We have gone through tactics of how to avoid interrupting people and, in doing this, accelerating arguments beyond the point of recovery. So I am sorry that I continue to interrupt you sometimes.

‘—Do you really believe in that term?’ I ask. ‘Self-medication?’

Because surely, I say, the desire to go out, lose one’s inhibitions, make new friends, dance around, kiss strangers – surely that’s mostly a desire to enjoy our finite and beautiful lives, rather than the need to replace some sort of absent prescribed pharmaceuticals and therapy that are the correct way of compensating for our mortality?

You shrug. I press my advantage. ‘Don’t you want to do that sometimes?’

‘Of course I do,’ you say.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing on Friday?’

You shake your head. ‘Certainly not the kind of thing you mean. I’m far too old for that kind of thing now.’

‘You’re no older than me.’

‘You know – if you were seeing a Lacanian analyst, that might be the moment she would stop the session.’

Which I thought was a bit below the belt of you.

*

Our second offer for the flat in Downhill was accepted. And so was somebody else’s for the château. We had to be out of there by the start of October. Jonathan’s stuff was still in the house but he had not been home ever since one night when he had gone out to meet Julia, so it appeared his campaign to win her back was progressing. It was quiet in the evenings without him, even when Mary was around. She had quit her job in the bar and was seeing less of Nathan. ‘I’ve no idea where he is,’ she snapped, when I asked if she’d seen Jonathan. She had been reacting strangely to the mention of his name ever since the night they went out together to the summer party. I had offered her the spare room in Downhill for a cheap price, but not so cheap, she said, that it would encourage a woman in her mid-twenties to move from the twenty-first century to the 1930s. She had started going for interviews in small living rooms, with twenty-somethings who asked her what she liked watching on Netflix and what she thought she would bring to their household.