‘No.’ Surprise pinched my throat but I managed to add, ‘I’m sorry, were you expecting him to?’

Audrey shrugged. She spooned sugar into her tea and stirred. ‘I thought he might have done the decent thing at the end. But I wasn’t exactly expecting it, no.’ I noticed that Jack was calmly gnawing the chocolate off his biscuit as if this turn in the conversation were entirely predictable.

‘How did you and Ted know each other?’

‘We met.’

There was a silence. Audrey’s mouth folded into a smile and I could see that she was enjoying the mystery. I didn’t like her and I didn’t want us to be sitting there in her house among the softly decaying newspapers and fishy bowls of cat food. I thought she was like some rusty and cut-rate Mrs Danvers, holding the keys to rooms that had been locked up for too long. I was afraid of the lumber piled up within those rooms, but even so I was driven to open them up. How else, now that Ted was gone, was I going to learn anything more about him? ‘And how did you meet?’

The folds of her smile deepened. ‘In the usual way. And I lent him money to start up in business.’

Not another one, I thought. Ted’s history was one long story of borrowing money to set up businesses. Even I, the hoodwinked and hidden-from, knew that much. If only his expertise as a businessman had matched his phenomenal memory for essences and the scale of his romantic imagination. ‘You weren’t the only one,’ I said.

‘He never paid me back.’

‘You weren’t alone in that either I’m afraid.’ She was going to ask me for money from Ted’s estate to settle some ancient debt.

Audrey suddenly struck an attitude on the worn mat in front of her gas fire, and the adjacent towers of newspapers and junk trembled.

‘We were planning to conquer the world together. Paris, Rome, Rio, New York. Shops in the best quarters. Squads of technicians behind the scenes. Launch parties for our fragrances with jewelled flasks containing just a few drops of our golden liquid that women would commit murder to possess and lead men to their own deaths from desire. A life of rose petals and peacocks and diamonds, that was what Ted and I intended.’

Auntie Viv and her suburban dreams of setting lotions and conditioners had nothing on this. Audrey was slightly mad, I realised, or madder than just slightly so. And my son was looking at her with fascinated admiration.

Audrey bent one arm to her hip. ‘And what did my money buy, you might wonder? I’ve no idea.’

I said, ‘There isn’t any money now, either. At least until his house is sold.’