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‘Joseph Wright of Derby!’ I shouted, as if this were a quiz. ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.’

‘And you really love Van Gogh!’ she shouted through to the kitchen.

Did I? Should I? Was that a good thing? Had I overdone the Van Gogh? I thought everyone liked Van Gogh, but did that make Van Gogh a bad thing? I pressed the moustache back on to my lip.

‘I love him,’ I called back. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I do. Not this one, though.’ Then, Connie, I will take it down. ‘And Billy Joel, too. There’s a lot of Billy Joel.’

‘The early albums are terrific!’ I yelped, but by the time I carried tea through — loose-leaf Earl Grey in simple white china, milk in a new jug — she had disappeared. Perhaps Sunflowers had caused her to leap out of the window. I heard the shower running and stood stupidly in the middle of the floor, tea cooling on a tray, for somewhere between eight and twelve minutes, wondering if I could go in, if I had earnt that right. Eventually she opened the door of the bathroom, winding a new towel around her, her hair wet, her face scrubbed plain. Or perhaps she’d scruffed. Either way, she was beautiful. ‘I’ve made you some tea,’ I said and held out the tea that I had made her.

‘You have more toiletries than almost any man I’ve ever met.’

‘Well, you know.’

‘You know the strangest thing about them? They’re all brand new.’

I had no answer to this, though thankfully it didn’t matter because we were kissing now, apple and mint on her breath.

‘Put the tray down, maybe?’

‘Good idea,’ I said, and we fell back on to the sofa. ‘It’s not so terrible here, is it?’

‘No, I like it. I like the order. It’s so clean! In my flat you can’t cross the room without stepping on an old kebab or someone’s face. But here’s so … neat.’

‘So I’ve passed the inspection?’

‘For the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s always room for improvement.’

Which is exactly what she set out to do.

I’m inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete. But I was young or at least younger then, and more willing and malleable, and with Connie, I was happy Plasticine.

Over the following weeks, then months, she began a thorough process of cultural education in the art galleries, theatres and cinemas of London. Connie had not been considered ‘academic’ enough to go to university and occasionally seemed insecure about this fact, though goodness knows what she thought she’d been missing. Certainly, where culture was concerned, she had a twenty-seven-year head start on me. Art, film, fiction, music; she seemed to have seen and read and listened to pretty much everything, with the passion and clear, uncluttered mind of the autodidact.

Music, for instance. My father liked British light classical and traditional jazz, and the soundtrack to my childhood was ‘The Dam Busters March’, then ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ then ‘The Dam Busters March’ again. He liked a ‘good beat’, a ‘good tune’ and on Saturday afternoons would sit and guard the stereo, album cover in one hand, cigarette in the other, tapping his toe erratically and staring into the eyes of Acker Bilk. Watching him enjoy music was like seeing him wear a paper hat at Christmas; it looked uncomfortable. I wished he’d take it off. As for my mother, her proud boast was that she could do without music entirely. They were the last people in Britain to be genuinely horrified by the Beatles. Listening to Wings’ Greatest Hits at a reasonable volume was the closest I came to punkish rebellion.

Connie, on the other hand, was uncomfortable in a room without music. Her father, the vanished Mr Moore, had been a musician, and had left behind only his collection of LPs; old blues albums, reggae, baroque cello, birdsong recordings, Stax and Motown, Brahms symphonies, bebop and doo-wop, Connie would play them to me at every opportunity. She used songs rather like some people — Connie, for instance — used alcohol or drugs; to manipulate her emotions, raise her spirits or inspire. In Whitechapel she would pour immense cocktails, put on some obscure, ancient crackling disc and nod and dance and sing and I’d be enthusiastic too, or enthusiastically feign it. Someone once defined music as organised sound, and much of this sound seemed very badly organised indeed. If I asked, ‘Who is this singing?’ she’d turn to me open-mouthed.

‘You don’t know this?’

‘I don’t.’

‘How can you not know this track, Douglas?’ They were ‘tracks’, not songs.

‘That’s why I’m asking!’

‘What have you been doing all your life, what have you been listening to?’

‘I told you, I’ve never really been that into music.’

‘But how can you not like music? That’s the same as not liking food! Or sex!’

‘I do like it, I just don’t know as much as you.’

‘You know,’ she would say, kissing me, ‘you are extremely lucky that I came along.’

And I was. I was extremely lucky.