‘What are you afraid of?’ There’s warmth to her voice, that empathy of hers breaking through again.

‘People.’

She doesn’t say anything, and he thinks that it is also true that there are things within his house that frighten him: the past, the dangerous drift of memories, his wife’s voice ghosting through every room. He remembers again the pelting of eggs against his house, the anonymous gifts of dog faeces left on his front steps. Nowhere is safe. Except here in the garden with Leah.

‘I find that I get anxious. That’s why I like it here.’

‘In the garden?’

‘It was always my refuge. You wouldn’t think it now, but it was once a beautiful garden.’

He used to devote hours to it, the kids playing on their bikes around him while he knelt there, wrist-deep in soil, coaxing life out of seeds and bulbs.

‘Was your wife a gardener too?’

‘Oh, no!’ He laughs at the thought of it, a deep chortle that gurgles up out of nowhere, surprising him. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like that. ‘No, Charlotte was more of a house-cat. Always more comfortable indoors.’

His wife had never understood the quiet pleasure he drew from this patch of soil, the way it flourished under his care. She teased him about it at parties, his green fingers. ‘He gets down on his knees and takes scissors to the edge of that lawn.’ He’d once heard Charlotte say that to a neighbour at a party, a knifish edge to her voice. She’d known he was within earshot.

He doesn’t mention this to Leah. He shivers in the darkness, unnerved at the flow of Charlotte’s bitterness in finding him out here where he thought he was immune, where he thought he was safe.

Somewhere in the garden there’s a rustling sound. Their gaze is drawn away into the undergrowth. In the darkness, you can’t see the full tangled mess, the briars and rhododendrons rampaging through what had once been a tidy, orderly space.

‘It’s probably just a fox,’ he tells her. ‘The gardens along here always had a lively fox community.’

His wine glass is empty now.

‘It’s getting late,’ she says, and he feels her drawing in. Whatever brief opening there’d been between them is closing.

He wants to keep her there. To say something to draw her in. He has a sudden impulse to thrust out his hand and grab her wrist. Impulses like that can’t be trusted, but he understands the need in him that she has called up from the depths. Nineteen years since he has held a woman in his arms, felt her flesh against his bare skin. A conversation in the twilit garden, the wine, the night deepening around them, he can’t help but conjure images.