‘No.’ She smiles. ‘I was a high-school senior in Maryland during that campaign. I didn’t get to share a lot of umbrellas with the candidates. I had a Kennedy button.’ She taps her index finger on her chest, on the spot where she wore it. ‘“Kennedy for President”. That was my contribution. Think I still have it somewhere. “Leadership for the Sixties,” the slogan was, and that was an exciting prospect. Walter was teaching high-school history by then, and he taught it in a way that caught my attention when I met him, but that was twenty years later. I was a teacher too. Not many couples fall for each other over the teaching of history, I don’t suppose.’ She points to the umbrella. ‘That’s what Walter was about. He would say that, when people wrote history, they never wrote that bit. It was all battle dates and generals and the crowning of kings and emperors. But gestures matter. That . . .’ She touches the photo, Kennedy’s hand on the umbrella. Her fingernail clicks on the glass. ‘Kennedy was a charismatic senator about to become the most powerful person alive, but he’d still hold the umbrella over you. That kind of observation matters when studying history, when trying to get inside it, to see what it did to people and what they did to it.’

The ache in my left knee lifts a notch. I’ve been standing in one position too long. I shift more weight onto my right leg and try some isometric contractions, but I need to bend it.

‘That was what Walter believed,’ she says, ‘and I liked that thought. History was never dry with him. He was never content to let it rest as “a fable agreed upon”, as the quotation goes. When he taught the Civil War, you got the Gettysburg Address for sure, but you also got the lives people led. You packed a knapsack, you marched, you went hungry, you faced uncertainty. He did that with the students. He told them all the rumours that came before the battle happened and got written down, and he asked if they’d hang around to fight it. They’d write an essay on that, imagining it from a soldier’s point of view. Walter’s grandfather, the one who knew Joe Senior, he served in the Union Navy in the Civil War. He was a boy, or little more than that.’ She stops, takes a breath. ‘I’m sorry. You’re here to sell my house for me. Not for show-and-tell. What’s your assessment? What kind of price can I expect?’