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what to do with my time.’
    The way he says this suggests he is not particularly worried about this at all. Why would you be, she thinks, if you could spend your days wandering your favourite cities, taking in art or offering random strangers coffee? ‘So where do you live?’
    ‘Oh … all over the place. I do a couple of months here in the early summer. I have a place in London. I spend some time in South America too – my ex-wife lives in Buenos Aires with my two eldest children.’
    ‘That sounds complicated.’
    ‘When you’re as old as I am, life is invariably complicated.’ He smiles, as if he is well used to complication. ‘For a while I was one of those rather daft men who found it impossible to fall in love without getting married.’
    ‘How gentlemanly.’
    ‘Hardly. Who was it who said, “Every time I fall in love I lose a house”?’ He stirs his coffee. ‘Actually, it’s all fairly civil, as these things go. I have two ex-wives, both of whom are pretty wonderful women. It’s just rather a shame I never worked that out while I was with them.’
    He speaks softly, his cadences measured and his words careful, a man who is used to being heard. She gazes at him, at his tanned hands, his immaculate shirt cuffs, and imagines a serviced apartment in the first arondissement, a housekeeper, an upmarket restaurant where the proprietor knows his name. Tim Freeland is not her type, and at least twenty-five years older than she is, but she wonders, briefly, what it would be like to be with a man like him. She wonders whether, to a casual onlooker, they look like husband and wife.
    ‘What do you do, Olivia?’ He has called her Olivia since she introduced herself. From anyone else it might sound like an affectation, but from him it sounds like old-fashioned courtesy.
    She is hauled from her reverie, blushes a little when she acknowledges what she has been thinking. ‘I … I’m sort of between jobs at the moment. I finished my degree and did a bit of office work, a bit of waitressing. The usual middle-class-girl stuff. I suppose I haven’t quite worked out what to do either.’ She fiddles with her hair.
    ‘Plenty of time for that. Children?’ He looks meaningfully at her wedding ring.
    ‘Oh. No. Not for ages.’ She laughs awkwardly. She can barely look after herself; the idea of having some mewling infant dependent on her is unthinkable. She can feel him studying her.
    ‘Quite right. Plenty of time for all that.’ He doesn’t take his eyes from her face. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you’re very young to be married. In this day and age, I mean.’
    She doesn’t know what to say to this, so she takes a sip of her coffee.
    ‘I know I shouldn’t ask a woman her age, but what are you – twenty-three? Twenty-four?’
    ‘Not bad. Twenty-three.’
    He nods. ‘You have good bones. I should imagine you’ll look twenty-three for a decade. No, don’t blush. I’m just stating a fact … Childhood sweetheart?’
    ‘No – more of a whirlwind romance.’ She looks up from her coffee. ‘Actually, I’m – I’m just married.’
    ‘Just married?’ His eyes open just a fraction wider.The question is there within them. ‘You’re on
honeymoon
?’ He says it without drama, but his expression is so bemused, his sudden pity so inadequately disguised, that she can’t bear it. She sees
Wife, out of sorts
, turning away defeatedly, a lifetime of other people’s faint embarrassment.
Oh, you’re married? Your husband is where?
    What has she done?
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, her head down, gathering up her things from the table. ‘I have to go now.’
    ‘Olivia. Please don’t rush off. I’m –’
    Blood is thumping in her ears. ‘No. Really. I probably shouldn’t be here anyway. It was very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for the coffee. And … you know …’
    She does not look at him. She raises a smile, throws it somewhere in his direction, and then she flees, half walking, half