Yes, was the enthusiastic conclusion she wrote up afterwards.

Hold on to your purse strings! With everything under one roof, Brent Cross is a revolutionary new shopping experience that is likely to transform the way we buy – and how long we spend doing it. With restaurants and cafes, children’s entertainment and a vast range of shops, this American-style mall is designed to entice us in and keep us there for as long as it can, much to the likely dismay of husbands all over London.

She bored herself, but Marnie seemed pleased.

Jim was waiting for her after work with a bunch of drooping tulips wrapped in cellophane. She laughed. ‘What’s that for?’

‘I’ve missed you.’ He swept her into an embrace and she hugged him back, the flowers squashed between them.

They walked along the river to Embankment and entered the musty confines of Gordon’s Wine Bar. He went to order drinks and she sat down, smiled at a group of six around the table next to her, greeting cards opened and displayed on the wooden table top. She caught the writing on one: ‘Congratulations on your engagement’. The girl showed off her ring, curled into her fiancé, beamed up at him.

The first time she came to this bar was within weeks of moving to London. Jim had arranged an internship at a political magazine, and she was applying for every junior reporter job and graduate trainee scheme going, hoping to get one before her money ran out and she’d be forced to temp, a prospect that scared her more than staying jobless, not least because the words of her French literature tutor rang loud in her ears: Never tell anyone you can touch-type or you’ll be forever pigeonholed as a secretary. What little money they did have went towards rent on their respective flatshares two stops apart down the Northern Line: she with Maggie in Clapham, Jim with his uni friend David down the road in Balham, a set-up forged mainly to placate Jim’s mother, for whom living in sin was simply an unacceptable state of affairs for her only son. This pokey old bar had seemed to epitomise everything they loved about being in London, so they’d cobbled together enough money for one glass each and had come here to toast their new lives.

Back then – what, only a year and a half or so? – everything had seemed new, fresh, exciting, hopeful. Their futures were a clean slate, waiting to be imprinted with success and money and respect and experience.

She still felt like that last week, she realised now. Just last week.