She couldn’t help but laugh. He had taken her arm, whisked her out of the house, hailed a taxi in the Cromwell Road, and seen her all the way to her apartment in WI2. If questioned closely, she would have admitted that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d already decided she fancied him for more than a flingette, he could have parked his hand-benched shoes under her bed that same night.

She continued to fancy him, in spite of all the ‘larking around’, as he called it—or perhaps because of it. And although, since they married, he had never disappointed her, she always felt there was that little something held in reserve that might be revealed at any time. More than a little.

‘Spotting’ him as he worked out, she noticed that during the exertion of his final sets of exercises, tears of gleet would issue from his member. She would lubricate her middle finger with them and slide the tip between the semi-stiff head and its loose foreskin, delicately circling the almost raw conflux of nerve endings. Sometimes, waking in the night, she would observe the sleeping head on the pillow beside her, often on such occasions covering his flaccid penis until it grew in her mouth like a crazed mushroom.

She supposed she had met her erotic match, yet often wondered whether another man could stir her the way he did—binding her emotionally as well—and pondered a phrase heard from her eldest sister; that there comes a day when a woman only feels comfortable undressing in front of her husband.

She wondered what was keeping him, and hoped that he would come home soon.

Routes did not present a problem for Zeno. Left to his own devices, the journey itself became the objective; the destination was simply the excuse for, or focus of, the journey. He had viewed the day from his window and assessed it worthy of an inbreath—which meant he wouldn’t engage it with any exertion, he would simply observe it and let it come to him; ‘loafing’, his wife would have called it.

The trip he loosely planned for himself was a stroll across Kensington Park Gardens to the Porchester Terrace Gate, where he would cross the Bayswater Road down into the Queensway station, catch the Central Line (changing to the Northern Line at Tottenham Court Road), and zip up to Hampstead, where he knew a delightful tea-shop that had resisted all attempts at modernisation—a word associated with ‘ugly’ in Zeno’s mind—and was still in the ‘home style’ of its Hungarian owners’ dream. They also sold the only proper poppy-seed slice in London, which, although it was made with both wheat and sugar, he occasionally indulged in when his daughter wasn’t about.

The destination with its poppy-seed treat was in no way fixed in his mind, and he knew he might digress at any step, but his route did hold certain other points of interest, the first being a tree which Zeno felt was special. Today he found himself sitting and resting his back against its ancient trunk, appreciating a particularly blue sky, pondering the passing of his youth, and shelling his four almonds (eaten every day to prevent cancer), one of which contained two entwined so perfectly as to fit the space made for one.