‘Of course it is. You made a good life here, the two of you.’

The house is a gut job. It’ll be stripped back to its bones, pushed out, opened up. The new owners won’t stop till the front door’s fire-engine red or tangerine and the house has as many toilets as people. She’s holding the door frame, gripping it.

‘When you leave here,’ I tell her, ‘don’t come back. I mean, do whatever you want, but that’s my advice. You and Walter have made your mark here, and now another family will make theirs. The life you and Walter had here, that goes with you.’

‘Yes.’ She reaches out for my hand, half shakes it, half squeezes it. ‘Yes, thank you.’

She shuts her door before I’m halfway to the van.

The sun is trying to be warm. There’s a throb in my knee. I’ve been standing too long. I rub my quad, which is tightening up, and put one hand against the side of the van and stretch my calf. Slowly, carefully, the way the physical therapist taught me.

I’m settling in the driver’s seat, shifting my leg around with my hands to get it comfortable, when there’s a tap on the window. It’s Ellen, with a small wrapped box in her hand.

I wind down the window and she pushes the box in before I can speak.

‘I know you won’t take anything,’ she says, ‘so it’s not for you. It’s for your brother. From the way you spoke, I can tell you’re close, and that’s important.’

She sets it in my hand. It fits across my palm, almost. It’s heavier than it looks.

‘It should go somewhere it might be appreciated,’ she says. ‘Take it with you next time you see him.’

I drive home with the box on the passenger seat. It might have the soldier in it, or it might not. He might not be ready to go yet. It could be another toy, small but solid, without the same story, the same level of deliberation.

It has been too long since I have seen Simon. Ellen has a picture of a family in her mind, one that isn’t quite ours.

I will get Ellen out of her home as well as possible, now that she’s decided to go. I hope the people she finds in her new place appreciate her, know what they’re getting, as she sends her broken Bibles and the banknotes of the long-vanquished off to their new lives.

When I pull up at home and open the van door, a cello is being played. It’s not a student marching up and down a scale, though, or sawing their way through ‘Three Blind Mice’. This is music, a melody rising and falling, full of adult intentions. There are no lessons this morning.