Edward couldn’t concentrate on the play. The audience didn’t seem to know if it was funny or not, there was a lot of stuff on video and one of the actors kept sitting in places people don’t normally sit: on dining tables, on the floor in the middle of a kitchen, on the lap of an elderly man. (The audience knew that was funny.) Edward found the whole thing completely baffling. He was thinking about Stanza, of course, who was sitting next to him, and whose perfume, whose legs, whose occasionally fidgeting fingers were the only drama occupying his attention. He was wondering if her legs could sense his eyes. He was thinking about Robert’s new house. He was also getting WhatsApp messages from Mrs Knatchbole, the mother of one of his tutees, haranguing him about William Pitt the Younger. ‘You simply have not explained to Cecily the very basics of the Act of Union and I suggest you do so before her deadline.’

The truth was, he had loved Stanza since they’d met at Cambridge. He had loved her then as now; there, here and everywhere else. On holidays, at parties, and tedious evenings in the flat. He had loved her in neon-lit cafes in Riga at two in the morning with a stag group sniggering about the bag-’ouse they’d almost visited (‘Hello, you horrible, horrible pricks,’ she’d said, and Edward had caught his breath); he had loved her in a Pizza Express on Oxford Street when she’d ordered two Cokes, both for herself; he had loved her perhaps most of all whenever she was ill, in bed, when she required him, appreciated the grapes and his Seinfeld commentary; he had loved her when someone was talking nonsense and merely in the modest slowing of her blinks she relayed to him that she, too, thought they were a moron; he had loved her when she was a brat, moaning about the current nothing that was too much for her to bear.

He had loved her when she was cruel, too. Once, her beloved dog Cameron was nosing around the side of a pool in Puglia and, the thought barely occurring to her, she had shoved him in with her heel. He had seen the specific idea cross her face. This small act of black mischief had made him love her not because its suggestion of evil was itself attractive, but because it showed a kind of comprehensive apprehension of the world, that she understood the full reality we all inhabited.

By the end of the performance, Edward was fighting sleep. An ancient manservant was locked in an old house (why didn’t he try a window?) and muttering to himself: ‘It’s gone. It’s gone …’ Edward had no idea what he was talking about. He never really felt much towards Robert’s productions, ostensibly competent and slick though they were. A standing ovation returned him to the auditorium and he dutifully rose. He was addled, wrung out.

‘I’ll give him that one,’ Stanza said with faux reluctance. ‘He’s actually done a good one now.’

He couldn’t be sure, but Edward thought he could detect a trace of pride lingering in her unironic grin. He nodded ferociously, staring at the elderly actor who’d just toppled dead off a chaise longue, and who now camply pursed his lips and actually wiggled his hips as he pointed to the lighting box. They headed straight to the bar, where Robert had commandeered an entire tray of full champagne flutes.

‘Just – I’m speechless. It’s out of this world,’ Edward said.

‘They didn’t fuck it up, then?’

‘I begrudgingly congratulate you,’ Stanza said.

‘Honestly? It felt like a moment. Like an iconic production.’

‘Love you, Ed.’

Robert was immediately set upon by all and sundry and Edward was shunted back, mainly by the sponsors from BP. He braced himself to answer questions about his own career, and to battle through their immediately soporific expressions. He looked out at the partygoers and realised he was not one of them, not at all. A woman in overalls was shouting giddily, ‘No, seriously, I can’t move into film yet – I’m still making still images that are shit. The thing about my job is it’s like, wham, that’s over, move on – you know? But thank you – maybe when I have time.’ Nearby, a shrill man cackled: ‘Do I use Ocado? Oh my Lord, you’ve read me so well!’ Which was succeeded by torrential peals of laughter … All the glimmering eyes agreed intensely and looked elsewhere at the same time, a double-action that made Edward almost dizzy, and lonelier than ever.

During the melee, Robert introduced him, or you might say handed him over, to an acquaintance of his, Madge Wong. Robert said, ‘This is Ed – great pal – he’d do anything for anyone.’

Madge grimaced. ‘God, what a mug you must be’ – and as Robert was pulled away, Edward hastily assembled his smile. ‘I hate everyone here already,’ she said. ‘Well, I can’t tell if I hate them, or fancy them? You know? Some of the older ones?’ Madge was like all of Robert’s university friends, approaching thirty and approximating in her manner a fifty-year-old industry leader. She appeared nervous, though, and the nerves were making her say almost anything, but with absolute conviction. ‘I’ve been considering dating exclusively Boomers recently.’

‘I see. Right,’ Edward said.

‘People know who they are by the time they’re sixty – sixty-plus – and they’d probably know who I am too. It’s something I’ve been toying with in New York?’ She wore a lot of knocking jewellery, worked for a youth charity in Manhattan and described herself as ‘proper London pre the’ – waving her arm at the crowd – ‘wankers’.

It became clear quite quickly that Madge was a British person who had moved to New York and subsequently made this emigration a key component of her personality. Madge was now boasting, was the only appropriate word, about the ‘level – the actual level, though – of breakfasts you can actually get out there, in the Big Apple’.

‘It’s the cinnamon,’ she said. ‘New Yorkers understand cinnamon.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Amazing what a difference that makes.’ It was this sort of phrase which formed the currency of Edward’s day-to-day exchanges, small meaningless nothings that somehow gave the other person what they wanted while not really giving them anything at all: nods and assenting sounds and a lot of the word ‘Really.’ It was his only method to navigate the enciphered world of people: to flood the infinite gap between himself and his peers with a superfluous amount of whatever he assumed they desired.

Meanwhile he watched Stanza from across the room. Three avuncular bankers listened to her, rapt, as she enunciated her point with a languid swill of her glass. Her amused scoffing lips, her free hand batting away some absurd notion; emanating darkness rounded off her beauty. Madge presently excused herself.

Edward was watching a bead of condensation plough the fluting of his tumbler when there was a crash over by the entrance. It was hard to see past everyone, but there was something of a commotion near the doorway, which scattered through the roped-off area in gasps and giggles. Edward craned his neck to see a security guard forcefully remove a man in a paint-flecked sweater and loose navy cargo trousers. He couldn’t see his face. A receptionist righted a chrome bin and soon the chatter resumed. Robert emerged by his side with Stanza. He looked flushed and grim. ‘Situation,’ he said. ‘Fucking situation. Tonight of all nights. Need your help, Ed, I’m afraid. Have I ever told you about D’Angelo?’

‘Er …’

‘D’Angelo – Danger Mouse.’

‘Vaguely, maybe?’ Edward remembered the name distantly, from a mythical prehistory before university.

‘Guy who knew me back home. He’s mental, I haven’t really talked about it – out of kindness to him, more than anything. He’s not a stalker per se, but I mean – we were kind of friends when we were extremely young? Then he … “re-emerged” when I started doing well. That was him.’

‘Oh dear.’ Edward tugged at his earlobe, wondering how he personally fitted into all this.

‘Danger’s off the rails. Pretty sure he’s an addict. He’s clearly violent.’ Robert was looking at his phone, texts leaping to his screen. ‘He’s going to ruin the vibe. He would completely ruin the vibe – I’ve got the West End in, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Gosh,’ Edward said, trying to see D’Angelo outside, attempting to nod the adrenaline away.

‘He’s got into some dark shit, you know – I mean, he lives near Birmingham. And it’s quite … “real” up there. Believe me … He just can’t be here.’