I looked up and across the pub but when I found nothing to distract me I turned back to her. ‘He accused me of — I don’t know what he accused me of. Using his daughter as part of some baroque plan to steal his fiancée.’

She smiled. ‘Really? How funny.’

‘Something like that.’

‘It’s understandable that he’s protective of Sophie. She has a habit of doing stupid things.’

‘Which I’m one of. Though isn’t he just keen to keep the riff-raff away from her?’

‘You’re imagining that. You’re quite good enough for her.’

‘For her?’

‘Well.’ She looked out of the window. ‘She seems to have developed into a Marxist sex columnist. What’s going on there? That recent piece was quite something.’

‘I haven’t seen it. I’ve tried to keep away from the internet recently.’

I had deleted all my social media accounts to avoid accidentally seeing what Sophie had been up to, and to make me feel less antagonistic with the culture, less at risk of turning right-wing out of contrariness. I could change my mind within thirty days, but I was very close to this now, and in a day or two I might lose forever the ability to broadcast pictures of haircuts with witty captions to my seven thousand followers, which would be a problem if I hadn’t vowed to never talk to Stev’n again.

‘Her life is quite an adventure if any of it’s true,’ she said.

‘Really? Am I in there?’

‘I don’t know, Paul. Are you in there?’

‘What does it say?’

‘Oh, I can’t say. I’m too shy.’

‘I bet you’re not.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, read the column for yourself.’

She had me worried now and I reached for my phone.

‘Oh, no. Look when I’m gone. Please. I don’t want to know if it’s true.’

I looked back down at my phone and put it away. ‘Is Andrew actually pissed off about me and Sophie? Or was it that I provided you with a place to hide away from him for so long?’

‘After you’d accused him of going to a hotel with his student.’

‘A hotel bar.’

‘You didn’t say “hotel bar” at first. You said “hotel”.’

‘Did I? So you think I was stirring things up too?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Maybe I was, unintentionally on purpose.’

‘Or on purpose, pretending to be unintentionally on purpose.’

‘Does he know you’re meeting with me now?’

‘He does. He’s fine with it.’

‘Is he?’

She shrugged.

‘And so why did you stay there so long?’ I asked.