There were photographs around the house: the framed family-portrait stuff on the dresser, the big old albums in their cupboard in the dining room. I flicked through the albums, moving back in time. Soon the big glossy colored rectangles gave way to much smaller black-and-white images, like something prewar rather than early sixties, and then they petered out altogether. There were surprisingly few of them—only one or two of me per year of my childhood, for instance, taken at such key moments as Christmas, and family summer holidays, and first days at new schools. It seemed an odd paucity of images compared to the screeds people produce now. But then, I realized, glimpsing through these portals into sunny sixties afternoons long gone, that my memories of great moments, like the day the training wheels came off my bike, were of my father’s face, not of a magnifying lens.

I tried to be brisk. The Catholic tokens went to the parish. I gave most of Dad’s personal stuff to the charity shops. I kept back the photographs, and a few books that had some resonance for me—an ancient AA road atlas mapping a vanished Britain, and some of his Churchill biographies—nothing I’d ever read or used, but artifacts that had lodged in my memory. I didn’t want this stuff, but of course I couldn’t bear to throw any of it out, and I knew Gina would take none of it.

I swept it all into a trunk and hauled it into the boot of my car. My boxed-up TV21 collection went in there also, thus beginning a migration from one attic to another. I wondered what would happen to all this junk when I died in my turn.

I kept out the little picture of my “sister,” though.

I had the phone disconnected, sorted out such details as the TV license, but left the utilities running, billed to my account, to keep the house dry and intact, the better to present it to prospective buyers. On the last morning I cut the grass, knocked over the anthills, and did a little brisk weeding. It seemed the right thing to do. I was going to miss those big old azaleas. I wondered about taking a cutting, but I didn’t know how to. I didn’t have a garden to grow it in anyhow.

I engaged a house clearance firm—“friendly and sympathetic service,” according to the Yellow Pages. A surveyor with an undertaker’s doggedly glum manner came, glanced efficiently over the furniture and utilities, and made an offer for the lot. It seemed ruinously low. Part of me, loyal to the notion of what my dad’s reaction would have been, was inspired to fight back. But I just wanted shut of the business, as the surveyor surely calculated, and the deed was done.