Just then there was a loud crash, and the bell-like sound of something smashing on a hard floor rang through the house. Pip jumped, and her heart immediately began to pound. She still couldn’t deal with loud, sudden noises. Maybe she would always struggle with them.

She took a deep breath to steady herself then called out into the silence. ‘Is everything okay?’ When there was no reply, she rushed from the room to try and trace the sound, running through various disaster scenarios in her head as she went.

The kitchen appeared to be at the end of the corridor and Pip headed in that direction, calling out again. This time she got a reply.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. No need to panic,’ snapped Evelyn as Pip entered the kitchen. Pip was relieved to see she was on her feet, but she was standing in a puddle of tea, the teapot lying in pieces around her. ‘Damn,’ Evelyn tutted. ‘How careless of me. What a mess I’ve made.’

However, as Pip approached, she saw that the broken teapot was almost insignificant next to the catastrophe that was the rest of kitchen. Every surface was piled high with stuff. Pip couldn’t really be more specific about what it was. Most of it was unidentifiable clutter. It didn’t smell any worse than the rest of the house, so it probably wasn’t stale food, although there seemed to be a lot of cartons. In one spot, a pile of cornflakes boxes was stacked almost to the ceiling. There was a similar pyramid of toilet rolls and another of teabags.

Instantly Pip formed a pretty clear idea about how they had appeared.

‘Do you do online shopping?’ she asked with a grin.

Evelyn looked peevish, but then her pinched expression widened into something softer.

‘I don’t know how to stop it,’ she admitted. ‘Nicholas said he’d help, but I said I was fine. Pride, I suppose. Now I think I could eat cornflakes every meal for the rest of my life and not get to the end of them.’

‘I do . . . did the same,’ confessed Pip. ‘The same things keep arriving week after week, and before you know it, you’re inundated. Once, I ordered what I thought was four bars of soap, but it turned out that each packet had six bars in it. The flat I shared with my boyfriend was quite small and there definitely wasn’t room for twenty-four bars of soap. He wasn’t best pleased.’

‘That’s funny,’ Evelyn said, and started to laugh, a light tinkling sound, almost a giggle. ‘I’m so glad it’s not just me. And what’s even funnier is I don’t even like cornflakes that much.’

She rolled her eyes at her own foolishness. When she smiled, she looked ten years younger, and Pip thought she could see something of the Evelyn she had come to know through the diary.