‘Mel, I’m not you. I didn’t grow up in your family.’

‘What about his house?’

‘Still there.’ Locked up, since the day of the cremation, with all his possessions inside it. Brooding, waiting for me.

‘Are you going to go and sort it out?’

‘Yes.’ It came to me now that my reluctance formed part of the numbness. Of course I feared going back to his house and unlocking the memories, but sooner or later I would have to make myself do it.

Mel insisted, ‘I’ll come and help you. I’m sure Graham and Caz will as well.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

I knew I didn’t want anyone else to be there, not even Lola and Jack. It wasn’t just furniture and clothes and memories I had to deal with. It was the way the very scent of the place entered into me and shook my soul.

FIVE

I unlocked the front door of Ted’s house and gently pushed it open.

The draught excluder caught on a heap of letters and circulars lying on the doormat, so I stooped down and cleared them out of the way. I was breathing hard. The air in the hallway smelled dense and mouldy.

In the kitchen I unlocked the back door to let in some air. The reek of mould was stronger in here. The silence pressed on my ears and in an effort to dispel it I rattled around opening cupboards and moving jars. There was the tin tea caddy from our old house, with pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb and palm had grasped it so many times. Inside, I knew, was the teaspoon with an RAF crest on the handle.

I lifted the lid off the breadbin and recoiled from the source of the smell, a puffy canopy of blue mould. Caz and Mel and I remembered after the funeral to empty the fridge and leave it with the door propped open, but we forgot the bread. Choking a little, I rummaged for a cloth and a rubbish sack. I went to wipe out the mould and the obscene furry nugget of bread that lay in the heart of it, but there was no point. I dropped the whole thing, bread bin and all, into the sack and firmly tied the neck. I was here to go through Ted’s belongings. I didn’t want to keep many of his possessions – there were more than enough memories already.

Upstairs there was the silence, even thicker and heavier. Ted’s was a quiet road, and behind these closed windows nothing had moved for a month. I turned on the bedside radio but the sudden babble made me jump and I switched it off again.

The blue-tiled bathroom with worn blue candlewick mats was a comfortless narrow space that reminded me again of the dripping green box at our old house. Ted humming ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as he shaved. Me perched on the edge of the bath watching him. Through adult eyes I could see myself, gazing, hungrily following his every move, trying by the sheer power of concentration to draw some attention to myself. It must have been infuriating for him.