Still, the pretence holds and the elderly are in good spirits as the relatives start to arrive. Miss Hancock is a no-show, which is a relief, because it means her father isn’t there to spoil a good day. This is a beautiful place, it must be said, with its Victorian glass-and-steel canopy and scenic steps descending into the back garden like a verdant, natural theatre. We’ve strung a necklace of fairy lights in the tree above the stone fountain at the back. In the evening we turn them on and, when there is a breeze, they flicker light into the bedrooms of the first-floor guests. The old people love it. The piano bar, Miss Phyllis calls it. ‘Are we going down to the piano bar today?’

Nobody really comes to visit Miss Phyllis, but we take her out anyway, because she loves the open air. If there’s time, I sit with her for a while, to keep her company. She tells me stories. Miss Phyllis once had her heart broken by a man. It was the only time she allowed that to happen to her. He was a police constable during the war, and she only ever refers to him as Constable, as if it were his given name, or as if remembering his real name might prove too much. Since then, she’s ‘saved herself’, she says, thus preserving her capacity for romance. She is ninety, but it spills out of her, a transparent emotion. And while it may not seem obvious, a care home is a good place for romance. So much time to be spent daydreaming.

Miss Phyllis lifts her lashless eyes to the sun and says, ‘A singer’s heart is like the bluebird; it wants to fly.’

For the first year we are together, I am never beyond his reach. ‘My angel girl,’ he tells me. He’s always touching me, following the edges of my body, with his fingers spread out across my collarbone or a thumb tracing the slope of a hip. ‘Look at you.’ His gestures when we are together are always a little larger than they ought to be, to accommodate me. He keeps me safe. In the pub, he draws me into him. He pulls out the chair at the restaurant. The crook of his arm designs a space for me on a packed train, on the sofa, in the bed next to him. ‘Little bird,’ he says, ‘one day you’ll learn to fly, but for now you’re all mine.’ I am happy when he says that. I give him my whole heart.

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