He believed that it was his ability to keep his emotions in check that had helped him care for his wife four years ago when cancer had finally robbed her of her life.

Their marriage had been a happy one with scarcely a cross word exchanged between them. They’d been set up to meet at a dinner party given by mutual friends who had decided that Diana had grieved long enough for her husband, who had died in a car crash three years previously. They had also decided it was high time Ellis settled down. To everyone’s satisfaction, he and Diana had hit it off and before the evening was over they’d swapped telephone numbers.

At the time Diana’s son, Lucas, was ten years old and Ellis was in his late thirties with no previous experience of children. A relationship with Diana had the potential to be a minefield of complex challenges, but it hadn’t been like that at all. Lucas was an easy-going child and accepted Ellis into his mother’s life quite readily. Had he not, who knows whether things would have gone as well as they had.

Ellis’s mother, Rose, had been delighted at last to have a grandchild and loved Lucas as though he were Ellis’s own son. As did he. Amongst the many framed and treasured photographs which Rose had brought with her to make her room here at the care home feel more homely were several of Lucas, charting his years from young boy to teenager to adult. She was so very proud of him.

Sitting in the stuffy, overly warm room where Rose was fast asleep, Ellis hoped she found the pictures a comfort. For him, the collection of photographs was a poignant reminder of her life coming to an end. Ninety-six years of age, she was now painfully insubstantial, as though the slightest of breezes would blow her away.

Physically she had never been a big woman, but mentally she had been a colossus, and an inspiration to many. A schoolteacher all her working life, she had taken to mentoring troubled teenagers in her retirement. She believed everybody deserved not just a second chance, but a third and a fourth, or however many chances it took to find one’s place in the world. Anyone who knew Rose Ashton had had nothing but respect for her.

The nursing staff here at West View Care Home were wonderful and Ellis didn’t give a damn how much it was costing him to have Rose so well cared for. It had been a sad day for him when she had admitted that she could no longer look after herself, that she had begun to feel worryingly unsteady on her feet. Always a pragmatist, she had refused point-blank his suggestion that she live with him in Richmond.

‘If you think I’m going to let you take me to the lavatory, you have another think coming!’ she’d fired back at him. Her body might have been failing her, but her mental faculties and the ability to assert herself were not. ‘No son deserves that punishment inflicted upon him.’