Nothing remained, it would appear, of James, apart from his works in the room above and a few bottles of pickled cucumbers and preserves in the larder. To all intents and purposes he had gone away into his world of ‘sweet oblivion’ leaving little behind him, apart from the canvases.

Maurice sounded his horn three times loudly, a long pause between each blast, so that, wherever I was, I would be bound to hear.

I closed the front door, locked it, slid the key into my pocket and went down the path through the abandoned vegetable garden and the unpruned roses.

Standing at the iron gate, not attempting to enter the wilderness, stood a young woman in a thick woollen jacket, hair pulled back with a ribbon. We stood looking at each other for a moment from a distance of three yards. Pleasant eyes, grey; no concern.

‘Bonjour,’ I said.

She nodded, a slight inclination of head and neck.

‘Bonjour. What is it that you want? Can I be of assistance?’

‘No. No … I just came to see the house. My name is Col-cott, William Colcott. I am the brother of James Colcott who used, I believe, to live here? He sent me the key.’

‘Ah,’ she said, pressed her heel on an insect on the path.

‘To London,’ I said inanely.

‘No.’ She looked up at me, a slight frown.

‘I sent it. Not him.’

‘Oh.’

‘He told me to. I’m his wife.’

Chapter 3

‘I see,’ I said.

I didn’t, of course, but could find no more intelligent phrase at that moment. She smiled, slightly, turned and began to walk down the narrow path to the main drive. I opened the gate and followed. She stopped suddenly, turned back.

She had those grey eyes which seem to be so particularly French, for some reason: dark with a darker circle round the cornea, an intensely black pupil. There was a dust of freckles round her neck and throat, and at the bridge of her nose, no make-up, otherwise a clear complexion, smooth, unlined. She was, I reckoned, about thirty, somewhere like that.

She pushed her hands into the pockets of her woollen jacket, hand-knitted, judging by the sag at the hem, but comfortable, and worn comfortably.

‘You didn’t, of course, know, I suppose? James would not have told you?’

‘No. James didn’t tell me. He hardly ever wrote anyway in the last few years, he just seemed to fade away in France. We were not, you will realize, very close.’

She nodded, scuffing the dusty path with her foot. ‘I realize that. But he always had a photograph of your family. You, I know – I recognize you now. And was it Elspeth? Your sister? You are all together sitting outside a tent – by the sea. I don’t know where, or when. He was quite small, about ten perhaps?’

‘Perhaps; it was at Dieppe, and he would be about ten.’

‘You were much older.’