She stood in his bedroom, her back to Dyer. She had removed her jacket and put it on the bed. Hearing him enter, she lifted her hand to behind her head, unbound her hair. Shook it loose.

Taut as a bough, he said: ‘Katya?’

She turned to him without a word and stepped forward – he could smell her breath, the faint whiff of pale ale – looked at him, then opened her mouth and pressed it against his.

There were fresh sheets on the bed. There had been a report on the news. The Americans were suspending themselves from the nuclear treaty, the Iranians were going mad. A boy on the towpath was talking to a skinny man with a backpack. The mist, as if it had drifted in from the nearby cemetery, was disintegrating the branches of the trees. She bent over to take off her shoes. The jersey tightened on her shoulders, and then she was pulling it up over her head.

His heart stumbled. Stretched out on her back. The shape of her breasts. Long legs apart on the sheet, the small dark-blonde triangle of hair between them. All that she had on was the silver leaf on the cord around her neck. The innocence of this people is such that that of Adam could not have been greater. Her mouth is hypnotic. She knows she is attractive, her effect.

She was thirty-six. Her son was listening to his history teacher, brows knitted. When she reaches up to put her hands on his chest, her breasts throw a shadow on the pillow.

Feelings don’t have manners. They roll over and over. Dazedly, he sees her spread out beneath him. Her splendid behind raised, her buttocks glossy and firm, like conkers. Her throat half-turned, exciting him on. As he enters her, he knows the code to the universe, he sees it flash before him, dazzling and shining, and then fade and disappear.

She held him from behind, her pubic hair soft against his buttocks. In spite of the beer, he could smell her perfume. He turned to ask what it was. She looked at him and smiled. ‘Perfume? No, I’m not wearing perfume. You must mean me …’ glancing down. ‘Oh, I know, it’s my BB cream.’

He kissed her neck, now covered with a shimmer of perspiration, and tasted a sudden oily residue in the back of his throat, the aggressive bleachy taste of a laundry tablet. Then he realises that it’s the cream, and she has applied it to camouflage the dark bruise that lies beneath her skin in the shape of a fish under water.