I smiled at him. ‘Yes, it is, actually.’ His face remained clouded for a second, but then an answering smile broke through. It was the same smile that had been his from babyhood, but now the changing planes showed me a glimpse of the grown man too. There he was, just briefly: Jack fully formed.

It was a moment of great delight, and also an instant of bereavement. As always, I wanted to wrap him in my arms, make him a baby again, but I held still.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘The postman came. There’s a package for you.’

A brown padded envelope lay on the counter. I picked it up and saw French stamps, half-familiar handwriting, crossed sevens. I put it aside until later.

I made Jack a late lunch and we sat down to eat together. Then he mowed the lawn for me, for probably the last time before the winter, while I raked up leaves and cut back waterlogged summer growth. It was good being out in the thin sunlight. The garden smelled of wet earth and benign decay. Afterwards Jack said he was going on the tube to see his new friend Max, and I agreed that he could make the complicated journey on his own if he called me when he got there. Then Paul rang to ask if I wanted to go to the cinema later or have dinner with him. I was replacing the receiver and thinking that I would make a cup of tea when I saw the brown envelope still lying where I had left it.

I used the bread knife to slit the parcel tape that sealed it. The envelope had been used before and a new white label had been thriftily stuck in place to cover the first address. Inside, wrapped in a protective collar of corrugated card, there was a plain glass bottle of perfume with a round gold-coloured screw cap. I slid my fingers inside the envelope once more and found a letter with another sheet of paper folded inside it.

As I had already guessed, the letter was from Philippe. ‘Your visit’, he wrote, ‘prompted me to look through some old boxes of my mother’s things. And I found this.’