The doctor looked closely at my face, at my striated hands. Perhaps he sensed just how deep the silence in the basement flat was when I opened the door, balancing the days-old John on my hip. Perhaps he could sense for how long I scrabbled at the door of the Morris Minor when I thought John was dying and I couldn’t reach him. Perhaps he sensed that, for once, I wanted to finish something properly, to feel the end of the circle pass through my hands and feel no regret. He coughed and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. ‘Yes, she’s dying. I really can’t say how long it will take but she is quite weak. The secondary cancer has spread and all we can do is alleviate her suffering. I’m sorry. I’ve known Ellen for some time and she’s a remarkable woman. I wish I could say something else.’

‘Thank you.’ I walked away, out of the ward, to the lifts, and out into the glorious day. I sat on a wall and smoked a cigarette, trying to prepare myself. I was reminded of the day when we met, sitting on a different wall, outside a different hospital.

Will I be enough for her?

30 August 1979

It’s taken me years to tell Ellen about Miles, and even then the admission was prompted by her question this evening. We spent the day clearing John’s bedroom, packing and carrying boxes up into the attic. It’s been a sweltering summer and all the windows and doors in the house are still open, even now, to try to create some breeze, as Ellen’s dogs lie panting on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. John has gone, married, now, to Sonja, and it was Ellen’s idea to change his room. She said it would mark a rite of passage. I can’t believe that he’ll never sleep in that room again, that he’ll make his own bed and lie in it with Sonja.

I had a bath in the early evening, while Ellen baked the dough she made this morning and knocked up a chicken salad. We took the meal out on to the deck, and watched the sunbathers straggle across the rough of the golf course, struggling with chairs and ice boxes, dragging exhausted children. The sun was still warm, and as I ate I thought of the pale, blind rectangles left on the walls of John’s bedroom where the two posters had been for years.

‘Did you ever think of marrying again?’ asked Ellen, settling herself against the newel post of the steps that run down to the garden.

‘What?’ I was shocked back to the present — this was definitely personal.

‘After your husband left, did you think of marrying again? I mean, today I saw those photographs of you and John when he was a young boy. Don’t tell me that you didn’t have offers. Quite a few, I shouldn’t wonder.’

I gulped from a glass of chilled white wine. ‘No - I didn’t want to get married again.’