“Is it interesting?”

“It’s a living.”

“We all need living.”

He suddenly thought, No, you can’t flirt, either. Maybe you can flirt in your own language, but you can’t do it in English, so we’re even. He also thought, She looks sturdy. Maybe I need someone sturdy. She might be my age, for all I know. Not that he minded one way or the other. He wasn’t going to ask her out.

He asked her out. There was little enough choice of “out” in this town. One cinema, a few pubs, and the couple of restaurants where she didn’t work. Apart from that, there was bingo for the old people whose flats he would sell when they were dead, and a club where some halfhearted Goths loitered. Kids drove into Colchester on a Friday night and bought enough drugs to see them through the weekend. No wonder they’d burned down the beach huts.

He liked her at first for what she wasn’t. She wasn’t flirty; she wasn’t gabby; she wasn’t pushy. She didn’t mind that he was an estate agent, or that he was divorced with two kids. Other women had taken a quick look and said no. He reckoned women were more attracted to men who were still in their marriages, however fucked up those marriages were, than to ones who were picking up the pieces afterward. Not surprising, really. But Andrea didn’t mind all that. Didn’t ask questions much. Didn’t answer them, either, for that matter. The first time they kissed, he thought of asking if she was really Polish, but then he forgot.

He suggested coming back with him, but she refused. She said she’d come the next time. He spent an anxious few days wondering what it would be like to go to bed with someone new after so long. He drove fifteen miles up the coast to buy condoms where no one knew him. Not that he was ashamed or embarrassed; just didn’t want anyone knowing, or guessing, his business.

“This is a nice apartment.”

“Well, if an estate agent can’t find himself a decent flat, what’s the world coming to?”