‘I’m fine. Sorry, I’m not in a good mood.’ She looked up at the grand ceiling of the room we were in, at the waiters gliding past us in their bow ties. ‘This isn’t my sort of place at all.’

‘We could go somewhere else. Let’s go somewhere else.’

‘I’m not sure. Oh, OK. As long as we go right away.’

*

It was hard to find a pub in Mayfair that wasn’t full of loud men in suits sucking the marrow from platefuls of hacked-up bones, and we gave up. I walked Emily home along the top of the park, against her insistence, wheeling my ghastly bike beside her and feeling like a boy talking to one of his friend’s older sisters.

Andrew’s daughter Sophie had been caught shoplifting in Selfridges; that was the crisis. Sophie had called Andrew because she didn’t want her mother to know about it, and she hoped he could help.

‘Can he help?’

‘He has enough lawyers and barristers as friends. One of them will go along with him and throw her weight around.’

‘I imagine Andrew himself can be pretty fierce.’

‘Yes.’

‘To his daughter?’

‘He’s quite indulgent of her. He feels he owes her for leaving home when she was a kid.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s difficult. Young. Superior. Doesn’t smile much, or not when I’m around. She’s just submitted a PhD and has started writing these opinion pieces on being a Marxist activist for the Guardian. Dinner talk with her is what I imagine it was like to have a tutorial at Balliol. Which she knows all about, and perhaps it’s just the style you learn there but she certainly takes on the role of the tutor in our conversations. I sometimes wonder if she believes I wrote my books myself. The egalitarianism she professes is abstract rather than intuitive. She’ll have a book out herself before we know it. It will sell in one week more copies than all my books have ever sold. In interviews she’ll outline utopian plans to end sexism, famine and war. I can see it. It’s the future. I’m sorry, listen to me. I’m ranting. I’m hateable. Fucking kill me, please.’

I made my fingers into the shape of a gun and pressed them against her temple. ‘Bang,’ I said, though I had not yet had a single murderous thought towards her.

‘I didn’t know she was a shoplifter,’ she said, ‘but it’s one of those details that make perfect sense.’

‘Why’s that?’

While she tried to penetrate the remaining mystery of Sophie’s personality, I looked out at all the darkness to our left as we walked down the road. It had rained earlier and the air smelled green. The gates to the park were all locked by now. I wondered how we would get in.