For a man who loved cooking, I can’t understand this refusal to indulge his own appetite. Maybe it was only ever something he did for others. ‘Owen!’ he says to me when I come to visit, ‘Help me with this, will you?’ and he shoves some large object at me that he wants me to hoist onto a high shelf, or attach to a wall, or break up with a tomahawk. He collects bits of furniture from everywhere, side of the road, deceased estates, and little by little it leaves his house and enters the lives of others: chairs that need re-upholstering, a lamp that needs its wiring mended, a kitchen table with missing stoppers. His house is a holding-station.

He sold the restaurant in 1997. He never remarried.

Rosa? Rosa will come to the launch. She might not stay long but she’ll come. Rosa, who most recently fought a legal battle because she refused to allow the National Gallery to print her images onto tea-towels. She has enough money to live on and she doesn’t need more. ‘Who does, Owen?’ she says. ‘Why do you need more money than you need? They can shove their tea-towels. I am not a gift shop.’ She is old and dried as a prune, but she is also a household name, and she loves it though she pretends not to.

Today, in Music Therapy, I got you to shake the maracas, Ornella. You haven’t shown such interest in a long while. But you’re not going to get better. Your words are going. Even a simple sentence is no longer intelligible. I have to read what you mean in your eyes and usually what I see is merely a plea for reassurance.

Some time soon, you will stop speaking altogether. You will stop speaking and you will stop eating. You will move your thumbs, back and forth, and that will be it. Memory will stop being an argument, even theoretically. I will be the sole repository of my own experiences.

They fixed your bed. You have a choice now: bed or chair, banana or apple, water or wine.

On the night of the thirtieth anniversary of The Poems of Veda Gray, Julia is dressed in green—deep jade green, a voluptuous dress for a voluptuous middle-aged woman. She wishes she could forgo her glasses, but she can’t bear contacts, and she can’t bear not being able to read. She is very pleased with the publishing deal she has brokered. There is not much money involved, really, but that’s not the point: keeping Mother in print is the point.

‘Veda is still so relevant,’ she says. ‘Because it’s still hard to be angry, if you’re a woman. It’s still not allowed.’