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dishes around, and the conversation moved on. We ate home-made burgers and kebabs, grilled vegetables and salads, watching shadows lengthen as the sun disappeared behind a hawthorn two gardens down. When a sharp breeze started to cool the air we went inside for pudding — flaky strawberry tart with thick cream. Their kitchen was cosy and subdued, and outside the darkening garden glowed with pinpricks of light, along the path and around the edge. Solar lamps, Dan said. Light pollution, said Fitz. All right, all right, Dan sighed, we can’t all be eco-warriors. He got up to fetch whisky, poured a glass each.
    ‘To our reunion,’ he said. I thought of Alex then; I pictured her outside, watching us, unseen.
    It was peaceful in that kitchen, seeing our reflections loom up out of the dark and holding easy conversation. I could have sat there all night, tempted for the first time for years to go on drinking into the small hours, listening to Fitz and Dan’s stories. But I had work in the morning, and an early start. When finally I said I should be going Fitz stood up too, said he’d walk along to the tube with me. Looking back to wave to Dan, I thought I caught a slightly wicked smile on his face as he rested a hand on Martin’s shoulder and watched us walk away.
    *
    It was both remarkable and unremarkable to be walking along a London street beside Fitz, as though the years had rolled away, as though we’d just got up that morning from the mattress on the floor in Empire Road, on our way to the market, and that afterwards we’d go back home and lie on his bed, listening to Pink Floyd, in his room that smelt of candles and crumbling walls, and sex.
    That was if I ignored the skyline ahead, where glass and chrome reared up above Georgian brick and seventies concrete. That and the disturbing fact that we seemed to have run out of conversation, something we would never have done before. We went for some distance without speaking while I searched my mind for a topic that hadn’t been exhausted or that wouldn’t assume an intimacy we no longer had.
    When we reached the junction with Islington High Street Fitz said, ‘You haven’t told me much, you know.’
    ‘I haven’t?’
    ‘No. You let me and Dan do all the talking. I know Dan can talk for England, but…’ He shrugged. ‘All I know, I mean of your personal life, is that you’re divorced and have one son who’s at university.’
    ‘So what else do you want to know?’ I teased. ‘You want to know if I’m with anyone?’
    He laughed. ‘You can tell me to fuck off.’
    ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. Okay. So there is someone, but it’s…difficult. He might be moving. To Ireland.’
    ‘Right. Right.’ He waited for me to go on but pride stopped me from revealing I was involved with a married man. ‘And what happens if he does?’
    ‘That’s what I don’t know. He wants me to go. I haven’t decided.’
    ‘Which part of Ireland?’
    ‘Near Waterford.’
    ‘Is that so? Not too far from my family.’
    ‘Yes, I remember.’
    ‘You do?’
    ‘Of course I do. I remember—’ I was going to say everything. ‘I remember you talking about your holidays there, as if it was the land of milk and honey.’
    ‘Sure. It is gorgeous. You’d love it. But I suppose there are other things to consider.’
    He was fishing. ‘Right, your turn,’ I said. ‘You might have talked a lot but it was all football, family and politics. What about you?’
    ‘What? Oh. Yeah.’ He sounded pointedly vague. ‘Her name’s Kirsty. We met at a party here in London, just over a year ago, but she lives in Cornwall. She’d like me to move down there, but I’m not sure. She lives in this tiny village, miles from anywhere. Well, miles from a cinema, or anything like that. It’d be better if she came up to London, but she’s got two boys, both still in school, so that isn’t going to happen.’
    ‘Do you have children?’
    ‘Me? No. I was never with anyone long enough.’
    I