‘I’m 50 – hardly your average spring chicken. Besides, nobody is ever too young to die… Look, I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a wonderful life, wonderful friends – and wonderful you – and on balance I prefer the idea of a short life, but a fine one. Who wants a life that’s long but horrible?’

Jelly was weeping onto a pile of unopened post. ‘How… how long did they… ?’

‘I may be all right for a while, especially if I go for the surgery. I may see this Christmas, but as for the one after, who can say… ’

His equanimity astounded her. ‘When can I see you?’

‘If there’s any time you could come to Ireland… I’m afraid I’m unlikely to be up to the crossing. And if you do… well, I can’t promise to be the best company.’

Jelly grabbed the diary out of Anna’s top drawer. Her spring was chock-full of concerts, all over the country – Torquay, Oxford, Bournemouth, the Wigmore Hall – and in a horrible irony she had to go to Belfast, but needed to come straight home the next day. Some musicians, Jelly knew, would cancel concerts with impunity. She never had. People invest time and effort in going to listen to you; you can’t let them down. ‘There has to be a time.’

‘Jelly… it’s all right, you know.’

A pause. She knew what he was trying to tell her: if she went, she would be going to say goodbye.

She’d never said goodbye to Sep. He vanished back to France when his leave was over, and that was that.

‘Listen… ’ he said. ‘Please don’t feel you have any obligation towards me. I’ve never wanted to hold you back. Certainly not now. You understand?’

She could scarcely say that perhaps he could have tried harder to hold her back. That it wasn’t fair that she should have to endure him dying as well as Sep and her parents and too many friends, and that he was not only too young to die, but too good, too kind. And that to break off now what little there was between them would compound the unendurable with the inexplicable. ‘Isn’t there something I can do?’ she pleaded, skirting the issue. ‘Anything I can send you, anything that will help, even just a little bit?’

‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘Jelly, dearest girl, will you promise me one thing? Whatever happens – don’t change. Stay true to yourself, no matter what it takes. You are the best, brightest star in my firmament, you know that.’

‘And you in mine… ’ Their relationship was not really a relationship; it was a friendship blended with a might-have-been. Yet now that it must end, the lack of fulfilment hit home.