‘How would you feel about being slightly older than a lot of the entry-level staff?’ asked the marketing director, a woman about my own age.

‘It’s very kind of you to say slightly,’ I said.

She smiled but I got the sense I might be overdoing the self-deprecation.

‘I live in Dalston. Everyone is younger than me every time I leave the front door.’

She kept smiling, politely.

‘I’d work hard,’ I said, ‘and be ambitious, and I’d hope my experience in the world and in the book trade would enable me to distinguish myself and progress quickly.’

This was another of Susannah’s set answers. I surprised myself by almost believing it.

She was seeing some other people that week, she said, but she’d let me know.

*

And everyone in London talked about nothing but Brexit. You asked a friend or a customer how they were, and they moaned the word ‘Brexit’. Politicians resigned from their jobs and went on holiday to avoid having to think about Brexit. I stopped talking to people whenever possible. For the first three weeks I read everything there was to read about Brexit and then I couldn’t digest any more. We joined or left the Labour Party, depending on whether we had been members in the first place. I tried to give up newspapers and retreat to novels. But if you didn’t bring up Brexit in the first ten words of a conversation then you knew that the person you were talking to thought you lacked moral seriousness. I wished I was Irish. I had grown up Catholic on the coast of the Irish Sea! I was not Irish in any way at all. And we were probably about to make another mess of Ireland too.

Sophie was about to go on holiday with some of her friends, to a villa that one of their parents owned in Italy. I hadn’t been invited, and didn’t expect to be, but the idea of lying with her by a pool winded me whenever I thought about it. Helen caught me on the staircase holding my stomach.

‘Brexit?’ she asked.

Outside the shop the sun was shining all the time. The courtyard filled up with men in shirts and elongated leather shoes. Orange women drank pink wine. Our customers, pushed up against the wall, lit cigarettes and sucked vape machines and made disparaging comments about the fair-weather crowd who had once again stolen their tables and chairs.