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everyone calls me Stinx on account that I reek of some sort of chemical or other. I'm a painter."

    To my discredit I assumed he meant the sort of painter who slaps a coat of magnolia on your hall-stairs-and-landing. I didn't realize my mistake until much later. We weren't about to spill our emotional guts, so in turn he asked me what I did.

    "I'm director of a youth organization. Well, kind of a youth organisation."

    "What's that, then?"

    "I head up the National Organisation for Youth Advocacy. NOYA."

    "What's that, then?"

    "It's an umbrella outfit. I represent a number of organizations to government and official bodies, that sort of thing."

    "How's that work, then?"

    "We lobby for change, make representations, sit on funding committees. You know?"

    "No, I don't get it."

    I suddenly felt depressed about my job as well as my marriage. "No, no one ever does. I dread meeting anyone new because I feel worn out just trying to explain my job."

    Stinx waved a nicotine-yellowed finger at the barmaid, a freckled redhead with button-eyes. "Haven't I told you before not to leave a man with an empty glass?"

    "It's my first night on the job," she said, pouring me a fresh globe of wine. She was Australian, as are all bar staff now in London. Compulsory. "So that's kinda gotcha."

    "You're too fast for me," he said. "Have one for yourself."

    While we skirted around our respective matrimonial disasters I noticed another man sitting at the bar fiddling with the text on his mobile phone, though I had the impression he was eavesdropping on our conversation. He was Asian and extraordinarily handsome; the kind of groomed figure you see in moody men's magazines with full-page adverts and quarter-page articles. He tapped away at his text with growing impatience.

    Meanwhile Stinx shuffled one stool along to sit next to me. "What's the wisdom, then?" he said seriously. "What is it?"

    "About women? You must be joking if you think I know the answer to that."

    "Date blokes instead," the Asian man said without looking up from his text.

    We both turned our heads towards him at the same time. "Well, I suppose that's one answer," Stinx said gruffly.

    "Except I've just been dumped." He held up his phone. "By text, would you believe it? The arrogance of it."

    Stinx reached over and grabbed the phone from him, reading the message. "My life!" He wagged his pollen-gold finger at the Aussie barmaid again. "Give this one another drink, too. We seem to be forming a club."

    "Great. Can I join?" said the barmaid.

    "No, you bloody cannot. But you can have another drink."

    So the Candlelight Club was formed. It's a curious thing, but when Diamond Jaz joined the conversation we had a warm sense of our own ridiculousness. Camaraderie flushed through us like a good wine as we paraded our wounds. I'd seen it before on the hospital ward when I had my appendix removed. Men in hospital drop their competitiveness and become tender, solicitous, motherly, wanting each other to recover. And so were we. I surprised myself by talking at length about Fay and how much she had meant to me. Stinx waxed poetic about Lucy and actually cried at one point in the evening, though we were saturated with booze by that time, so it was allowed. And Diamond Jaz, the baby of the group who did indeed turn out to be a photographic model, explained that he was bisexual and could therefore speak with authority on the difference between being dumped by a man you loved and a woman you loved: he said there wasn't any.

    It was like falling off the world, and falling for days, until you hit a shelf. There you lay for a while until, struggling to your feet in the dark, you found steps hewn in the stone. Though your heart felt too heavy to climb the steps, climb them you did, knowing they were without number.

    I remember saying all this—or slurring something like it—while the Aussie barmaid tried to get us to drink up so that she could go home. Everyone else had already gone, and