The one window looked out on to the ‘garden’, or, to be more accurate, a yard, thirty foot long with two battered dustbins, a sad May bush, and the rest all concrete, with cracks grown green with moss and damp like an aerial view of the mouth of the Amazon or the Nile Delta.

We hacked it up in the first spring, with great effort, laid turves on fresh earth and made raised flower beds where she planted honeysuckle, fuchsias and some sort of clematis. But it all faded away after a couple of seasons and was neglected. It faced north anyway, and was dank and sunless. We never sat out in it, the cats peed everywhere and it was really all over by the time that Giles and Annicka were born.

I always thought Annicka was a silly name, and said so, but she said it was very unusual and romantic, and screw what the child thought when she was eighteen. Anyway, it would probably be called Anne or Annie – which it was.

I folded the Guardian again, watched her eat her yoghurt; she stirred a spoonful of strawberry jam into it.

I didn’t like her much.

She looked up as if I had said it aloud, lips sticky with the pink slosh stuff, some sliding down her chin.

‘If looks could kill,’ she said, wiping the muck off her face with her sleeve.

‘I’m not looking. Not killing,’ I said.

She hunched her shoulders, tossed her scraggy pigtail, grinned at me across the pitch pine table.

‘No need for a killing, is there? I’m going away, willingly, longingly, and you do as you like.’

‘Right. I’ll do as I like.’

She raised the coffee mug with the clown to her lips, both hands holding it. ‘Shan’t miss a thing about this place. You’re very welcome to it all, every tile and brick. Just my books, a few odds and ends you wouldn’t want anyway. I’m very glad we talked things to a head last night, no good dragging on like this, not when love, as they laughingly call it, has dried up like an old pond.’

‘No point at all. But you’ll let me see the children?’