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and quickly got to her feet, putting out a hand for me to shake. She was wearing a navy-blue skirt with a buttoned-up white shirt, and flat knee-length black boots. Her hair was pulled back, and she was wearing no make-up but for a slash of the unflattering pink lipstick.
    She apologised for looking ‘office-y’. She had been in court all afternoon: a Congolese teenager, a model A-level pupil at school in Barnet, who was due to be deported when she reached adulthood in a month’s time. Yes, I was right, it was emotionally draining. Her own daughter was almost exactly the same age, which added an extra layer.
    ‘Phoebe?’ I said. ‘The one who is moving out?’
    ‘Yes. She has a place at Leeds in September to read English. If she gets the grades.’
    ‘Oh. Not until September.’
    ‘It’ll come soon enough. I can’t bear it. She’ll leave such a hole.’
    ‘You could get a lodger?’
    ‘She wants to be a journalist actually. Andrew said you wrote for newspapers sometimes?’
    ‘I do. And if she’d like any advice, I’m happy to help. Anything to help her on her way.’
    ‘That would be kind. Thank you.’
    We ordered food – wild sea trout and the guinea fowl special. I learnt more about her children. Phoebe, the eldest, followed by two boys (Louis, sixteen and Frank, fourteen). She mentioned her dead husband several times. ‘Frank is straightforward,’ she told me, ‘just like Harry, up for anything.’ Louis was a darker character, going through a difficult stage, ‘but then of course he misses his father more.’ She sighed when she said this and, with the middle finger of her left hand, lightly padded the pouchy skin under her left eye. Her eye was dry, so the gesture seemed staged or, at least, well practised; an instinctive check, perhaps, from a time when there would have been tears there. I felt as I had in Andrew’s garden, that even when she was apparently opening her heart, she was keeping a great deal back.
    My chair was near the entrance to the kitchen and the waiter jogged it every time he passed – through the doors, out again. I began to find it hard to concentrate. I felt agitated, knees twitchy, not at my best. As soon as the plates were cleared, I decided to call it a day by asking her back for coffee, and was astonished when she accepted. It was raining and the pavements were slick with it – or perhaps I’m making that up: all my memories seem to involve rain. She whistled for a taxi, a proper scalp-shrinking two-finger whistle, which abruptly turned me on, and when we pulled up in my street ten minutes later, insisted on paying. She professed herself ‘charmed’ while we were still climbing the stairs, her shoulder bag bashing against the bannisters, and she stood in the doorway of the flat, raving in self-conscious delight at my taste and cleverness. ‘Oh yes. Oh yes. This is lovely .’
    I lit a cigarette and busied myself in the kitchen over the coffee machine, listening to her move about the sitting room, knowing, with each particular creak in the floorboards, where she was standing: by this picture, or that bookcase.
    ‘I love the “twiggy bird”!’ she cried. She was in front of the black and white print above the fireplace.
    ‘A dry-point etching,’ I returned. ‘It’s a Kate Boxer.’
    ‘You play?’ she called a little later. She was poking in Alex’s pile of sheet music to the side of the sofa.
    ‘Terribly rusty,’ I called back. ‘Not since I was a child.’
    I had a quick tot of whisky from my emergency supplies, and then a couple more. Persephone wound herself around my legs and I gave her a saucer of milk. I wasn’t quite sure what my next move should be. Was this a seduction? I didn’t know how it worked with the older woman. Would she expect something rather more gracious and prolonged? In which case, why was I bothering? It didn’t cross my mind to tell the truth: that the life the flat purported to reflect wasn’t mine – not because I was