‘Easy to say when she’s not here to contradict you.’

‘I can only tell you the truth.’

When Gemma turned away from him, he tried to build a bridge without blackening his dead wife’s name. ‘It was Judith who asked for a divorce. I hadn’t been unfaithful. I swear that by your best teddy bear.’

That familiar oath, which Gemma had created as a child because she didn’t like anyone saying ‘Cross my heart and hope to die’, brought her up short and she frowned at him.

‘Judith told me she’d fallen out of love with me.’ He returned his daughter’s gaze without flinching. ‘By that, I assumed she’d met someone else.’

‘Easy to say that when she isn’t here to defend herself.’

‘I’m not going to labour the point for that very reason: she isn’t here to put her side. It’s up to you whether you believe me or not.’

He hadn’t wanted to lose touch with his only child as he’d seen happen with other divorced men. And yet, in spite of his efforts to keep the peace, it had happened to him, too.

He took a few rubbish bin liners off the roll and handed them to his daughter. ‘All right. Let’s get this job done. How about you go through her clothes? Keep anything you want as a memento. Put the good things in one bag, the throwaway clothes in another. Your decision. We’ll take the good things to the charity shop and the rest to the rubbish tip. I’ll go through your mother’s drawers.’

‘I should do that.’

‘You think I haven’t seen her underwear before?’ And he knew Judith had concealed things in her drawers, so he wasn’t risking Gemma finding something that would destroy her illusions about her mother.

Without a word, she took the bin liners from him and went into the walk-in wardrobe. He heard her sniffle and blow her nose, and though her back was towards him, he saw her hand raise a tissue towards her face a couple of times, presumably to wipe her eyes. He didn’t dare offer any comfort. Well, what comfort was there when you’d just lost your mother?

Sighing, he began to investigate the contents of the two matching chests of drawers: tallboys, Judith had called them when she inherited them from her grandmother. They didn’t match the décor of this modern house but they were beautifully made pieces and she’d wanted to keep them, even though they made the room feel crowded.

He ran one hand across the polished wood of the nearest top, which had a neat inlaid border at the edges with black stringing, then forced himself to start on the job. He decided to work his way up the drawers from the biggest one at the bottom to the smallest at the top. He didn’t know why he chose to work that way, it just seemed right, because you couldn’t pile big empty ones on little ones as easily, could you?