‘Yes.’

He said, ‘In Italian, “turnover” is fatturato. You understand?’

‘Of course, yes, I do… and you speak Italian.’

He shrugged. ‘A little.’

‘OK, OK…’ She smiled – her teeth glowed, her eyes were alight. She riffled again through the pages of her book. Her finger darted down and stabbed at a line. ‘Here… For “balance” we have soppesare in my dictionary, but that is not the Italian word for the commercial balance of an account. What should it be?’

‘To “balance” an account is bilanciare, and a “balance sheet” is bilancio di esercizio. Does that help?’

She touched his hand – fleeting, a natural, spontaneous gesture of gratitude. He felt the tips of her fingers on his skin. He liked girls, liked their touch, but would have admitted, if quizzed, that he was currently ‘between relationships’. God, who needed commitments? He’d nearly been engaged, to a local-government kitchen-hygiene inspector, two years back but his mother had become too fond of her too quickly. He hadn’t found a soulmate.

‘I have a very good helper.’

Eddie Deacon said he should be good – he was a language teacher. He didn’t add that if he’d put his back into it he might have made interpreter level and gone to Brussels or even the United Nations, but it would have been a hassle. He taught English to overseas students. His core tongues were German, French and Spanish but he also had useful Italian. She told him she was on two courses in London: in the morning she studied English language and in the afternoons she did accounting and bookkeeping. Eddie Deacon wondered why a pretty girl in a tight skirt and a tight blouse, from Italy, bothered with any of that, but didn’t take it further. The sun seemed, in mid-afternoon, to spear his forehead and shoulders. The men and women who walked past the bench wore floppy hats or had white war-paint daubed on exposed skin, while little parasols shaded tots in push-chairs. There were squeals and shrieks from the lake, and splashing. He assumed that swimming in the Serpentine was forbidden and that the gauleiter men would be there soon, yelling that it was verboten.