I had been meeting Emily regularly for lunch now it was summer. She was getting up then at first light to write, and would have worked for five or six hours before she took a walk into town through the park to the shop. She never arranged things in advance. I would get a text in the morning to ask if I was working, and if I wasn’t I’d ride over to meet her anyway. We would buy sandwiches and sit in Bloomsbury Square, with the students and tourists and yoga extroverts. The pollen made her sneezy and interrupted her sentences. I learned how she had met Andrew, twelve years ago at a literary festival when she was promoting her first novel, and how they might not even have thought of getting together then, if it hadn’t been for a woman who insisted on inviting herself to lunch with them and who had warned Emily, when he went to the toilet, that he wasn’t only attracted to her talent. ‘I should hope not,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t think he was thinking of me like that at the time but I was quite pretty then.’

I always took the opportunities she gave me to compliment her. She would leave little spaces for me to contradict her self-criticism, then wince when I did.

I was discovering that there were limits to her renunciation. She dressed differently every time I saw her, in styles that were from different eras, with the feminine clearly demarcated – there was rarely any androgyny, or even jeans, nearly always a dress or skirt, shoes and tights, her face made up. I rarely saw her in the same outfit twice but when I did I felt I had gained a notch of intimacy with her. I didn’t flatter myself that she was dressing up for me. It was in keeping with her correctness, her old manners, a formality that suited the way she handled her emotions – when, for example, I asked her about her parents, she exhaled sharply, and changed the subject. The way she presented herself was also simply the outward signs of someone who appreciated style in and outside of the sentence, who knew her body and how to make an effect with it. Her decision to avoid being assessed by her photograph may have been taken with mixed feelings. Sitting on a park bench with her, I imprinted my memory with the shape of her calves, the angle of her nose; and I learned how to make her laugh. I came to know her frustrations too. She lived off meagre advances and grants and Andrew’s charity. She had to think hard if she wanted to buy a new frock. ‘It should be me out shoplifting, not his pretty little daughter.’

‘She is pretty, isn’t she?’

‘I thought you’d think so. Yes, she is. You can see her dad in her.’