Still furious with herself, she leans across the table to pick up her abandoned coffee. A vase of garden flowers is beside the mug and, in her haste, she nudges it. The vase wobbles like a child’s toy, and falls onto its side and, as though in slow motion, it begins to roll across the table. Tess reaches out to catch it just as it falls off the edge, but she doesn’t have a good enough grip and it slips from her hand, lands, and smashes. Shards of glass and water and bent flower stems are strewn across the floor. She had cut a fresh selection of pink cosmos from near the herb circle just an hour ago and filled the vase almost to the top with water. The same water which is now running across the floor, spreading out into a small lake as she watches. She shuts the door to the hall to stop Baxter wandering through and hurries to the scullery to get a mop and bucket, and two copies of the Evening News from the fire-lighting pile. It takes a good fifteen minutes to pick up all the tiny pieces of glass and then to mop up all the water, and another five to rinse the mop thoroughly and make sure the tiny glitters are gone.

She turns her attention back to the table. The water has coursed across Stan’s letter. The sheet of paper upon which he had poured out his heart is a puddle of pooling ink, and getting more and more soggy by the minute. There is no paper kitchen roll in the house because Georgia sees it as a waste of trees, and right at this moment Tess curses her landlady’s eco credentials. She grabs the only alternative and lays a clean tea towel gently over the paper. Both ink and water soak into the white linen and Tess can barely bring herself to peel back the fabric, but knows she has to.

Some words remain. The salutation ‘Dearest Georgia’ and the first paragraph have survived but after ‘she did not want a funeral’ only snippets are left.