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form. It’s as though he’s dressed for a fashion shoot in a men’s magazine. I notice that he has a dining table and chairs in his sitting room. That makes sense. If the apartments are identically laid out, then his kitchen will be, like Celia’s, a narrow, galley affair. While eating clearly doesn’t matter enough to Celia for her to bother with more than the tiny two-man table in her kitchen, this man wants something a little more civilised.
    Does he cook? I wonder. Who is he? What does he do? I need to give him a name, I decide. ‘The man’ isn’t quite evocative enough. What shall I call him? Well, Mister something, obviously, as we haven’t been introduced and first names are so peculiar to an individual. It would be weird to call him something like Sebastian or Theodore, and then discover his name was Reg or Norm or something. No, I need something that’s mysterious and flexible, something that can contain all possibilities . . .
    Mr R .
    Yes, that’s it. I’ll call him Mr R.
    As in Randolph Gardens. It kind of suits him.
    Mr R walks back into his sitting room carrying an ice bucket and a couple of glasses. A promising-looking gold foil top pokes out of the bucket. Two glasses – so he’s expecting company unless he intends to have a drink in each hand. There’s no sign of the flowers. I sit back on the chair, crossing my legs like a school kid, and take the lid off my ice cream. I curl a long bit up onto the spoon and suck it off slowly, letting it melt on my tongue, savouring the sweet, cold trickle down my throat. It’s plain vanilla, just the way I like it.
    Mr R disappears again, and he’s gone a long time. I’ve managed to eat about a quarter of the tub, and De Havilland has nested in the gap between my knees and slipped instantly into purring slumber. When he comes back, he’s obviously showered and changed – he’s now wearing a pair of loose linen trousers and a blue T-shirt, which look, needless to say, amazing – and he’s not alone.
    I gasp when I see her and then mentally roll my eyes at myself. So what, he’s not allowed a girlfriend? He doesn’t even know who you are! You’ve spent two nights having a good old look at him, and now he somehow belongs to you?
    I almost laugh at my own craziness and yet, somehow, the weird intimacy of being able to see inside his flat like this has made me feel like there’s a connection. That is clearly in my imagination, but still, I can’t quite shake it. I lean forward to get a better look at the girlfriend.
    Okay. Just as I thought. I’m way, way off course if I think I’ll ever be able to compete with a girl like this.
    Girl? She’s a woman. A proper adult, grown-up woman, the kind who makes me feel like a gauche and scruffy child in comparison. She’s tall and slender with the kind of elegance that can’t be learned, and she’s wearing a pale linen trouser suit with a white T-shirt underneath the jacket. Her dark hair is cut into a wavy bob, and she’s wearing red lipstick in a way that indicates style, rather than tartiness. I can see that she’s fine-boned and lovely, as though she’s stepped out of the pages of Paris Vogue. She’s the kind of woman who would never look tatty or sweat-stained or have a ponytail that hangs limply down her back. She’d never trip into gutters or walk about with a streak of grime on her face.
    She is the kind of woman who is given white peonies and champagne in a Mayfair apartment. I bet she never ate ice cream with only a cat for company because her boyfriend preferred to shag someone else.
    Just the thought of Hannah (my God, I’ll never be able to forget seeing her lying there naked, her breasts bare with dark nipples crowning them, her belly damp with sweat) and the ice cream curdles in my mouth. I put the tub down, annoying De Havilland by leaning across him. He stretches out his claws and sinks them lightly into my bare leg, just enough to let me know he doesn’t like my change of