At the end of a month Henry and my mother took her to the doctor. I stayed at home in my room, feeling terror for the first time in my life. There was a sour taste in my mouth... It was a rare form of leukemia. They tried giving her a transfusion but it didn’t work.

I knew already from my encounters with Stephen that miracles could happen, that the important thing was not what you saw or thought you saw but the significance you attached to it. By the time we changed trains at London Bridge I had made a decision: I would become a connoisseur of time.

I knew it was futile to wait but I waited anyway. Andrews had said we would meet again and I somehow believed him. I sipped my drink and scanned the faces in the crowd, hoping that one of them one day would be the face of my friend.

The thought of intimated contact with Edmund Wiley had always sickened her. It was not just the fear that he would find her flat chest and bony body repulsive; what she feared was the penetration of her body by another, the idea that she might not be able to stand such dreadful proximity.

The watch had belonged to Andrew’s grandfather. It was a Smith watch, not one of the rarer models, just one of the many thousands that the London firm had manufactured for the army in the years leading up to World War Two.