I see him now from the top of the road as soon as I come around the corner, and I swear it looks like he’s waiting for me. Before I’m even close enough to say hi or hey, he pulls a magazine out of his hedge and waves me down. Like I wasn’t going to stop anyway. Because it’s weird, but I think I’ve been waiting for him, too. He hands the magazine over and it’s already open at a glossy half-page photo.

‘One of mine. January edition of Birdwatch a couple of years ago.’

It’s a brilliant photo, to be fair. Every feather on the little grey and pink bird is perfectly in focus and it’s looking straight down the barrel like it’s posing, just for Ray. I suddenly remember the detail in that picture of Danny in the Double and think, No wonder.

‘Wow. That’s cool. What is it?’ I actually want to know. Again, surprising.

‘Bullfinch. Male.’

We talk about photography for a couple of minutes, and I impress him with my knowledge of F-stops and shutter speeds and resist the urge to say I told him so. It’s the first time he’s looked back at me properly, and it’s so much better than an OAP smile under duress. I run out of things I know about his specialist subject and I scramble for something else to talk about.

‘How come you chucked out those armchairs, if you like old stuff so much?’

He looks a bit thrown at the change of topic, but recovers quickly.

‘Marie Kondo.’ This guy might be funnier than he looks.

He tells me his parents sat opposite each other in those armchairs for more than fifty years in the front room of this very house, but then things went pear-shaped with dust mites and asthma and bloody velvet shedding. Whatever that is.

‘Wore right through the fabric in the back, kept losing things down it. Nothing but a bloody nuisance in the end. Got a John Lewis recliner now.’

‘What about the second one?’

He blows out his lips and makes a long pfft sound, but I catch a bit of a smile. He doesn’t answer the question.

‘That your mother, with the broken legs?’

‘Yes. One broken, one mangled. And by the way, that photo you took of my . . . of Danny has had some pretty wild ramifications.’

I give him the sanitised version of how Lou and I have ended up in Belsize Park with Dom and my uncle. And while I’m talking, I’m thinking about how I saw Danny and Lou this morning, sitting opposite each other in those armchairs exactly like Ray’s mother and father did for fifty years, and how weird that is. But if you believe in the universe and what will be will be and all that stuff like Lou does, maybe not.

Ray looks up at the sky and says nothing for about thirty seconds, and then he turns back and eyeballs me, full on.