‘And were you surprised to hear it?’

I noticed that Audrey betrayed no surprise whatsoever. I had been right to deduce that it was Audrey I should be talking to about the past. Whoever she was and whatever she had been to Ted, she knew much, much more than she was so far prepared to give away.

My father was a perfumer and a con artist. You would have liked him.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

‘I see.’

The cat, sensing that some moment of drama had passed, resumed his kneading. Another plane roared overhead. When the wind blew in a certain direction they came right over my house too, a mile or so distant in a straight line from here, but I didn’t normally register their passing. So I was listening harder than usual, without knowing what it was that I wanted to hear.

‘I brought you this, too. You asked if there were any photographs.’

I handed over the same picture of Ted that I had given to Angela. I had searched my house for the photograph of Audrey herself, the young woman sitting on a low stone wall with the wind blowing hair round her face, but I’d been unable to find it with the others I’d brought back from Ted’s. I thought it must have fallen behind a piece of furniture or else I had allowed it to be swept up in a pile of papers, and I was ashamed of my carelessness. Audrey took the other picture and looked at it for a long moment. Then she put it down carefully, in a way that told me she would pick it up after I had left and stare at it much longer and harder.

‘Why have you come? Not just to drop in an old photograph and some Suffolk farm produce, I imagine?’

I sat forward on my upright chair. I found myself thinking that I had nothing to hide from Audrey, or to be afraid of in her house, and then wondered why I should imagine that I might have. It was sad here, among all the lumber and decay, and with loneliness hanging like a blanket at the windows, but that was all. There was nothing sinister. What I did fear was what Audrey might force me to confront within myself.

‘Since Ted went,’ I explained, ‘since he died I feel him in my head all the time. He’s gone and I never asked enough questions about him while he was still alive, and I never talked to him about what put us apart from each other. You know that about us, don’t you? You know that we weren’t good friends even though we only had one another? My mother died. You know that, too.’