Her modern bungalow was in a little close, with concreted paths leading up to each of the identical front doors. Angela’s house had pots of salvias and busy lizzies on either side of the door, and vertical louvred blinds masking the picture window. I put my finger to the bell push and waited what seemed like a long time for her to open the door. At last she did appear.

‘Good gracious,’ Angela said.

We had kept in touch, but only just. It was twenty years since we had last met, a little while after Lola was born. Angela’s exclamation meant that I didn’t look like a young mother any longer, let alone the adolescent I had been when she first knew Ted. And on my part, if I had passed her in the street I don’t think I would have recognised her. In the Dorset Avenue days she had been plump, with heavy white calves and soft dimply arms, but now she was hugely fat. Her face was a broad moon of flesh, with concentric circles wobbling round a tiny central boss of features.

‘Come on inside, then.’

I followed her through the narrow hallway. She moved very slowly on twin pillars of fat, with ripples of it seeming to flow over the tops of her slippers. Her feet looked like flippers, too short to stop her toppling over. In her living room we sat down facing each other across the hearthrug, flanked by ranks of family photographs.

I knew that after Ted Angela had married a chef and they had had two daughters before the chef left her and emigrated to Australia. Angela had supported herself and the girls with hotel work, some of it quite probably in the place where I was staying now. Both girls had married and moved away, and Angela was left alone here. She had had a hard life.

‘You’ve been quite a stranger,’ Angela said.

The abrasive touch in this reminded me of Audrey. Ted must have liked his women to be cheeky, and it was just time’s wear and tear that turned a pretty girl’s taunting into sharpness.

‘Well. I’m sorry about your dad,’ she added more gently.

I rummaged in my bag. ‘I thought you might like to have this, to remember him by,’ I said and handed her a photograph that I had had copied and framed. It was of Ted smiling in his RAF tie and a blazer, taken some time in the late Fifties. He looked very handsome and wholly untrustworthy.

Angela studied it for a minute, then put it aside. ‘Always a lovely boy, Ted was. A lovely boy.’