I laugh. ‘You think we’re like some old Brit Pop band?’

‘I can’t remember why we came apart.’

I remember. I remember it all. But I am too old to care about being cool. I am too close to the end – or at least the middle – to play games. Christian is right. There is no time left for small talk.

I miss us. I miss our home. I miss our life. I miss all that we lost and even though I know it is never coming back, the irrecoverable past, and I know that I will miss it forever. I compare every man to the one I lost. I compare every place I live to the home we had in Camden Town. And every new place, every new man, they are always wanting.

I look around The One Bar. I had loved this bar at first sight. One band, one wine, one pasta. And I knew that the reason I had gone looking for it all those years ago, and the reason that I had loved it, was because it felt like a bar that had been invented with Christian in mind.

‘Bloody good bar,’ he murmurs, sipping his Shiraz, nodding along to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ as the waitress places two plates of steaming truffle pasta before us.

What I had missed over the last ten years, most of all, was the sense of being exactly where I was meant to be. But for a while now I have had the feeling that the best is over, I have been nagged by the sense that life is winding down. It is only when I look at Christian’s face – Clark Kent pushing forty – that I believe that there is hope. But of course I am not allowed to say any of that.

I know that, biologically, life is finished with us. But I can’t help feeling that we, this good man and I, are not quite finished with life.

‘We should have come here ten years ago,’ I say. ‘I mean it, Christian – we should have come here years ago!’

‘There’s a saying,’ he replies, then pauses for a bit as he finishes a mouthful of truffle pasta. ‘The best time to plant a tree is fifty years ago – and the second-best time is now.’

‘One of John Lennon’s?’

‘Could be,’ he says. ‘Somebody wise.’

We sit there in silence, eating our pasta, drinking our wine, listening to the music and thinking about the best time to plant a tree.

‘Listen,’ we say, both at once, then laugh with mutual embarrassment.

‘You,’ he says. ‘Go on.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘You.’

‘When we’ve finished our dinner, do you want to go and get a drink?’

And now I am Tara, the old Tokyo hand.

And now I take control.

‘You’re spoilt for choice,’ I say, and I tell him about the block of tiny bars called Golden Gai in Shinjuku, where there are only two or four seats in every bar, and all of those micro-bars have a theme, reflecting the owner’s lifetime obsession, and we might even be able to find that magical little block if we look hard enough and if we don’t mind too much about getting lost.