‘That’s better,’ he sighed. ‘And go for it yourself,’ he invited. ‘Take off whatever you want –’ He broke off the end of the sentence abruptly and a mortified hiatus followed. The heat of his discomfort reached Lisa. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered grimly. ‘That came out wrong.’

Agitatedly he ran his hand through his messy hair, so that the front stood up in silky peaks before flopping back down on to his forehead.

‘No problem.’ Lisa smiled politely, but the tiny downy hairs on the nape on her neck rose sharply. Shocked and excited at the image of undressing for Jack in his car, feeling those dark eyes on her naked body, the cool of the leather seats against the heat of her skin. Nipping her lip in determination, she vowed to make it happen.

After a suitable recovery period Jack spoke again. ‘Let me tell you about the house.’ He steered into the Dublin evening traffic. ‘The deal is, Brendan is going to work in the States. He’s got an eighteen-month contract, which might be extended, but it would mean that you’d have the place for a year and a half, anyway. After that we’d have to see.’

Lisa shifted noncommitally. It didn’t matter because she didn’t intend to be here in a year and a half’s time.

‘It’s off the South Circular Road, which is very central,’ Jack promised. ‘It’s an area of Dublin that still has a lot of character. It hasn’t been yuppified to fuck.’

Lisa’s spirits started a slow slither. She was desperate to live in a place that had been yuppified to fuck.

‘There’s a strong sense of community. Lots of families live here.’

Lisa wanted nothing to do with families. She wanted to be surrounded by other singles and to bump into attractive men at her local Tesco Metro buying Kettle Chips and Chardonnay. Dully, she watched Jack’s hands on the steering wheel, her churning misery calmed by the confidence with which they glanced off and guided the leather.

He swung the car off the main road on to a smaller road, then on to an even smaller one. ‘There it is.’ He pointed through the windscreen.

Crouching on the pavement was a little red-brick artisan’s cottage. Lisa took one look at it and hated it. She liked modern and fresh, airy and spacious. This house promised cramped, dark rooms, ancient plumbing and an unhygienic free-standing kitchen with a horrid Belfast sink.

Reluctantly she got out of the car.

Jack approached the house, put the key in the lock, pushed the door and stood back to let Lisa pass. He had to duck his head to fit through the doorway.

‘Wooden floors,’ she remarked, looking around.

‘Brendan had them done a couple of months ago,’ Jack said proudly.

She forbore from enlightening him that those in the know were completely over wooden floors and that carpets were very much in the driving seat.

‘Sitting-room.’ Jack led her into a small, ash-floored room containing a red couch, a telly and a cast-iron fireplace. ‘That’s an original,’ Jack nodded at it.

‘Mmmmm.’ Lisa loathed cast-iron fireplaces – they were so busy.

‘Kitchen.’ Jack trailed her through to the next room. ‘Fridge, microwave, washing machine.’

Lisa looked around. At least the cupboards were fitted and the sink was an ordinary aluminium one – she’d rather run the risk of Alzheimer’s than live with a Belfast sink. But her satisfaction ebbed when she noticed a scrubbed-pine kitchen table, with four sturdy, rustic chairs! Heartsore, she thought of the wheely turquoise Formica table and four woven-wire chairs in her kitchen in Ladbroke Grove.

‘He said something about the boiler playing up. I’ll just take a quick look.’ Half-disappearing into a cupboard, Jack rolled up his sleeves, displaying brown forearms, with planes of muscles which shifted with the movements of his hands.

‘Pass me the spanner from that drawer there, will you?’ Jack indicated with his head. Lisa wondered if he was putting on a special macho display in her honour, then she remembered Trix saying he was handy with machinery, and felt her sap rising. She’d always had a weakness for men who were good with their hands, who got smeared in oil and came home at the end of a hard day’s fixing things, slowly unzipped their overalls and said meaningfully, ‘I bin thinkin’ ‘bout ya all day, baby.’ She also had a weakness for men with six-figure salaries and the power to promote her when she didn’t really deserve it. How nice would it be to combine the two?

Jack banged and twiddled with things for a short time longer before saying, ‘It looks like the timer is gone. You can get hot water, but you can’t pre-set it. I’ll sort it out for you. Let’s see the bathroom.’

To her surprise the bathroom passed the test. Washing herself needn’t necessarily be a lightning raid, with a loofah in one hand and a stopwatch in the other.

‘Nice bath,’ she admitted.

‘Handy little shelf there beside it,’ Jack agreed.

‘Just big enough for two glasses of wine and a scented candle.’ Lisa’s swift glance was meaningful. And wasted. To her frustration Jack had marched onwards to the next room.

‘Bedroom,’ he announced.

It was bigger and brighter than the other rooms, though it was still afflicted with a country-cottage feel. Sprigging on the white curtains, echoed by sprigging on the duvet cover and way too much pine. Pine headboard, big pine wardrobe, pine chest of drawers.

Even the mattress is probably made of pine, Lisa thought scornfully.

‘It overlooks the garden.’ Jack pointed out the window at a smallish square of grass, bordered by shrubs and blooms. Lisa’s heart sank. She’d never had a garden before and she didn’t want one. She liked flowers as much as the next woman, but only when they came in a big, cellophane bouquet, with an enormous satin ribbon and a card of congratulation. She’d rather die than take up gardening, the accessories were gruesome – elastic-waisted trousers, ridiculous floppy hats, silly baskets and mad Michael Jackson gloves. It was Not A Good Look.

And though she’d told Femme readers last July that gardening was the new sex, she hadn’t meant a word of it. Sex was sex. Perennially. She missed it.

‘He said something about having a herb garden,’ Jack said. ‘Will we check it out?’

He shot the bolt on the back door, and again had to duck his head on the way out. She followed his straight-backed progress across the little lawn, wryly amused by her own admiration. The birds chattered in the benign evening light, the air was pungent with grass and earth and for a second she didn’t hate everything.