Nobody else mentioned it at all.

I had constructed, over about eleven weeks, an evening in which a hundred and forty people looked at me, and what I got was a hundred and forty people who were mostly worried about their own hair, and I sat at a table at about ten o’clock with a drink and understood that I had been the only person in the building thinking about it.

Giselle found me at the end, when the committee had gone and the staff were stacking chairs, and sat down in the seat next to me and took her shoes off and put them on the table, which is a thing I have since learned she does.

And she said: “Can I ask you something I’ve never asked you.”

And I said yes.

And she said: “In the courtyard.