‘Of course, love,’ Marion said. ‘He’s in our bedroom. He likes to sit looking out of the window. I’ll bring some tea up, when it’s mashed.’ Anyway, she thought, she’d value a few minutes more on her own with Daniel. She was full of questions she didn’t want to ask in front of Alison.

Sometimes, if he waited long enough in front of the glass, pigeons would land on the sill outside and look in at him with black diamond eyes. None of these birds were his. There were house martins too; they’d made a mud nest in the eaves, but they’d be gone soon, off on their travels, and anyway they were never still, and not bold enough to study him like the pigeons did. He saw other things as well, although, oddly, his eyes seemed only able to see what was very close or very distant; the middle ground was grey matter, as if a permanent blanket of low-lying fog had settled on the street. Marion said he couldn’t be long- and short-sighted, but all he knew was what he saw. Birds at the window, and other things, very far away, such as the weather changing in the sky, way over north-west; he knew what was coming and when it would come, and if Marion said, ‘Oh blast, it’s raining on my washing,’ he always thought, I could’ve told you that would happen, though he never said it out loud. You could fall out of the habit of speaking, he’d found, and if you did, you had a job to start again. Marion chirruped like a noisy budgie, saying everything, anything. He wanted to say hush, just hush.

So, Daniel was here; that was nice. Marion had somebody to talk to now, other than Claire. Joe didn’t come. He hadn’t seen Joe since, oh, since all them months in hospital, when nobody knew what was up. Joe came then, sat by his bed, watched him breathe, then after that he stayed away; maybe he saw too much of himself in the silent, sad old man in the hospital bed. Joe liked his own company; he wasn’t a family man. Lived in the mountains, in France, a long way from where he started.

There was a low knock on the bedroom door. Bill ignored it, and a woman’s voice, unknown to him, said, ‘Mr Lawrence, it’s Alison.’

He said nothing, because it was always easiest, but she came in anyway; he heard her approach. A nurse, perhaps? Or another one of those cheerful women from the day centre, with an invitation to sit and say nothing there, rather than sit and say nothing here.