He dresses in a clean shirt and trousers, adds socks and braces, then goes to the kitchen. To accompany the remaining Scotch eggs, he adds a thick wedge of cheese, some sliced apple, a dollop of salad cream and tomatoes. He fancies himself quite the cook, these days.

When he’s finished, he claps his hands together and picks up the most recent magazine. When he sees the front cover has a women’s team on it, he almost tosses the magazine to the floor, but a story about Victor Trumper catches his eye. ‘Ah. Proper cricket. That’s more like it.’

George rips off the cellophane and, for no reason other than that Ellen used to do it, he sniffs the pages. Satisfied the magazine smells good, he dives in and spends the next three hours devouring the Wisden with his magnifying-glass, stopping only to tell Poppy about the real Sylvester Clarke. ‘He was fearsome,’ George tells her, thinking how much he and Clarke had in common. ‘People were petrified when he came up to bowl. He knew the battle between batsman and bowler was a trial of strength and character. He could bowl at one hundred miles an hour.’

Poppy has no idea about speed so she just barks.

‘He died when he was only forty-four,’ George carries on. ‘I never knew that.’ George thinks about how he got fifty years with Ellen and feels almost lucky.

As always, the sky around his house, his little sanctuary, slowly darkens. He’s used to Ellen not coming home now. It doesn’t hurt less exactly, it just is and there is nothing George can do about it. He has his dog, and he can empty his own washing-machine. His dinner was fine, and he’s only had one glass of beer. It’s not the life he wanted, but it is a life. A little one.

He’s about to put the magazine down and go to bed when he spots it – the fixtures for a cricket tour. Kensington Oval to St Lucia and all the places in between. On a cruise ship. He reads about the boat, with three bars and a swimming-pool. It even has a theatre. Ellen always wanted to go to the theatre.

Come to think of it, Ellen had wanted to go on a cruise. George had told her to forget it: ‘Waste of time and money. Like being on a floating council estate with food poisoning.’ He says to Poppy, ‘There are three restaurants on the Crystal Esprit,’ he tells Poppy. ‘Three!’ One of them promises the best of British and George thinks of pie and mash and lamb chops, none of that foreign muck. ‘That boat will be full of people thinking they know about cricket.’ George pictures himself telling them how wrong they all are. It’s a wonderful thought.