‘Did you ever see her again?’ she asked, her voice softened to a whisper by sentiment.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘After it was finished we never went back. Francis thought it would be too risky.’ I did not want to tell Jessica about what had happened the last time I had visited the strip club. I did not want to risk her newly emerging sympathy on an unpalatable truth.

‘And do you draw Alysha?’

‘No. We fuck.’ I told Jessica what I genuinely believed to be true. ‘It saves time. I could go out and find a girlfriend, or a wife or a mistress, or even a one-night stand, but why would I, when all I really want is sex? I don’t want someone to share my life. I’m courteous, I stay in shape for them – I’m not like some of the other dirty old men they have to see, I stay clean and smart. I want someone to fuck, someone to do the cleaning, someone to do the laundry, so I have prostitutes, maids and dry-cleaners.’

‘You’re a one-man service industry,’ she said bitterly, and stood to leave for the toilet.

When she came back into the room, something in the mood between us had undergone an irreparable change. Jessica looked tired, her eye shadow lending a bruised darkness to the skin under her eyes. She toyed listlessly with her pendant. I would have suggested that we call it a night, and pulled down the sofa bed for her, but I was still ravenously hungry. I did not want to cheat my stomach out of the takeaway for the sake of a botched reunion. Nor did I know whose fault it was. I had been so long without another opinion on my lifestyle that I could not tell if my behaviour was objectionable in itself, or simply objectionable to her. Did she feel that it was her duty to be outraged, as a woman? I did not feel like apologizing, and I couldn’t think what to apologize for. We simply sat for a while in silence, each of us stubbornly refusing to be the first to move for a reconciliation.

When the food arrived, Jessica seemed to revive. She had always been a creature of simple physical pleasures, and the greasy, promising smell from the brown bag filled the gap between us. My mouth was watering as I went to retrieve plates and cutlery from the kitchen. When I came back in she had already broken open the seal on one of the boxes, and was holding half a spring roll. She stopped chewing and looked at me like a guilty child, and the last of the tension melted away. We did not bother with the plates, but ate straight from the cardboard cartons, jousting with our plastic chopsticks for the final dumpling. We sat up and had a midnight feast, like the ones I used to have in my prep school dormitory on the last night of term, each of us feeling as if we were awake later than was good for us, on the verge of that private landscape of reflection that opens up when the whole of the rest of the world has gone to bed.