The attic is freezing, snow thick now on the slate roof tiles. In the corner I find the trunk I’ve been looking for. It’s heavy, so I drag it across the rafters, scraping the leather. Opening it I find a photograph album, filled with pictures of Noss Mayo, of my grandparents, of me playing with Toulouse. There’s the photograph of my mother staring at Dai Davies with a look of surprise. There are lots of photos of me and my mother when we were younger, at picnics, on the beach, me with the groups of friends I would collect for a day. Both of us paddling on the endless beach we found in France, smiling for the stranger holding the camera. The photograph my mother took as I sat on a log by the lake, staring straight into the sun and I’m so tall, so whole, so sure that everything will be just fine. I notice there are no photos of us after the bomb.

Beneath these are my mother’s journals. I’ve never read them but I think this is the time. I think I must read them now. I pile them into a box and climb awkwardly down the ladder. Then I go back into the attic and when I shroud the surfboard with the sheet I notice the board behind it. The plank from a dinghy, weathered and ragged, the word Merboy faded by water and years. I turn off the lights and close the hatch.

My mother collected me from the station in Kingsbridge every Friday evening during term time and drove me back to Exeter every Monday morning. Our weekends had their own rhythm: I would sleep late on Saturday because I found the school so hard. It was hard to keep concentrating, hard to catch everything that was thrown at me. I missed Harry’s office with its view over London, missed his easy manner, the fact that he knew me well enough to know when to stop. When I woke up, my mother and I would eat breakfast together in the old-fashioned kitchen, then go for a walk, across the golf course or down to the beach. I’d walk along the water’s edge, wanting and not wanting to run in, to swim, to drown. We talked sometimes about the future, about what I was going to do. She wanted me to go to university but I was paralysed by the thought of it, although I said nothing. It seemed to me that it was enough that I had already disappointed one parent. In the evenings we’d read or play cards. She’d sit with a glass of whisky as I drank juice and we worked through every game in Hoyle’s. Then, just before I left school, when I was eighteen, she poured us both a whisky and I realised that I must have grown up. I sometimes wondered, as I dipped my way through doorways and smacked my forehead against low rafters, if I’d grown up a little too much.