Reaching for her spectacles, Evelyn placed them on her nose and peered out at the street beyond her window. In truth, it was becoming increasingly difficult to see out. The salt together with the grime from the street below and decades of dirty rain had combined to coat the glass in a smeary film. Maybe she should ask Nicholas to clean this one pane. She didn’t care about the other windows, but she missed having a clear line of sight to the street and the sea beyond. Almost nothing ever happened directly outside the house, but it would be a shame to miss what little there was to see because she couldn’t make it out through the murk.

That girl yesterday, for example. She had stood in the street and stared up at the house for five minutes straight. The staring wasn’t that unusual. People often stared – children, mainly, and those who had nothing better to do than waste their time wondering about what went on behind her front door. But they didn’t often stand and stare quite so blatantly, or for quite as long. Evelyn hadn’t recognised her either, although that meant nothing. She knew no one in the town any more. Nobody visited other than Nicholas, and that suited her just fine.

On a side table next to her chair sat a mobile phone and a diary with a pen tucked into its spine. She didn’t keep a diary these days, not like she had done. She had stopped all that when she’d realised there was nothing in her life worth recording, but she did like to keep a track of the days as they passed. Otherwise they all ran into one another with no way of telling them apart.

Today was a Friday. Friday was the day her groceries were delivered. She had set the online shopping order up herself. Nicholas had shown her how to do it, and she had taken to it like a duck to water, although there were some aspects of managing it that still bamboozled her. Sometimes she played a game with herself. She would imagine she was organising an enormous party, like the ones she had gone to back in London, and she’d fill her little basket with everything that she needed. Smoked salmon and blinis, jars of caviar and all kinds of canapés that you could buy ready-made nowadays. And champagne – bottles and bottles of champagne. It was surprising how quickly it all added up. Throwing a party was an extremely expensive business.

And then, once she had amassed everything she would need to host the kind of affair people would be talking about for months, she took every item out of her basket, the total spend dropping click by click until she was left with the bare remains of her needs for the week – a paltry selection, as she lived a very simple life.