I look at my watch. If I write quickly I should have time.

*

We left the house just before one o’clock. We did not go far, and parked the car by a low, squat building. It looked abandoned; a single grey pigeon sat in

each of the boarded windows and the door was hidden with corrugated iron. ‘That’s the lido,’ said Ben as he got out of the car. ‘It’s open in summer, I

think. Shall we walk?’

A concrete path curved towards the brow of the hill. We walked in silence, hearing only the occasional shriek of one of the crows that sat on the

empty football pitch or a distant dog’s plaintive bark, children’s voices, the hum of the city. I thought of my father, of his death and the fact that I had

remembered a little of it at least. A lone jogger padded around a running track and I watched her for a while before the path took us beyond a tall hedge

and up towards the top of the hill. There I could see life; a little boy flew a kite while his father stood behind him, a girl walked a small dog on a long lead.

‘This is Parliament Hill,’ said Ben. ‘We come here often.’

I said nothing. The city sprawled before us under the low cloud. It seemed peaceful. And smaller than I imagined; I could see all the way across it to

low hills in the distance. I could see the thrust of the Telecom tower, St Paul’s dome, the power station at Battersea, shapes I recognized, though dimly

and without knowing why. There were other, less familiar, landmarks, too: a glass building shaped like a fat cigar, a giant wheel, way in the distance. Like

my own face the view seemed both alien and somehow familiar.

‘I feel I recognize this place,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. We’ve been coming here for a while, though the view changes all the time.’

We continued walking. Most of the benches were occupied, by people alone or in couples. We headed for one just past the top of the hill and sat

down. I smelt ketchup; a half-eaten burger lay under the bench in a cardboard box.

Ben picked it up carefully and put it in one of the litter bins, then returned to sit next to me. He pointed out some of the landmarks. ‘That’s Canary

Wharf,’ he said, gesturing towards a building that, even at this distance, looked immeasurably tall. ‘It was built in the early nineties, I think. They’re all

offices, things like that.’

The nineties. It was odd to hear a decade that I could not remember living through summed up in two words. I must have missed so much. So much

music, so many films and books, so much news. Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from

one day to the next.

So much of my own life, too. So many views I don’t recognize, despite seeing them every day.

‘Ben?’ I said. ‘Tell me about us.’

‘Us?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

I turned to face him. The wind gusted up the hill, cold against my face. A dog barked somewhere. I wasn’t sure how much to say; he knows I

remember nothing of him at all.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about me and you. I don’t even know how we met, or when we got married, or anything.’

He smiled, and shuffled along the bench so that we were touching. He put his arm around my shoulder. I began to recoil, then remembered he is not

a stranger but the man I married. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How did we meet?’

‘Well, we were both at university,’ he said. ‘You had just started your Ph.D. Do you remember that?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. What did I study?’

‘You’d graduated in English,’ he said, and an image flashed in front of me, quick and sharp. I saw myself in a library and recalled vague ideas of

writing a thesis concerning feminist theory and early twentieth-century literature, though really it was just something I could be doing while I worked on

novels, something my mother might not understand but would at least see as legitimate. The scene hung for a moment, shimmering, so real I could almost

touch it, but then Ben spoke and it vanished.

‘I was doing my degree,’ he said, ‘in chemistry. I would see you all the time. At the library, in the bar, whatever. I would always be amazed at how

beautiful you looked, but I could never bring myself to speak to you.’