‘Aren’t you a nosy parker? It was big enough. He’d been poorly for years. Lots of the nurses and carers came. They’d grown fond of him.’ Betty has her head back in her knitting now. She’s talking to an uneven row of purl stitches in a diarrhoea brown.

‘I thought you said you nursed him yourself.’ George takes a handkerchief out of his pocket to mop his brow, then stuffs it back up his sleeve. He’s wearing a vest under his shirt and jumper.

‘Strike a light, George! I did, but you can’t do it all alone. There are machines and medication and all sorts.’ Betty sounds defensive, like she does when George asks her where the last bit of pie went. He wonders why he’s pushing her but he can’t stop himself.

‘Yes, but you could have learned how to use the machines and when to give the medication.’ Ellen knew the names of all of his tablets and what they did. She could rattle off side effects and dosages like a pharmacist. Better than a pharmacist.

George can tell from Betty’s face that his forked tongue has hit a root, or maybe a piece of flint. She wrings the knitting, like she wishes it were his neck, and speaks to him in a voice he’s never heard her use before, her teeth clenched.

‘For crying out loud! I sat by his side from the day he took to his bed until the day he died. I made four thousand three hundred cups of tea and one hundred and seven Victoria sponge cakes. I know this because I kept count. I know exactly how much I did. I know every medicine that man took, alphabetically. Aspirin. Bisacodyl. Diazepam. Epirubicin. Feroglobin …’

‘All right, enough already. No need to overegg the fucking pudding. You’re a modern-day marvel. A real-life Mother Teresa.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I was just his wife. I changed his sheets every single day, with two nurses helping me to lift him. I cleaned the carpet on my hands and knees so the vacuum wouldn’t wake him up. Towards the end, I made him fourteen bowls of custard a week. I made cakes and cards and scarves for every single person who came in to help us. I spent three hundred pounds on merino wool, you old dumb-cluck. So don’t you dare, for one second, tell me I didn’t do my best. I was there, watching him die, and die and die a bit more every day, for three years. You didn’t even notice your Ellen had cancer.’