‘Yes and that’s another thing and another reason why I can’t go. Who else is going to look after my birds? There’s a party of long-tailed tits comes down morning and afternoon, easily a dozen of them, they flock down like a gang of kids. Well, I’ll tell you who’ll look out for them, nobody, that’s who, and my birds have grown used to it, they rely on me, I feed them every day. They won’t know what to do if it’s left empty.’

‘But I can see some peanut feeders in the garden next door, I’m sure your neighbour’ll look after them for you.’

‘What, her? She’s got a broomstick parked inside her back door, I’ve seen it.’

Cat laughed. His skin was pale ivory and translucent as an honesty pod, his finger bones felt like winter twigs under her hand.

‘Are you getting warmer? I can find you another blanket.’

‘No, I’m all right now, you’ve made it lovely and cosy in here, Doc, which isn’t what you went to college all those years for.’

‘I’ll make sure you’re wrapped up well when you leave, it will be colder in the ambulance. When it comes.’

‘I am not going in an ambulance, I’m not going anywhere, I’ve already told you.’

Cat thought he had probably had a mild stroke, fallen and been unable to get up, or else simply tripped over, though he had no broken bones and his contusions were only superficial. When the almshouse warden had found him on her morning check, she had found Lionel alive, though as she had said, ‘Only just.’

The twelve almshouses, built and endowed in the sixteenth century by a local landowner, had dark red-brick walls, tall, barley-twist Elizabethan chimneys and rather small rooms, but all of them had been modernised within the last ten years and the warden installed in an adjacent, newly built bungalow. The founding benefaction had been augmented over the centuries by several large bequests and the money shrewdly invested by the trustees. The last doctors’ surgery in Starly had closed several years ago, following the major changes in the NHS, with GP home visits a rarity. Nobody in the almshouses had a car and the warden had spent too much time driving residents in and out of Lafferton for medical appointments. The problem had been solved by another benefactor, anonymous – though Cat had a shrewd idea of his identity – who had set up a fund to pay for registration of every almshouse resident with GP care from Concierge Medical.

She still wondered occasionally how Chris, her first husband, would have dealt with it, given his steadfast opposition to private medicine, thought about how much he would have objected when she had, as he might have put it, ‘gone over to the dark side’.