I have spent my life with damaged women. I don’t believe this changed me. I don’t believe, either, that it damaged me. Ian once spoke of the invisibility of some damage - said that Sonja and I could pass muster in a crowd. I think that is what most people do. I’ve said that I can map out my life by scars; I’ve also said there are many scars I can’t see. I believe this is the case for everyone. We look at others and we see what we can and we judge what we can’t. As Dr Laws said, it’s all guesswork.

JOAN

26 January 2000

It was Ellen’s funeral yesterday. I arranged for her to be buried here. She has no family left in the States so why not? The day began with grey skies but as the cortege left the funeral parlour the sun came out and the village looked stupidly beautiful. I kept looking at the limousine in front, trying to imagine Ellen’s body in there, but luckily I couldn’t.

John, with his blood-raw, crusty stitches around his ears, black and grey stubble growing through, was inconsolable. He bawled in the church, bowed over and shaking. I rubbed his back and gave him tissues; I even held his hand. But I didn’t motion for him to turn the volume down. He had to grieve, even if that grief rose above the priest’s oration, even if it filled the church and near-lifted the rafters. I found myself -amazingly — smiling and looked up to see Harry grinning a wobbly grin too. Ellen would have loved it. The cant of centuries drowned out by a deaf boy’s sorrow. Because he was a boy in that church. I knew he was remembering Ellen teaching him words, teaching him to sign, beating him at five-card poker, bringing him presents, walking with him across the beach with the dogs. They had a relationship that had nothing to do with me. And the way I looked at it, if John needed to become child-like in order to say his goodbyes, that was fine by me.

When the mourners had left, when the last of the sherries had been drunk and the plates of uneaten food cleared away, John and I sat in the library. His face looked ravaged, eaten by misery, but he had stopped crying and I wonder just how much he cried for. Or, rather, what he cried for. I know he misses Ellen and he always will, but I think he cried for many things as the sun blazed through every stained-glass window in the church. I think he cried for Merboy, for Dai Davies, for every sound he has never heard, for waving at an empty parking space. For Hyacinth and her failing heart, for his own battery-operated heart, for days of silence and never being special enough. More than all these, I think he cried for me.

‘What will you do?’ he asked.

He asked the same question when I left teaching and I gave him the same answer. ‘Grow old.’