George would stick to the paths, but Ellen had walked in the long grass, at risk from sheep and shit, and never seemed to care. She was too busy collecting her tiny conical snails. They were always falling out of her pockets and George would stomp on them with childish glee, till he saw her flinch. He felt dreadful then, and had made her a box with a magnifying-glass set in the top. ‘Here, you can peer at your snails till the cows come home.’

‘Oh, George.’ How many times had she said his name like that? In exasperation, in gratitude? How much would he give to hear it one more time?

George thinks about his wife on the Beacon, skirt flirting with the wind, sniffing the salt on the air. ‘Breathe it in, George. Doesn’t it make you feel alive?’

The realization hits him as he puts on his cardigan and can’t do up the buttons. Ellen bought Poppy not for company but to keep him fit. She didn’t pity him. She knew this would happen, this weight gain, this sedentary settling of fat under his skin. He didn’t notice and wouldn’t have cared when she first died. He had fully intended to sit in his chair and eat processed meat from the tin until it was time to join her in the grave he never went to visit. Fat wouldn’t bring back his wife.

But something has changed. He’s been getting up at seven thirty to greet the morning with a long squeaky fart en route to the toilet. He sometimes tells Poppy, ‘Listen to this – too good to miss,’ before he does so.

His dog-for-fitness theory is proven correct when he stops at the pharmacy and Sophie takes out his medication, together with a note from Ellen. ‘She brought this in a while ago.’ Her spider-leg lashes blink away a tear as she says it. ‘Such a lovely lady. We all miss her.’

George wants to ask Sophie how she thinks it feels for him, the stupid, dozy tart, but she’s holding his medication and a letter from his wife. He wants the first and needs the latter, so nods his head and goes to pay, but Sophie smiles and tells him not to worry about it, prescriptions are free to the over-sixties. George didn’t even know that. Ellen did all of this for him. His wife had thought of everything, it seems, except how to say, ‘I’m dying. Goodbye.’