to reveal an old, somnolent green, were entirely filled with law books and DVDs. The former were mostly guides to commercial litigation and corporate finance, but there were some, such as my Chambers guide, that were as old as the decision I had taken to study the law. It had been a sudden and arbitrary choice, made in the conflicting currents of idealism and financial necessity that swept me along in the year after graduation. The DVDs were mostly pornography, a relatively expensive habit that had accrued over the years into a whole library of perversion. She began to browse the titles. She spared me the humiliation of reading them out loud.

‘I watch a lot of porn. It helps me switch my mind off.’

‘How can you find these sexy?’ she asked, running her finger over the DVD boxes, turned spine out to reveal slivers of garish nudity.

‘I don’t find them sexy,’ I lied, ‘I find them distracting.’

‘Why do you have them all on display?’

‘I’m not ashamed of what I like.’ And no one ever comes here to see. ‘Shall we talk about something else?’

‘Sure,’ she said, casting one last critical glance over the ranks of DVDs.

It occurred to me as her eyes dissected the visible portion of my life that I was seeing her in a curious double perspective. I knew her well, as only a friend can who has seen that final transition from adolescence into adulthood. I had watched her opinions and her priorities lose their plasticity and cool in the mould of complacent maturity. But I did not know the barest details of her life. She was unmarried, or divorced, that much I knew from the lack of a ring. Something in her manner, a certain residual selfishness, precluded the possibility of kids. She did not have the distracted amiability of someone used to factoring others into their decisions, and her stomach still fit snugly into the unforgiving waistband of her suit trousers. I looked at her flat belly with the judgemental eye of a consumer. It was not right to turn this gaze on her, but habit was stronger than morality, and I knew she could watch out for her own interests. I allowed the fingertips of memory to run over the thin white line where the surgeon had slipped his tongs into her belly, the brand of childhood appendicitis. Despite the great blank of her personal narrative, I still knew her by the way she nosed around my flat, peering into confidential files and collecting dust on the tip of her finger in a playful parody of a disapproving woman. It occurred to me how meaningless were the details of someone’s biography beyond a certain age, when placed in the balance against an understanding of their nature.