‘There was Sister Oesterious at St Granata’s,’ I replied. ‘She’d been taken off to be thumped and dumped in the local pit only they hadn’t hit her hard enough and she turned up three days later covered in fish-heads, old cabbage leaves and soggy newspaper. Looking back it seems kind of darkly comical, her lumbering in through the front gates with everyone screaming. Mother Fallopia was made of sterner stuff and retired her properly with a rounders bat behind the bike sheds. Lucy Knapp had nightmares for a week, but in general I think everyone was okay about it. What about you? Know anyone who nightwalked?’ She rubbed her temple thoughtfully.

‘My husband, Geoffrey. We met when performing as the front and back halves of a pantomime horse, and bonded over the “equestrian gavotte”. It’s a tricky dance to synchronise, especially as I had done the decent thing and took the rear half.’

She laughed.

‘Geoffrey said it suited me as I was a horse’s arse. I had to marry him, of course, and we had seventeen years of unbridled joy. He was my Romeo and my Macbeth, my Rochester and my Desmond. But we still donned the panto horse outfit and performed the equestrian gavotte at parties, just for kicks and giggles.’

She paused, and the smile dropped from her face.

‘At Springrise five seasons ago I thought he was just having a foggy morning, but his light through yonder window never broke. He did a post-mortem trick, too: Romeo, the balcony scene. Over and over again. I thought he was still in there, too. Not unusual to believe so, I’m told. I didn’t keep him for five years, though – he ate my sister’s Norfolk terrier the following Tuesday and that was it. I called the HiberTech hotline and they took him away.’

Better I’d be Dead in Sleep/than asleep and dead

wandering the Winter deep/Winter Cutlets as my bread.

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘He was redeployed as a road sweeper and I saw him once, I think, in Lee-on-the-Solent. Well, I thought it was him. HiberTech have a Redeployment Centre there, so it could have been one of many, I suppose. He was parted out the next Winter. His legs are on a gardener in Stourbridge right now and his eyes are currently looking across the Sound of Mull, which he would have liked. I don’t know about the rest of him . . .’

She lapsed into silence. Best not to dwell, no matter how hard that can be.

I turned to the train window and stared out at a landscape that, while constantly changing in detail, remained much the same in aspect: snow and ice, bleak and empty, cold and unwelcoming. The Winter. There was a very good reason most of us slept through it.