Lucas had savoured every second of the undressing and all that followed, thanking whatever hidden force had inspired the organisers of the faculty dinner the month before to seat them side by side. Still in the thick of settling divorce terms, he had been feeling so low he’d almost not attended, mentally composing an email of apology-for-absence while grimly knotting his bow tie and having to redo it several times because it had been one of Esther’s skills and he never got it quite right. Only some stubborn shred of a refusal to admit defeat had got him out of the door, arriving too late for the drinks but in time to make it to the dinner. Even then, the first sight of Heidi, rivetingly gorgeous in high heels, standing composed beside him while the Latin grace was read out to the hall, her muscled shoulders swelling out of an off-the-shoulder, black velvet mini-dress, hair piled high, Lucas’s initial reaction had been a sort of weariness at the demands such a dinner companion might make on his energies, seeking all the things he felt least equipped to give: charm, wit, interest. The elderly woman in a dog collar on his other side had looked a much easier bet.

As soon as the first course was delivered however, five pale prawns on a bed of lettuce, Heidi started throwing out parallels between Orwell and Dostoevsky, displaying a knowledge of Russian and European literature that greatly exceeded his own. The prawns took a lot of chewing, which saw him through a round of dutiful exchanges with the guest on his other side, who turned out not to be easy at all, although this undoubtably had some connection to Lucas’s eagerness to return his attention to Heidi. When at last he did so, there she was, her open face split into a smile, waiting for him, it felt like; and on they went, leaping from subject to subject like old friends playing catch-up. It transpired that her family ran a clothing company and lived in Bonn; that she had been a junior national gymnast, spoke several languages fluently, and was in Cambridge working on her ‘habilitation’, as European academics called the second doctorate before becoming a professor. Over mouthfuls of dry chicken breast, softened by excellent wine, they moved back to literature, Lucas professing his admiration of the feisty women in courtly tales, and Heidi drawing enjoyable parallels between medievalists and romantics. By the time dessert arrived, succulent slices of something involving blackcurrant and chocolate (they could have been chewing leather, for all Lucas cared), she had mentioned the end of a recent relationship in Germany and the desire for a fresh start, to which he had responded with a pencil-sketch summary of his defunct marriage to Esther. Thimbles of port and cups of coffee saw them exchange email addresses and phone numbers, both by then oblivious to the eighty or so other guests.