The few photographs told me nothing at all. There was the family group at Dieppe. Faded rather, but still five cheerful people, Mother, Father, Elpie and me, with a slightly self-conscious smile holding a pipe. I must have been twenty-ish. James, his face screwed up in distaste, about ten, something like that. Difficult to date exactly. The rest were all standard, dull snapshots in not very good colour. Florence and James smiling, covered in plaster or cement or some form of dust, building their wall. A blurred photograph probably taken by one of the two helpers: Florence sitting under a tree, shadow-dappled, smiling, holding up a shirt which she was apparently mending, James naked except for a pair of very brief swimming-trunks posing self-consciously on a log, like a muscle-builder. Which he most certainly was not, although his figure was slender and in good form – he’d certainly kept that intact. They were a pretty couple, one had to admit that. Perfectly matched one could say, right ages, right shapes.

His heavy fall of blond hair, her wide-set eyes, laughter lurking on her lips. One picture of them standing together, arms round each other, against a background of scrub and pine trees, bare feet in wet sand, and the long shadow of the photographer thrusting across the bottom of the photograph, camera and arms making a bold blur of its head. Whose shadow? Some unknown friend they met on their escape to the coast? For on the back of the photograph, in James’s flowing calligraphy, were the words: ‘Porquerolles. March 24th. Joy-Day!’

The day of the false wedding, I felt certain.

And that was just about all the envelope contained, except, almost forgotten at the very bottom, a scatter of black and white photographs: a hand, muscular, hard, curled against a piece of tartan cloth, two feet … not particularly attractive … the curve of a thigh and a knee raised, obviously photographic details for some portrait he was painting. These were annotated on the back, in the familiar handwriting, ‘Daniel. No. I’ and so on through to No. 7.

Who was Daniel? What had happened anyway to the glowing happiness of Porquerolles? What had gone wrong, what had happened to destroy the soft delight in the eyes of Florence, which now, or rather in the portraits in the studio, held only sadness and shadowed bewilderment.

I slid everything back into the envelope, except for the family group at Dieppe. It was, after all, the only photograph of us all together that I had. I’d have it copied, one day, and then return it. Then I put the envelope in a drawer of the wardrobe and wandered across to the window overlooking the vegetable garden and the hen run.

A young girl, taking down some tablecloths from the line, looking anxiously at the darkening sky.