‘We met up. Then he introduced me to his new girlfriend.’

‘New girlfriend? But he’s in love with you.’

She sat up and put her hand on my arm. ‘Do you think he is?’

‘It seemed obvious to me and Jonathan.’

‘Jonathan.’

‘I thought so too.’

‘Well, I did too. I think we were wrong.’

I made us both a cup of tea and added one sugar to each, an emergency measure. Nathan had never made a move, she told me. They would share a bed sometimes and she could feel how he wanted her, and how much she liked knowing that, and how she would have responded if he’d touched her, but she wasn’t in a hurry for him to touch her. ‘I wasn’t totally sure I wanted him until I realised I couldn’t have him. I thought we could take things easy until something happened. I wanted to be free for a bit longer.’

We had forgotten that freedom was more important as a means than an end. Sophie didn’t call but during the three hours I stayed up talking to Mary I tried not to think about her, only suffering the occasional juddering vision of what might be happening. I was too embarrassed to tell Mary about the invitation I had turned down.

‘I saw Jonathan with his wife earlier,’ she said, and then she told me what I had suspected; that she had slept with Jonathan on the night he was thrown out of the Serpentine party for forcibly kissing his wife’s new boyfriend, and that Mary had spent some time before and after imagining what it might be like to be his girlfriend.

‘So they’re definitely back on?’ she asked me.

‘Looks like it. He’s not been back here for days now.’

I made us some more tea and she played me some of the new music she was promoting for her record label. We lay side by side on the sofa, her facing away from me. I had my head in her hair and my arms round her.

‘Are you sad about selling your mum’s house?’ she asked me at one point.

‘Desperately,’ I said.

‘That’s what you have to do though, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was she like, your mum?’

‘She was nice. What about yours?’

‘Stop deflecting me. You never talk about her. What was she like?’