And I never asked her for help.

I look at the pile of letters scattered on the hall floor and bend, stiffly, to pick them up and open them. Last night on the phone my mother asked me to pay any bills before I leave. There are Christmas cards (but so few), circulars and junk mail. There is also a handwritten letter on thick, ivory vellum.

I am aware that for years I have indeed heard the wolf’s breath in the cave, because the wolf falls suddenly silent. My father is dead. The Bohemian, handsome, vain father, who married a woman who didn’t exist, who never came, who never thought I was special enough, is dead.

Dear Mrs Player,

This is a very difficult letter to write. You don’t know me — I am Dai Davies’ second wife and Tm writing because I think you should know that Dai died last month. He didn’t suffer and it was very sudden, as he had a massive heart-attack. I know that John will want to know and I don’t know where he lives. In any case, I think that you should be the one to tell him since you will find the right words. The funeral was held last month in Oxford. We are all devastated. Yours in sorrow, Hilary Davies

My father died on a numberless November day, the day, perhaps, when I first met Darren Whiteside? Or maybe during the night, as Sonja and I made our smoke-flavoured love? I don’t know and I’m not being told. I sit and hold the letter, a letter not meant for me, and I can feel the empty space left by the wolf’s breath. I’ve heard it in my dysfunctional cochlea for nearly thirty years and now it’s gone.

Ian once asked me what I would say to my father should I ever meet him. ‘Would you offer him forgiveness? Would he be shriven?’

‘Would he be what?

‘Would he be exonerated? Absolved?’

I looked at Ian’s soot-smudged face, at his still, calm hands on the table. ‘For what?’ I asked, unsure myself.

‘Indifference. Lovelessness.’

We were sprawled across the benches in the garden of the Highbury, two sweat-stained giants considering the various delinquencies of the lovelessness of men.

‘I wouldn’t know how to,’ I decided finally.

‘Then forget about it,’ he said, swinging his feet to the ground and going to the bar for a pint of Smiles’.

And now, years later, I can. I gather together the journals, repack them in the box and climb once again into the attic. Before I switch off the light I look at the pale plank from a dinghy that went down years before. Now is not the time to take it, but one day I will. I throw my clothes back into the hold-all. I walk through the house, locking and checking doors and windows, resetting the timing of the heating.

The Jeep is covered with vicious, thin-skinned frost and I scrape at it, breath misting, trying not to think. I put the Jeep in four-wheel drive to climb up out of the valley and soon I’m on a near-empty motorway, heading towards my mother and Ellen, a letter folded into the back pocket of my jeans. The fields of Devon race past, grey with snow, scabbed by black, skeletal trees. I touch the Corona scar and I’m reminded of summer and the sound of my own yell. I remember, as I speed over the Avonmouth Bridge, that I have left my wife. I packed my bags and left our house when she wasn’t there, just as Dai Davies did.