The first show she put on was a success and she was offered a job on a three-year project in Melbourne, though she’d be able to get out after two, she said. We discussed it and agreed she should go. There was no absolute reason not to, not if we believed in our magical three years. I think we were punishing ourselves for a decision that we couldn’t admit to each other we regretted. It was a penance. Or I used the idea of a penance to justify my baser instincts. Two years wasn’t that long. It was long enough that we shouldn’t kill ourselves over faithfulness in the strictest sense, but it wasn’t that long, it was survivable. We took a holiday from the weight of being in love, from its limitations, and we behaved like we had done in the years after we’d just met each other, when we’d been waiting for the inevitability of us coming together. We had joyful reunions, spaced far apart. We lived two lives. The halves grew unequal. We lived on Skype at different ends of the day. The Monica who loved me grew smaller. The bigger half of her is sitting exams for citizenship now, bringing up an infamous baby with a colleague from the gallery. The part of her that loves me, if it is anywhere, is still there too, far too far from me to be of any use to either of us.

‘Well, at least I’m funny,’ I said to my mum, the last time I saw her.

‘You’re not that funny,’ she said. ‘You can work on your other qualities too.’

*

In the Conservative club I looked over again at Carl’s parents. Mike was sitting down now and staring through his pint, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. Janine was busier – talking to other mourners, giving Leia instructions to see about the sandwiches. Carl’s little brothers weren’t little any more – they came in for pints of lager and took them outside to smoke. One of them smiled at Amy and came over to say hello. Mike caught me looking at him and waved, so I walked over to sit next to him.

We had stopped going fishing with him when we became teenagers but when we were drinking on the beach at night we’d see him sometimes, sitting silently on a camping stool at the tide’s edge, just visible in the dark, with his line cast out into the sea as it drifted out.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Silly bugger,’ he said. I felt the stubs of his fingers as they woke up to the handshake and began to squeeze my hand. ‘Are you working, Paul?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’

‘In a shop.’

‘What kind of a shop?’

‘Bookshop.’