‘Right. Will you give him a message for me?’ The man took out his wallet and selected a card, then wrote a few words on the back. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget, will you?’

I tried to read what he had written as I went back up the stairs. But Ted was on the landing, waiting.

He held out his hand. ‘Well done, Princess.’ He pocketed the card with barely a glance. ‘Don’t want people knowing where we are every hour of the day, do we?’

Once he had made sure that his visitor had really gone he went out himself, whistling. I had homework to do, and after that there was the television for company, and if I needed anything I could always run up the road to Mrs Maloney. But I could never fall asleep until Ted came home again. I lay on my bed, watching the ceiling and waiting until I heard his Ford Consul drawing up outside.

Next I heard his key in the lock, then low voices in the hallway. Sometimes on these late nights there would be a woman’s giggle. Only then, when I knew that after all he hadn’t disappeared for good and left me behind, did I close my eyes. If there was a woman, I pulled the bedclothes over my head and clamped my ears shut.

I screwed the lid back on the bottle and reached to replace it on the shelf. Then I remembered that I was here to sort out his belongings and dropped it into a rubbish sack instead. I still didn’t like his cologne. Maybe it represented the way he wanted to be, or perhaps with his love of secrecy he just relished putting up another smokescreen. But to me it still smelled like a lie.

I cleared the bathroom cupboard of his smoker’s toothpaste and indigestion tablets and corn plasters. I worked methodically, telling myself that these were only inanimate things, the inevitable remnants we would all leave behind, which would be cleared away for us, some day, in our turn. By our children and their children if we were lucky, by strangers if we were not.

Next I went back to the bedroom. I took his jackets and suits off their hangers and piled them up, thinking that maybe they would do for Oxfam. The cuffs were frayed and the trousers bagged, but they were all dry-cleaned and brushed. Ted had grown seedier in old age – he didn’t bother to eat properly, preferring to smoke and nip at glasses of whisky, and he didn’t get his hair cut regularly enough or trim the tufts in his nose and ears – but he was always a dapper dresser. I folded up his thick white silk evening scarf and put it aside, thinking that Lola might like to have it.