When the front doorbell rang, she was to stay in her bedroom and was told to remain there until a large chunk of time passed, the front door closed and the visitor hurried away at a speed between striding and sprinting through the gravel at the front of the house.

She stood at her bedroom window, tall enough now to see the whole of the grounds before the front door.

He walked through the open gateway – they all did – and she wondered why none of her mother’s visitors could drive or own a car or park it where her father’s Bentley went when he was home.

As the visitor approached the front door, she looked closely at him. Like she did with all her mother’s visitors. And like all of them, this newest caller was totally unlike her father.

She recalled watching her father that morning as he walked from the house to his fancy car. Wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and a purple tie, he was only slightly taller than he was wide. Unlike the man approaching the house, who was dressed in jeans and trainers and a brown leather coat that kissed his ankles as it flapped in the breeze at his feet.

Tall and thin and much, much, much, much younger than her mother, he looked like an actor or an artist or one of those other men her mother constantly argued about with her father.

He looked left and right, and then left and right again as if he was playing an extremely dangerous game of hide and seek. In his hand was a thin book.

The man looked like… what were the words her father gave to men such as this on the street and the television set? Yes, yes. He looked like an arty-farty piece of shit.

She couldn’t see it but the front door was opened – by her mother, it must have been, she was the only one in the house apart from her and her baby brother, who was in his room at the back of the house – and the man was sucked into the belly of the house by an in-breath of her mother’s making.

‘What’s this?’ her mother giggled in the hall below.

‘My new book of poetry. And, so, off she floats to nowhere. It is for you.’

Their voices dipped and their words became incomprehensible as they came up the stairs at speed.

Just as they’d zoned out, they faded back in.

She spoke. ‘Do you not like what you see?’ It was her sad voice.

‘But you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve met in my life,’ said the young poet.

‘Is that all?’ she asked, the dent in her pride evident in the injury in her voice.

‘Helen of Troy. Yes, this is who I see when I look at you.’