‘That sounded very poetic, Quinn Hamilton. No one would imagine you were a boring management consultant.’ Minnie sucked in her cheeks to stop herself from laughing.

He reached out his rolled-up wet towel and playfully patted her on the bottom with it. ‘Watch your tongue, Cooper.’

‘You call that a towel slap?’ Minnie laughed. ‘Pathetic.’

‘Well, unlike you, I don’t go around beating people with towels until they bleed, I’ve still got a mark where you branded me, you know.’ His voice took on a husky quality.

‘You do not,’ Minnie said, elbowing him in the ribs.

‘And now with the elbowing.’ Quinn clutched his side as though deeply wounded. ‘I’m going to be black and blue being friends with you.’

They got breakfast rolls from the van. Quinn suggested they walk back to the top of Parliament Hill to eat them in the sunshine. They sat in the grass looking out at the London skyline, a vast carpet of buildings rolling out in front of them, dotted with cranes and skyscrapers.

‘Feels incongruous having this giant heath here, doesn’t it?’ said Quinn.

‘I love it. It’s like the last spot of wilderness in London, where nature has yet to be pressed flat beneath the concrete.’

‘Now who’s sounding poetic?’ Quinn said, looking sideways at her.

‘Oh shut up.’

‘The heath has inspired many poets: Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, now Cooper,’ Quinn said in a lofty, English-teacher voice.

‘I’m certainly not a poet,’ Minnie said with a sniff, biting into her bacon bap. She knew he was only joking but, when Quinn said things like that, it made her acutely aware that he had gone to university and she had not.

‘“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense”,’ he said.

Minnie turned to look at him with startled eyes. She stopped chewing mid-mouthful.

‘Keats. “Ode to a Nightingale”. Written here, I think. I can’t remember any more of it.’ He blushed, perhaps realising she hadn’t registered he was quoting from a poem. ‘He died at twenty-five, what a waste.’

‘Is this how you usually try to impress girls, quoting poetry and Wikipedia at them?’ Minnie asked, turning her focus back to her coffee.

‘No,’ Quinn leant back in the grass, resting his weight on his elbows. ‘Why, are you impressed?’

‘I’m not supposed to be being impressed, this is just a friendly post-swim blap chap – bap chat.’ Minnie stumbled over the words. ‘That’s hard to say – Post. Swim. Bap. Chat.’

Quinn turned on his side, resting his head on one hand as he looked up at her. ‘You think that’s my modus operandi, do you? Dropping in poetry where I can?’

‘You just dropped in Latin. What do you want from me, Quinn, a B plus?’

Quinn lay back in the grass and laughed, a deep chesty laugh.