So Erik became the story of the seventies. He and Sylvie lived next to his pottery among the factories of Marrickville, which was then still mostly industrial. Grit carried on the air from the trucks on Illawarra Road, but they had a swimming pool and two excitable Rottweilers. The business was successful. They wanted for nothing. Once, when the window of Erik’s car jammed on a trip to Melbourne, he pulled in at Albury and bought a new car off the lot, leaving the old one by the kerb in front of the dealership.

Sylvie thought that a good thing could be good even if it ended. She parted from Erik when he met somebody else. Later, much later, he asked her to come back. By this time he was starting to suffer from dementia. She didn’t go back but she helped him as best she could. When she went to the house, the surviving Rottweiler heard her car coming down past Newtown Station, and he would prick up his ears and whine excitedly. Sometimes Erik came to see her at the cafe, turning up in his dressing gown and drawing looks from the patrons. ‘I walked from Marrickville,’ he would say.

When I knew her, Sylvie had been living alone for years. She had a studio apartment at Rushcutters Bay. The boxiness of her main room might have been depressing if not for the water view and the extreme simplicity of her style. This required the banishing of clutter, the regifting of gifts, and a hardline approach to dealing with mementoes. She showed the same ruthlessness about Charles’s correspondence. She claimed to have lost interest. She couldn’t write emails all day.

‘Some people have to work,’ she said, setting out canapés. This was on a rainy evening at a catering job. She had asked me to come and help; someone had called in sick. When I arrived in my suit from work she said, ‘You’re great to me, Rowan. I know you don’t need to do this.’

It wasn’t her night: the job was an office party and she was cross with herself for having quoted too low. There were more people than there were meant to be and they fell on the trays of food. ‘Like vultures!’ she said. She was too proud to do what other caterers would have done, which was to serve cheaper food, fried things from the freezer. She tried to level the score by stealing whatever she could get her hands on in the office kitchenette. Taking handfuls of the popsicle sticks that were meant to be used as coffee stirrers, she shoved them down her pants.

‘I’ll use them to do my waxing,’ she said defiantly.

She didn’t care who saw as she left carrying her serving trays, with those popsicle sticks falling out of her trousers.