But did nothing last? Was the ‘she’ who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up? Surely there was something inside, some inward shadow, the part that loved Mozart or Samuel Pinedo. Didn’t that go on, somehow? Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten?

The children at school would remember her for a year or two. They had made a ‘Get Well’ card for her, with a picture of the school on the front, and each of them had written his or her name inside with great care, and some had put an X for a kiss. ‘DEAR MRS VALENTINE WE HOPE YOU GET WELL SOON.’ Row upon row of scrubbed faces gazing up at her at morning assembly. Mr Price thundering away at the upright. All good gifts. Morning has broken. The extraordinary thing was that Brando’s son had been one of them. She would have been a form mistress then but she thought she remembered him, a good-looking boy about Alec’s age. A doctor like his father now. Another doctor! In the end they were the only people you knew, though at least Brando was human. She could vouch for that. And what a relief when he took over from Playfair, that pompous little man who talked down to her because she was a woman. Thought himself so clever, but he knew nothing.

On the visits she made to Brando before feeling ill again, the check-ups, they used to talk more about the children, or about themselves, than about the cancer. His father had been an Italian POW in a camp somewhere in Somerset, married a local girl, then opened a little restaurant in Bristol that some nephew still owned. He said that in dreams sometimes he could smell his father’s home-made polenta pie, and she’d told him, laughing, that sometimes she dreamed of her mother’s chutneys, and of chutney-making day, when the kitchen was full of steam, a little sweet, a little savoury, that hung about the house for days.