‘I really wasn’t going to. I mean I am a parent. I can’t pretend to know how you feel because it has never happened to me, but I can say how bitterly I am aware of your grief.’

She shook her head. ‘Boff,’ she said with an air of dismissal. ‘Boff.’

Madame Prideaux rose heavily, stood with her hands on her hips looking across the conservatory through the windows, her eyes quite unfocused.

Florence said suddenly, ‘That was rude of me. I apologize. But he’s mine. I made him, I love him. So, there you are.’

Madame Prideaux slowly pulled her woollen cardigan down over her hips. ‘One has to be firm with him, of course. He is very determined, stubborn, a terrible temper. Terrible!’ She turned to look at Florence. ‘True, my child? Eh? But wonderfully loving. When he feels like it. They all are, those children. Rage and love!’

The church clock struck five. Madame Prideaux lifted one hand and counted the hours off on her fingers with deliberation.

‘Five o’clock. You would like a beer? We have some beer. Or perhaps tea. It is a perfect time for tea.’ She was smiling at me suddenly. Head to one side, a kind, gentle, weary smile. Almost apologetic, strain draining away.

She left the conservatory after I had assured her that I wished for neither tea nor beer, and when the door closed Florence looked up at me.

‘So,’ she said. ‘She has suffered, for me, more than I have suffered for myself. Her army training with my father sometimes forces her to deny her goodness, her fallibility. But …’ She got up and wandered over to the aquarium, rippled the water with a finger. The fish swung about, rose to the surface, sped away. ‘I tease them. Poor fish. Poor James. This was the situation which broke him finally. Broke him like a saucer shattered on a brick floor, a thousand fragments. What is the English nursery rhyme? “And all the king’s horses, all the king’s men …”?’

‘“Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”’

‘That’s it. That was it.’

‘And we don’t know where any of those fragments are, do we, even if we could put them together again?’

She crossed her arms over her chest, a containing, very feminine gesture. Shook her head.

‘No. Not at all. Gone.’

‘I suppose, looking at things clearly, that Thomas is a fragment? Would you say that?’

‘Yes. A fragment. And I know where it is.’

‘Do you think that Thomas is the “punishment” he writes of in his last letter to you?’

She was instantly evasive again, pulled at a plant, turned a pot about in its saucer, small gestures to give her time to think. Or consider – there is, after all, a difference. And once she had decided on what to say she turned back to me.

‘It’s possible. I don’t know.’