And so we step into the Tokyo night, the pair of us looking at the rain under my see-through convenience store umbrella, and although we are not young any more, and although we are not even together any more, I can’t deny the feeling of belonging that I know I will never find anywhere else, or with anyone else, and for one sweet moment anything seems possible in a city where the past and the future seem equally alive, and as Christian slips his arm in mine I know that anything could happen by the end of the night, even a shared bottle of Prosecco.

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ONE

Lana

Saturday 29 August

We were moving into our new home when an old hippy lady came out of the cottage opposite carrying a large glass jar of home-made honey. Her home was beautiful, the front almost completely covered with a pink tangle of oleander, so that her cottage seemed to be spun from the flower, like a magical home in a deep dark wood in a fairy tale.

‘Welcome!’ she called. ‘I do hope you like honey.’

As a city girl – born, bred and by nature – I was not very comfortable with the whole knocking-on-your-neighbours’-door thing. This was all new to me. I was more of the avoid-eye-contact-with-your-neighbour-at-all-costs type.

In my city, my long-lost city, if you lived next door to someone for ten years or so then you might possibly nod coldly to them at Christmas. But out here it was clearly different. Out here among the green rolling hills of Oxfordshire – only an hour’s commute to the city although it felt like another planet – your new neighbour brought you home-made honey before the removal men had started unloading the lorry. She told me her name – Sally Berry. She was waif-like, an elderly flower child who had headed for the country half a lifetime ago, seventy-five if she was a day, with fine, snow-white hair still streaked with natural blonde highlights like souvenirs of all those lost summers. Her silver and gold locks fell to the shoulders of a faded denim jacket embroidered with little flowers and peace signs.

Her lovely blue eyes sparkled behind wire-rimmed specs.

I told her my name – Lana Wade – and mumbled my thanks, tongue-tied and shy in the presence of this kind stranger, our new neighbour, staring at her golden gift, the late summer sun warming the glass jar of honey in my hands.

‘Store it as long as you like,’ Sally Berry said. ‘You can keep honey forever. Honey was found in the tombs of the Pharaohs.’

I must have looked doubtful.

‘Honey never goes bad!’ she assured me. ‘Eat it after a thousand years and it’s the same as eating it after a day!’ She turned to look at the removal lorry. ‘Is that your husband? The one in the white T-shirt? He’s very good looking, isn’t he?’