‘It felt more like neglect than shielding,’ I murmured. Audrey shrugged her indifference. ‘I suppose it may have done. Does it matter, now he’s dead and gone?’

I thought back to Dorset Avenue and the empty hours of waiting for Ted or of wishing, when he was there, that he wouldn’t go out again so soon. I had never been interesting enough to capture his attention, never believed that I would be glamorous enough to do so, never even quite believed that I would grow up and out of my stalled adolescence. Ambergris, musk and vetiver. The words circled in my head like a spell and I thought of Ted’s volumes of fragrance notes stacked where I had left them in my kitchen. The formulae for his spells. He had never tried to cast one for me. ‘Yes, it does,’ I said abruptly.

The back door creaked open again and Jack reappeared. ‘It’s amazing.’

‘Thought you’d be interested,’ Audrey remarked.

I looked from one to the other. ‘What?’

‘It’s like a zoo.’ Jack’s face was shining. ‘Come and see.’

The garden was maybe thirty feet long. All down one side there were rough hutches and cages made of wood struts and chicken wire, and inside the cages were rabbits and guinea pigs, most of them sitting vacantly in a slew of carrots and cabbage stalks. Jack tugged me along to the end of the line and showed me a hedgehog, and a small ball of russet-brown fur that turned out to be a sleeping fox cub.

‘His mother must have been trapped or poisoned.’ Audrey sniffed. ‘I found him half dead near the bins beside the supermarket. Can’t have him indoors because the cats’ll polish him off. But I’m going to save him.’

I thought of the dog fox that I had seen near the end of my road, listening to the urban music and delicately scenting the night air.

The rest of the garden was a mess of bowls filled with scraps, bones, corn, vegetable peelings. The stink, on this warm evening, was noticeable. I could see over the top of a sagging larchlap fence the neighbours’ clematis and Albertine roses, and I wondered what they thought of Audrey’s reeking menagerie.

‘I put out food for the foxes and hedgehogs,’ she was telling Jack. ‘Birds like it as well, of course. You see plenty of blackbirds and thrushes, the odd magpie and jay, as well as pigeons. They soon learn to beware of the cats.’ The two of them picked their way between the debris and wandered along the line of cages together, and I leaned against the back wall of the house, watching and feeling left out of a club that I didn’t want to belong to.