‘That wasn’t the thing I appreciated most about her.’

‘From the photos I’ve seen, the mother’s not bad either.’

‘You’ve never met her?’

‘No.’

Jean had been Andrew’s teenage sweetheart; they both went to Oxford at the same time from the same town; he became an academic, she became a head teacher.

‘The brightest kids from their grammar schools. The shining hope of an egalitarian future. Who rose through their talent from industrial Nottingham. Their union betrayed by lechery.’

‘You have to cut Sophie a bit of slack. Why would she like the woman who took her dad from her mum?’

‘But that wasn’t me! Is that what you thought?’

She corrected me. Andrew had left his first wife for his literary agent. They had lived together for four years before she was diagnosed with cancer. They had married the summer before she received the diagnosis. And the next summer his new wife had died.

‘It’s their flat we’re living in. I’ve suggested he might be happier somewhere else, but he won’t hear of it. Her books everywhere. I wonder if he’d sacrifice me for her in the blink of an eye.’

‘Come on,’ I said.

‘Best to be real about these things. If he could redeem all that suffering and grief for the price of one small life like mine? No one would miss me but him. I’ve disconnected myself sufficiently to be disposable. My carbon footprint is tiny.’

‘I don’t believe you. About having disconnected yourself. Who was that man at the launch?’ I said. ‘The giant. You were very pleased to see him.’

‘Oh. Richard. He’s got a wife now, and children. We were together in our twenties. It wasn’t serious – even if it felt so then.’

London summers felt like they got hotter and longer every year. Even at the centre of the square, covered by trees, we were never unaware of the hum of traffic, the grit and petrol in the air.

‘I need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Go somewhere to work that’s quiet, with clean air. Fields and hills, or the sea breeze—’

‘Do it.’

‘I’ve no money to.’

‘Stay at my mum’s place,’ I said. ‘The air’s clean. It’s quiet. It’s free. It’s extremely breezy. We’ll sell it soon, I hope, but it would be great if it could be useful to someone before we do.’

I had thought about moving back there myself until it sold, if it ever sold. I wondered sometimes whether the boredom would be so crushing there that I would have to create something of my own.

‘I mean it seriously,’ I said. ‘It might be perfect. There’s nothing else to do there.’

‘Maybe a couple of weeks?’ she said.

‘I’d love that. I’ll ask my sister. Andrew wouldn’t mind you going?’