There was silence between us as we blasted ten miles or so through the country roads. The sun was still overhead, strobing across our faces as we whizzed beneath canopies of trees. But the cloud was encroaching, misty white at its leading edge, foreboding grey at its core. The car creaked and shimmied as we rode the undulations, spitting back through the tailpipes each time Aunty Kaye eased off for a corner.

‘Did you really win this car in a poker game?’ I asked over the racket.

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Gramps told me.’

‘Just a little tall story of mine,’ she said, clearly proud it had spread. ‘I got fed up with everyone asking if it was my boyfriend’s car. Or, worse still, my dad’s. So I tell them I thrashed a surgeon at cards and left with the keys to his 1974 yellow Triumph Stag. Sometimes I mention how much he cried. Cool story, no?’

‘So what’s the truth?’

‘I bought it from a nice man called Roger, who’d restored it but couldn’t get into it after he had a hip replacement. It was always my dream car, and happens to have been born the same year as me. But that’s a much less interesting tale.’

‘Really boring,’ I said.

We powered out of a sharp bend on to a long straight. The back end of the car squirmed as Aunty Kaye floored it through the gears. Having hit ninety, she began to slow for the give way sign in the distance. We coasted towards the junction that would mark the end of our back-road short cut.

‘Here comes the storm,’ she said, the sky ahead of us like a slick of oil on a dull sea. The sun had been obscured. A restless wind battered past my ears. At little more than walking pace, we approached the T-junction, where we would turn left on to the main road.

Had we arrived at that turning a few seconds earlier, the delivery van would have been hundreds of metres away. A few seconds later, and the guy in the Range Rover would have completed his overtaking manoeuvre past that van and been back on the correct side of the road. But we arrived when we arrived. It was the wrong time.

Aunty Kaye looked to her right as we reached the turning. The road was clear. We didn’t quite come to a stop. The hedge on my side obscured the main road, but we were turning left, a glance to the right was all that was needed. We swung round the corner on to the carriageway.