I used the word ‘rubber’ at school and all the sixth-graders in my composite class (four, five and six) laughed and I didn’t understand why.

Mr Parish only pretended to like things that were ephemeral. But he didn’t like things that didn’t last. Not really. They upset him. He got cross, watching Mrs Parish’s ikebana dry and change, the stems turning brittle. ‘It’s time for the bin,’ he would say to her. Or ‘For god’s sake, June, can’t we have something fresh?’

But Mrs Parish had her own time schedule. Her flowers were left to dry out around the house according to their individual life cycles. Sometimes she even started with specimens that were already dead. She arranged these with the same care she applied to the living. She made careful, thoughtful cuts. She restricted herself with her materials, and she eyed each cut like a painter eyeing a brush stroke. ‘In ikebana,’ she said, ‘there is a thing called wabi sabi, Owen. It means that it’s not only the fresh things that have beauty. I can put potato vine with an old shoe, Owen. I can make something I like out of a warty old pumpkin. Or ivy. Or weeds.’

I found this a strange idea. Imagine if people arranged vases of weeds and old shoes and put them on their dinner tables. When I mentioned wabi sabi to Mr Parish, he laughed and said, ‘Ahh, yes, my wife’s self-justifying philosophy!’

Mrs Parish put her secateurs to a dead branch and made a decisive cut. There was no green inside the branch. There was none of what Dicken in The Secret Garden would have called ‘wick’. The branch was a smoky residue of its live self: when she cut, a little puff of grey dust came out. But I somehow understood what she was doing. When she hung the branch with wild berries, still shiny red, it was like Snow White in the forest with the apple. I don’t know why. It just was. I don’t know how there can be a story in something without words or, really, pictures even. But there was. Mrs Parish attached a frond of green—slightly off-centre, like a woodland creature’s antler.

15 JAN 1969

Dear Tilde,

Yes, please send Hannah. I’m so bloody lonely in this house by myself. I walk from room to room completely aimlessly. Yesterday, I went to the shops to buy milk and a mother from Owen’s school stopped me and took my hand and said, I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been unwell. I don’t even know what she was talking about! Do I have a sick look about me? Or has Owen been telling fibs about me to his friends?

Oh, do send Hannah. Send her with shoes and socks and toothbrush and magazines and thick waxy white pimple cream and wild hopes and hopeless dreams. Send the whole bundle! Send her now, registered post. We will shop for outrageous articles of clothing and long-playing records of popular music. We will eat ham sandwiches on the run and fry up leftovers for dinner. Owen will be beside himself with happiness and will make her sleep in his bed and play downball against the back fence.