‘Oh no, no, no. Tom also brought in pot. He liked to smoke it just as I do. But just before he died he was cheated. Whoever sent the pot sent heroin too. Tom said he’d been double-crossed, that someone wanted to incriminate him –’

‘Why did he not destroy it?’

‘He did, he destroyed it, flushed it down the loo just as you did. But he told me he was keeping one packet to confront –’

‘Confront who?’

‘I don’t know, do I? Tom went off to Paris and never came back. There have been no more little boats or little seaplanes, nothing.’

‘But you go on reporting UFOs?’

‘Yes I do. The police think I am harmless, so I am safe.’

‘Did Matilda know of this?’

‘Nothing. I think she knows nothing.’

‘So she is bored.’

‘Matilda is lonely, she has cranky ideas. She is middle aged, has nothing to live for so she falls in love with death. There you are,’ Huw Jones exclaimed. ‘I am brilliant! Talking to you has discovered for me what Matilda wants. She wants death because she wants something she has never had, a splendid deduction.’ Mr Jones looked enchanted.

‘But we all get it. Death is the one certainty.’

‘But we don’t all love it, do we? It is love she wants.’

‘I thought she’d had love.’

‘I think,’ Huw Jones said sadly, ‘that she has discovered she never really had it.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘She could love me but she won’t even try. I love her. I look after Gus when she goes away. I would die for her. I have never betrayed Tom to her. I lie at her feet and I don’t get a sausage.’

Hugh gathered up the tea things, took them to the sink.

‘That woman loves Gus, she does not love poor Jones.’

‘Shall we play chess?’ Hugh hoped that playing chess would distract his visitor. He found this talk of Matilda painful.

‘Okay.’ Mr Jones set up the board. ‘We will play chess, stop talking about Matilda who thinks old people should not be encouraged to live, that weak babies should not be put into incubators. I think she secretly thinks it’s a good thing when a lot of old people are suffocated in a fire in an old people’s home, when faulty brakes fail on the buses on old people’s outings, when they catch the ‘flu and die by the score. She is a horrible woman, just like Hitler, and I love her and I hate her and her Death. I want to hold her in my arms and roll about in that bed.’ With tears coursing down his cheeks Huw Jones set up the board. ‘Your move.’ His voice was desolate.

Hugh moved his Queen’s pawn. I could not comfort this man, he thought, he loves his grief.