Now he was glad neither of them was any good at flirting. Flirting was a kind of deception. Whereas Andrea was never anything but straight with him. She didn’t talk much, but what she said was what she did. She would meet him where and when he asked, and be standing there, looking out for him, brushing a streak of hair out of her eyes, holding on to her bag more firmly than was necessary in this town.

“You’re as reliable as a Polish builder,” he told her one day.

“Is that good?”

“That’s very good.”

“Is English expression?”

“It is now.”

She asked him to correct her English when she made a mistake. He got her to say “I don’t think so” instead of “I do not think,” but, actually, he preferred the way she talked. He always understood her, and those phrases that weren’t quite right seemed part of her. Maybe he didn’t want her talking like an Englishwoman in case she started behaving like one — well, like one in particular. And, anyway, he didn’t want to play the teacher.

It was the same in bed. Things are what they are, he said to himself. If she always wore a nightie, perhaps it was a Catholic thing — not that she ever mentioned going to church. When he asked her to do stuff to him, she did it, and seemed to enjoy it, but she didn’t ask him to do stuff back to her — didn’t even seem to like his hand down there much. But this didn’t bother him; she was allowed to be who she was.

She never asked him in. If he dropped her off, she’d be trotting up the concrete path before he’d got the hand brake on; if he picked her up, she’d already be outside, waiting.