‘Like his daughter.’ I didn’t mention that Sophie had sent me a text an hour ago, telling me she had a commission for an article she was going to write that day and also an appearance on Radio 4 to talk about how the exit polls showed that the elder generation had betrayed the younger, and what the young needed to do about it now. She hadn’t been to sleep at all, she wrote. She was furiously exhilarated. It was the worst and best thing that had ever happened to her.

The train was called and we walked through the concourse to our platform.

When we found seats at a table, Emily unzipped her suitcase to find the book she couldn’t find in her handbag. I could smell the fabric softener of her clothes, and I looked with her at the neatly rolled tights, the folded dresses and jumpers packed in around paperbacks and her laptop, the side netting filled with creams and make-up. A woman’s things. How I missed this stuff. I missed Monica and wanted her back. I missed Emily even as I sat beside her. I might have missed her for her generalness as much as her specificity, for the warmth of her body as much as her paraphernalia, for her shape as much as the outline of it. Sometimes, in front of toilet doors I would be unable to work out for a moment which were the men’s and which were the women’s; the stick man could be a stick woman until you added a black triangle, a skirt to make a woman a woman and a man her opposite.

‘Would you like a glass of wine mixed with orange juice, Emily?’ I asked.

‘No, thanks. The same as when you asked if I’d help you drink it when you bought it, and whether I thought you should buy two bottles.’

‘The offer remains open at any time. This is real French Charlemagne. You might not be able to get this stuff soon.’

‘Let’s read for a bit,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ll go mad if I don’t.’

She read her novel and I tried to read mine. The sun beat through the warehouses and foliage and for whole minutes I would forget myself and trance out before I refreshed the news on my phone, typed an ill-advised reply to one of the London secessionists, who I hated at that moment even more than the Leave voters, who I hated considerably too. I was glad to be travelling away from London that day. The opinion pieces were multiplying already.