Inside I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. They had taken a booth at the quiet end of the long bar room, sitting side by side and facing me. She pulled out a laptop and opened it, but they only looked at each other and after five minutes she pushed the lid shut. From my stool at the bar I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but it meant I could stare in their direction without it seeming like I was singling them out. The way they talked seemed intimate to me, weary, as though they’d exhausted all their best anecdotes already. Did I detect accurately that he was managing her in some way, meeting her more to prove that he cared for her than for the pleasure of her company? A situation which could just as easily have applied to daughter as to lover. As a lecturer he would have to forge close professional relationships with young people every year. Of course these relationships would mean more to the students than they did to him. Of course they would want as much as they could get from him. If they were ambitious they would have to. There was something sorrowful in his face. Whoever she was, he seemed to care for her and be pained by her presence. She was inconvenient. She had a woman-sized body: all its movement, all its weight. He had to care so that she didn’t destroy him. I was running away with my own fictions at the bar.

Perhaps I had been staring too intently in their direction; I realised Andrew Lancaster was returning my interest. I looked down at my book; prompted by Helen’s comment, I was reading a biography of George Eliot to find out if there were really any ways in which I resembled her, and so far it was not at all obvious. When I looked up again he was striding towards me. I looked down at my book again as he leaned into the bar next to me.

‘Good book?’ he asked.

I showed him the cover.

‘Ah, the little moralistic female, as Nietzsche called her – stupidly, in that instance, of course. What excellent taste you have… I knew you weren’t stupid, just by looking at you. Do I know you from somewhere? I thought I saw you looking quite intensely at me before. I haven’t annoyed you? Given you a bad mark? My memory isn’t what it was.’

‘No, no. I recognised you, that’s all. I’ve read your short history of the Russian Revolution. And your book about how the Left betrayed its principles.’

‘Ah, I see – well, thank you. Or is it that book that’s annoyed you? Everyone younger than me hates that book.’

‘I’m not annoyed. Honestly.’