The new White Jesus was back from the printers, and Jerry’s photos did not seem to document an atrocity. Emily had given in just a little. She wasn’t wearing antlers, or high-waisted PVC hot pants and bikini top, but she’d put a different dress on, and the photo they’d used had caught her turning round to hear something Jerry had said – something ambiguously offensive rather than outright – her facial expression incredulous but amused, at least in that split second, though she might have become angry in the next seconds. But this at least captured something of her brusque charisma.

I followed up the email Emily never replied to by sending her a copy of the magazine in the post with a note, saying I hoped she liked it.

And I asked again if she might like to meet me for a coffee one day, or a Coca-Cola. In the first week after I’d sent it I kept checking my emails, but when I didn’t hear back again I didn’t give much more thought to the matter. And that might have been that.

*

But towards the end of one shift in early spring, when I was digesting some particularly bitter news about my books page, Leo asked me if I wanted to go with him to a public debate about the dangers of Brexit.

‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Don’t we breathe in enough of that without having to seek it out?’

‘Your man Lancaster is speaking.’

‘He’s not my man.’

‘You’ve been reading his books.’

He gave me a look and I worried that he suspected me of stealing Lancaster’s short history of the Russian Revolution. ‘All right, I’ll come.’

It was round the corner in Senate House, a building of such imposing grandeur that Hitler was supposed to have earmarked it for his headquarters upon his successful invasion.

‘Yes, I know that,’ I said to Leo.

‘But did you know this?’ he said, and talked some more while I let my thoughts drift elsewhere. Something, something, terrible curators. Something, something, Georgian terraces. Something, something, knock it all down and start again, don’t you think?

‘How do you have so many opinions?’ I asked.

‘I think about things. Have you ever thought of doing the same?’

‘About which buildings to tear down?’

‘Yes.’

‘For aesthetic purposes?’

‘Yes!’

‘No.’