My glasses steamed up as I entered the shop where Emily’s launch party was being held. I unzipped my parka to wipe them with my T-shirt. When I put them back on, Susannah was standing in front of me.

‘Paul! How nice to see you again. You didn’t write to me like you said you would.’

‘I was just thinking how I should. I’m quite desperate for a career now.’

The room was busy already. A group of men in their twenties with side partings and retro glasses stood by the wine table, trying to look like they were attending a cocktail party sixty years ago on the Upper West Side. I could see Emily behind them, talking to the literary editor of a newspaper. She had her hair up and was wearing a white dress that showed off her shoulders. He said something and she laughed. Her new editor, James Cockburn, whom I knew well from his visits to our shop, was standing beside them, beaming, dressed in tight black jeans and a leather biker jacket, pointy boots. He must be knocking on for fifty, but he’s tall, not detectably fat while wearing clothes, and his long hair comes down in curls over his shoulders.

He was waving at me and so it was hard to focus on what Susannah was saying to me.

‘… my treat, what do you say?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Great.’

‘Thank you!’

‘Are you going to write it down?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said. I took my phone out. ‘Now, remind me…’

She gave me the details again and I wrote them down.

*

Amy was due to arrive too. I was keeping my eye on her, scared she would vanish again if I didn’t keep in regular contact. While she was back up north she had changed our estate agent and reduced the price of the house slightly, and now she was back in Peckham. She had devoured the proof of Emily’s book I gave her. ‘This is really miserable!’ she said, smiling and turning over the pages.

*