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body.
    ‘Far too old for me!’ he says.
    ‘She’s near enough your age, you cheeky git!’
    He shrugs.
    ‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ I say.
    ‘She’s nice looking. Anyway, looks aren’t everything.’
    The maître d’ beckons us over, and as we stand, James reaches under his bar stool and presents me with a bag.
    ‘I got you something,’ he says.
    ‘Really?’ I say, shocked. Inside the bag is a large bottle of Aromatherapy Associates Rosemary Bath Oil that he must have bought me in Duty Free, wherever he has been.
    ‘I know you like rosemary,’ he says. I do? ‘The pasta you ordered at the Italian …’
    Bless him, I love the taste of rosemary but I don’t want to smell like a roast lamb. Still, extremely thoughtful and sweet of him.
    ‘That’s lovely of you, James Stephens. Thank you.’ I kiss him briefly on the mouth and feel his eyes on the back ofme as I walk to the ladies’ room to check whether my ankle has stopped bleeding.
    The ankle is fine, but I change tights anyway as I have to take off the old ones to dab a slight blood stain on my foot.
    When I return five minutes later, there is a bottle of decent red on the table.
    ‘One of the chefs at work was telling me that this place is famous for its mince and potatoes,’ I say, looking at the menu.
    ‘I knew you’d be a good woman to go out with,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat.’ Men always say this. It is often bullshit and means ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat but neither can I stand girls who show signs of having eaten’. It is invariably the same men who say ‘I like girls who look natural’, but actually mean girls who only wear foundation, cover up, pressed powder, blush, a bit of eye pencil and a lot of mascara.
    ‘Oh, and save room for The Queen of Puddings, it’s meant to be amazing.’
    ‘Queen of Puddings, isn’t that your job?’ he says, smiling.
    ‘I wish, I’m only a junior developer,’ I say.
    ‘Still, it sounds great. I think it’s brilliant what you do for a living … Queen of Puddings. So you just sit around stuffing your face with cake all day, do you?’
    ‘There’s a little more to it than that. You have to thinkof new concepts, follow market trends, brief suppliers, work out if a product’s manageable in budget, there’s all the microbiotics, health and safety, shelf life, packaging, travel testing …’
    ‘So you do, you basically get paid to eat cake,’ he clinks his glass against mine in congratulation.
    ‘Sometimes I bake cakes all day …’
    ‘You cook at work?’
    ‘Great job, huh?’ I say.
    ‘Is that why you don’t paint your nails?’ He makes it sound like I have half a finger missing that he’s been too polite to ask about, but has been dying to know the story behind – did a squirrel bite it off?
    ‘No,’ I say, tucking my hands away on to my lap. ‘I’m just not always a full hair and make-up kind of girl. I don’t have the time. Why, do you like painted fingernails?’
    ‘A little red nail polish never goes amiss …’ he says.
    ‘You really did have your teenage sexual awakening in the 80s,’ I say, shaking my head.
    He laughs and fills my glass, then rests his hands on the table. My hands spontaneously float up from my lap to be beside his.
    ‘God, you don’t see many women out like that anymore,’ says James, as a six-foot, heavily made-up twenty-something in a full-length fur walks in, flanked by a tubby man of around fifty.
    ‘Bimbos with sugar daddies? London’s full of them!’

    ‘No, I mean the coat. That’s Russian sable!’ he says admiringly.
    ‘– I think it’s a bit tacky,’ I say.
    ‘The coat?’
    ‘No, them – he looks like he’s paying her by the hour. – How do you know it’s a Russian sable?’
    ‘The bluish tinge. Do you know that the mating ritual of the Russian sable can last up to eight hours?’ he says, leaning forward, a huge smile breaking across his face.
    ‘Sounds like Sting …