I tossed the coin and gave her an ice-cream.

‘Mango,’ guessed Rosie, correctly. Toss, heads again. ‘Mango again.’ She picked the mango correctly three times, then the apricot, then the apricot again. The chances of her achieving this result randomly were one in thirty-two. I could be ninety-seven per cent confident she was able to differentiate. Incredible.

‘So, Spiderman tonight?’

‘No. You got one wrong.’

Rosie looked at me, very carefully, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re bullshitting me, aren’t you? I can’t believe it, you’re making jokes.’

She gave me an ice-cream. ‘Since you don’t care, you can have the apricot.’

I looked at it. What to say? She had been licking it.

Once again she read my mind. ‘How are you going to kiss a girl if you won’t share her ice-cream?’

For several minutes, I was suffused with an irrational feeling of enormous pleasure, basking in the success of my joke, and parsing the sentence about the kiss: Kiss a girl, share her ice-cream – it was third-person, but surely not unrelated to the girl who was sharing her ice-cream right now with Don Tillman in his new shirt and jeans as we walked among the trees in Central Park, New York City, on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

I needed the hundred and fourteen minutes of time-out back at the hotel, although I had enjoyed the day immensely. Shower, email, relaxation exercises combined with stretches. I emailed Gene, copying in Claudia, with a summary of our activities.

Rosie was three minutes late for our 7.00 p.m. foyer meeting. I was about to call her room when she arrived wearing clothes purchased that day – white jeans and a blue t-shirt thing – and the jacket she had worn the previous evening. I remembered a Gene-ism, something I had heard him say to Claudia. ‘You’re looking very elegant,’ I said. It was a risky statement, but her reaction appeared to be positive. She did look very elegant.

We had cocktails at a bar with the World’s Longest Cocktail List, including many I did not know, and we saw Spiderman. Afterwards, Rosie felt the story was a bit predictable but I was overwhelmed by everything, in a hugely positive way. I had not been to the theatre since I was a child. I could have ignored the story and focused entirely on the mechanics of the flying. It was just incredible.

We caught the subway back to the Lower East Side. I was hungry, but did not want to break the rules by suggesting that we eat. But Rosie had this planned too. A 10.00 p.m. booking at a restaurant called Momofuku Ko. We were on Rosie time again.

‘This is my present to you for bringing me here,’ she said.

We sat at a counter for twelve where we could watch the chefs at work. There were few of the annoying formalities that make restaurants so stressful.

‘Any preferences, allergies, dislikes?’ asked the chef.

‘I’m vegetarian, but I eat sustainable seafood,’ said Rosie. ‘He eats everything – and I mean everything.’

I lost count of the courses. I had sweetbreads and foie gras (first time!) and sea urchin roe. We drank a bottle of rosé Champagne. I talked to the chefs and they told me what they were doing. I ate the best food I had ever eaten. And I did not need to wear a jacket in order to eat. In fact, the man sitting beside me was wearing a costume that would have been extreme at the Marquess of Queensbury, including multiple facial piercings. He heard me speaking to the chef and asked me where I was from. I told him.

‘How are you finding New York?’

I told him I was finding it highly interesting, and explained how we had spent our day. But I was conscious that, under the stress of talking to a stranger, my manner had changed – or, to be more precise, reverted – to my usual style. During the day, with Rosie, I had felt relaxed, and had spoken and acted differently, and this continued in my conversation with the chef, which was essentially a professional exchange of information. But informal social interaction with another person had triggered my regular behaviour. And my regular behaviour and speaking style is, I am well aware, considered odd by others. The man with the piercings must have noticed.

‘You know what I like about New York?’ he said. ‘There are so many weird people that nobody takes any notice. We all just fit right in.’

‘How was it?’ said Rosie as we walked back to the hotel.

‘The best day of my adult life,’ I said. Rosie seemed so happy with my response that I decided not to finish the sentence: ‘excluding the Museum of Natural History.’

‘Sleep in,’ she said. ‘9.30 here and we’ll do the brunch thing again. Okay?’

It would have been totally irrational to argue.

25

‘Did I cause any embarrassment?’

Rosie had been concerned that I might make inappropriate comments during our tour of the World Trade Center site. Our guide, a former firefighter named Frank, who had lost many of his colleagues in the attack, was incredibly interesting and I asked a number of technical questions that he answered intelligently and, it seemed to me, enthusiastically.

‘You may have changed the tone a bit,’ she said. ‘You sort of moved the attention away from the emotional impact.’ So, I had reduced the sadness. Good.

Monday was allocated to visiting popular tourist sights. We had breakfast at Katz’s Deli, where a scene for a film called When Harry Met Sally was shot. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, famous as a location for An Affair to Remember. We visited MOMA and the Met, which were excellent.