‘No.’ She follows my finger, which is still pointing to the corner. ‘I should make you a coffee. How rude of me.’

‘No. No, I’m good, thanks.’ Now I look rude. ‘Water, though. Water would be great.’

‘Then I will get you water,’ she says.

I would sacrifice my last native vowel before converting to American coffee. I drink a lot of water in this country.

‘What exactly is your product?’ Benches, packaging, something involving framing, but there’s nothing showing me what she sells. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

She stops at the corner of the nearer table. ‘History. And I don’t mind you asking at all. You understand that means I will now show you.’

‘History? Is that why you and Walter are looking down on us from Pompeii again?’ There’s a single picture on the wall above the filing cabinets, another photo of Ellen and Walter in ancient ruins, or at least with a piece of one in a dark wooden frame.

She turns to face it, and adjusts her glasses to look at it properly. ‘That fresco is actually from Pompeii, though that’s us visiting it in a museum in Naples. There’s a reason for the clothing choices.’ In the photo, Ellen is wearing Walter’s olive blazer and a fedora quite like Cedar’s, while Walter is in a linen jacket with a brooch and has a straw hat with a floral band on his head. ‘It’s Achilles on Skyros. The fresco we’re standing with. Achilles is in disguise as a woman, so we swapped too.’ She shrugs. ‘I’ll be taking that one down before the place goes on the market. It was the nineties. I wouldn’t do that now.’

There’s a rustle of wood shavings as she turns and steps towards the shelves. She bends down, straightening the glasses on her nose and tilting her head so she’s reading the handwritten box labels through the best part of her lenses.

‘This one,’ she says, sliding a box from a shelf and setting it on the table. ‘We started out as collectors.’ She rests an arm on the box lid and leans her hip against the tabletop. ‘Bullets at Civil War battlegrounds on vacations. Bullets and canister shot and other small items. Canister is an artillery round packed with small balls. It bursts after firing. There’s an incredible amount of canister at Gettysburg, for instance. Fire it at the ground just in front of the enemy’ – she indicates the trajectory with her hand – ‘and most of it ricochets up and fans out. You tell a student about the battle, that’s one thing. You tell it to them while they’re holding a ball of canister shot in their hands – a ball fired that very day – you know they’re going to remember, and think deeper about it. And you also show them the other items, give them the full picture. The buttons and the pen nibs and the hair-dye bottles. Those soldiers cared to write letters home, and they cared about the colour of their hair. That’s not in the books.’