She spoke. ‘See, I had this, well. This thing with Barry.’

She paused. Beside me, her cigarette glowed.

‘I’d never felt like that before,’ she said. Her voice grew soft. ‘It all started when Jim went to the Elvis Convention. It was in Coventry. He got out all his gear, you know, slashed shirt, white trousers. They all try to look like Elvis, but quite honestly in some cases it’s best not to try.’ She paused. ‘And, all the time, it was Barry who had it.’

‘Had what?’

‘What Elvis had. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.’ She paused. I drove through the fog. It had thickened up, I could hardly see the road. I’d heard about this happening in the fens; people got lost for days. ‘Jim never found out, of course. He’s been very kind to me, you’ll never know. Nobody will. I was in a terrible state when I met him. But you can’t help these things, can you.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘You ever fall in love? I mean really? So you can’t eat? So you ache all the time? So when you see a car that’s even the same colour as theirs you start perspiring?’

I paused. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Once, perhaps. A long time ago.’

‘What happened?’

‘I married her.’

She stubbed out her cigarette. Buildings loomed out of the fog.

She said simply: ‘He made me feel alive.’

We arrived at the market square. I stopped the coach and switched off the engine. The shops had lit their lights. A schoolgirl, holding a violin case, yawned outside a delicatessen.

When I turned, Shirley was crying. She said: ‘Got a hanky on you?’

I pulled out a Kleenex and gave it to her. She blew her nose.

‘He wanted me to go with him but I couldn’t.’ She wiped her eyes, but then she started sobbing again. ‘He’d just had a little girl, I couldn’t do that to a family, could I? I couldn’t do that to Jim.’

There was a silence. A woman came out of the delicatessen, took the girl’s hand and led her away.

Shirley said: ‘I missed my period the next month. I thought I was pregnant. But it never came to anything.’ She blew her nose again and stuffed the Kleenex into her pocket. ‘Anyway, he gave me his address, so I could write to him. I did, for a bit. He didn’t reply much, he wasn’t a letter-writer. And then his letters stopped.’ She paused. ‘I’m just telling you, because of the address. Nobody in the world knows about it. I’ve never told anyone, before or since.’ She paused. ‘Nobody to tell, really.’ She pulled a couple more Kleenexes out of the box and stood up. ‘15, Lyndhurst Road, Reading.’