Betty rescued the next one and put it on George’s coffee-table. He hasn’t opened it, though. Cricket is for the radio. He listens to matches on long wave, interspersed with the shipping forecast. ‘… And now the shipping forecast, issued on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at 17.54 GMT today. Low, north-west Malin 1002, slowly losing its identity by 1900 Tuesday.’ He has no idea what any of it means, but it’s comforting, and reliable, four times a day, every day. He used to think Ellen was reliable, but then she bought him a dog and died.

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Fastnet. German Bight. Ellen.

George used to silence her if she tried to talk to him while it was on. ‘Ssh, woman. Can’t you see I’m listening to the shipping forecast?’

‘George, you’ve never even been on a boat.’

‘I won’t need one, if I listen to the shipping forecast.’

Now George has to keep going, steer his solo ship on the treacherous seas of life. At least he has Poppy as his second-in-command. For a while he had Betty, too, his deckhand, but he had made her walk the plank.

The first time George had gone back to the allotment with his spade, he’d wondered if she might have left him a gift by way of apology, but there was nothing where Betty used to be. Just the smell of peat and manure. The sweet tang of weeds. A fork sunk in the ground where he’d left it. He picked it up and carried on digging more trenches, like a soldier in Flanders fields.

Today, the sun dials around him, hot on his neck, then his face. It’s heavy, sweaty work. No tea, no doorstop sandwiches. George is very good at feeling sorry for himself. He potters around until hunger drives him to the baker’s, where he buys all of the Scotch eggs, slips a sweaty two-pound tip into Till-girl’s hand, then walks out without a word.

The first two Scotch eggs see him home, where George sits in the bath and holds the shower over his head, watching the mud under his nails dissolve in the warm water. His skin is papery and wrinkled, sliding off his bones. He lifts a heft of belly flab and watches it droop and resettle, like custard falling back into the saucepan from the spoon. He studies himself objectively, with neither disgust nor pride. He is intrigued that his internal machines and cogs whir on, while Ellen’s have stopped. Why do the people who deserve to be alive always die, and the ones who don’t are preserved, like a jar of pickles in brine? Why is he still here? he wonders.