“Are you all right?” Tom said eventually. “I’m worried about you. You seem . . . I don’t know . . . not your usual self.”

“What’s my usual self?”

“Oh, well . . .” He hesitated. “Warm-hearted. Interested in things. Levelheaded.”

“Levelheaded?” I would hate him for that, if it were possible to hate Tom.

“It’s not meant as a criticism.”

“You’d never have saddled Stella with levelheaded.”

There she was again. Tom wasn’t having it—“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stella has nothing to do with this”—and I didn’t argue, but we both knew he was wrong. Stella always had everything to do with everything. Stella—with all the guilt and love and resentment that attached to her memory—was the distorting lens through which Tom looked at me, and I looked back at him.

We waited—suspended on a long-held breath—and he put his arm round my shoulders, as he’d done countless times in my imagination, and I leaned into him, as I’d always known I would, but my heart didn’t skip a single beat. I might as well have been leaning against the garden fence for all the joy I felt. He kissed my head, moving his mouth across my hair—once, twice, three times—and I could tell by the breathless way he did it, and the tension along his arm, that his nerves were wound to the point where mine ought to have been.

“I wish you’d done this before,” I said into his shirt, and he froze.

“Before what?”

I shook my head and pulled away.

“I don’t know. A long time ago. Before I grew so old and jaded.”

“Old and jaded? At twenty-three?”

He let me go, and as he moved I caught that nostalgic Tom scent: the coffee and the pencil shavings and the biscuits. I reached for him, but fell short of touching him, and it was too dark for him to notice.

“You even smell of ordinariness,” I said.

“Smell . . . ?”

We laughed together, ever so slightly, right in the middle of our misery. Pipes gurgled inside our house, and my dad moved in a blur across the bathroom window.

The people next door were watching TV and there was a constant plink-plonk of comedy music, punctuated by bursts of audience laughter. I rubbed my arms, despite the heat, and inhaled the stale breath of the night: tarmac and traffic and the kebab shop and the remains of Dad’s furtive fags. The sky over the city was a dirty orange, as if there were a great fire creeping toward us, and it was impossible to tell whether the night was clear or cloudy. I felt the same yearning I’d had at Byrne Hall: a thirst for something I’d never tasted before, and didn’t know, and couldn’t name.

“What’s wrong with ordinariness?” Tom asked, though he seemed to know the question was hopeless.

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“Everything’s wrong with it,” Tom suggested, doing his best to answer on my behalf. “And everything’s wrong with me.”