He remembers reading them with a sort of ghastly amazement. The flowery prose, the sickly sentiments expressed. For the most part, he felt embarrassed for her when those missives arrived. And it was true that they sometimes amused him, provided a spark of distraction from the dreary accumulation of his days. He’d even gone so far as to keep some for sentimental reasons: a reminder of what it had been like for him, some sort of touchstone to his old life. And it heartened him, sometimes, when his son neglected to write and his daughter set her mind against him, to think that there was someone out there who retained a spark of feeling for him, even if she was a crazed love-starved lunatic who needed these fantasies to punctuate the boredom of staid middle-class life.

‘You told me they kept you going,’ she says, wounded but still doggedly following her course.

‘I never … When did I –’

‘When I visited you in prison. During the third year, when you were at such a low ebb. You told me my letters were the only thing keeping you alive in there. That without them you didn’t know how you’d manage.’

He scrambles back through memory, shuffling to find an occasion when he might have uttered such a thing, but those early years are blurred and faded, like old sepia prints, mildewed and creased.

‘I remember the evening we met,’ she tells him now, her face and voice softening with recollection. ‘When Greg and I went upstairs to your house and Charlotte made that awful pass at Greg. We were so shocked, poor Greg not knowing what to do, how to disentangle himself without causing offence. I couldn’t believe she would do something so brazen, so cruel, right there in front of you. And I remember how still and quiet you were, and I knew – I just knew – that, despite your stoicism, she had cut you to the quick. There was something so pained within you, my love, something crying out to be healed. I wanted so much to comfort you – oh, yes, I wanted that. Even though I hardly knew you, I still felt this connection, like something ancient between us, waiting to be unearthed. So when you came to me that day, when you kissed me – you attempting to be a salve to my pain – I knew that really it was every bit as much about me healing your wound, my love easing your pain. You needed to be loved, and I wanted so much to love you. That hasn’t changed, Anton. It’s only got stronger.’

He’s mesmerized by her in one way, even though there’s a sickness in his stomach. There’s a kind of purity to her dogged belief, this trail of gibberish coming out of her with such fervour. It inspires pity and remorse.