They don’t speak in the car. Hilary keeps her eyes closed, her head leaning back against the rest. Hot air gusts through the open window and swirls around them, reminding her of another time – another summer – but it’s so long in the past now she can hardly believe that the memories she has are hers. That she actually was that person – younger, less burdened by respectability, less concerned by what people thought. And now it’s about to begin – the second act she has been waiting for. The fact that it’s upon her is almost overwhelming. She is impatient to be home, to be sitting in her garden with a G-and-T and a cigarette, her feet stretched out and bare, away from people, where she can think things through properly. She needs to make a plan.

A van is double-parked in the street, blocking access to their house, and Greg pulls the car to a halt behind it.

‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Hilary mutters, as beyond the windscreen two people struggle to lift out what looks like a piano through the vehicle’s open doors. A man and a woman. Young.

‘New neighbours,’ Greg remarks.

The woman pauses and lets go of her end of the piano – an upright in dark wood, battered and worn – while she climbs down from the van. Small and slight, dark hair and pale skin, a slightly anaemic look about her. She is wearing a smock-like dress in charcoal grey, black ballet flats on her feet. Hardly suitable clothing for carrying furniture, Hilary thinks. It’s the kind of garb that architects favour, she has noticed, or graphic designers.

‘We should give them a hand,’ Greg says.

‘No, don’t –’ But he is already out of the car, the door shutting behind him. Hilary watches, silently furious, as he approaches the van and the woman turns to him, shielding her eyes from the sun.

Greg shakes her other hand, then that of the man emerging from the van. Hilary watches him coming into view. A boyish face, though she guesses he must be thirty or more, wire-rimmed glasses lending him an intellectual look, despite the garish zippered jacket he wears, some sort of sports clothing. From where she’s sitting, she can’t make out what the three of them are saying, but when Greg gestures towards the car and the couple turn in her direction, she shifts in her seat with discomfort. Both strangers wave to her, the man turning it into a little comedy routine by ducking down and peering myopically at the windscreen. The others laugh, and Hilary knows she should get out of the car. It would be rude otherwise. But something holds her back. She can’t explain her hesitation. A cold instinct that keeps her sitting there, clenched in her seat.