With a sigh, Irene slid the picture back beside the others. But something had happened; she felt it as an easing behind her ribs and her eyes, a softening. She put her hand up to her face and discovered that there were warm tears rolling down her cheeks. Good tears at last. She wiped them away with the tips of her fingers. Then she walked round to the boot and pulled out the folder of letters that she had taken from home at the last minute because she must have known she would need them. There were dozens of them written in the first six months of their relationship, some short but others several pages long, with both sides covered in her cramped and spidery scrawl. He had kept them all; perhaps when she returned home she would find their partners. One by one she held them under the small light.

Adrian, she had written. When I arrived on Friday and you were standing there on the platform I felt so happy it wasn’t like happiness any more, but something new. You took my bag and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ And what I want to say now, after the last two days we’ve spent, is that I’ve been waiting for you too. And now I’ve found you.

Irene winced. She didn’t need to look at the date scribbled at the top to know that she’d written the letter just a few weeks after they’d met. She remembered the weekend; the little room at the top of a long flight of stairs where he was staying for the repertory season. The square window, grimy and cracked in one corner, looking out over roofs and the church spire, the dusty wooden floor. She could still see the expression on his face when she knelt in front of him and took him in her mouth. She knew his taste, his smell, the way he put his fingers into her hair, the way he said her name, over and over, as if it were a magic incantation that could save him; save him from what? Brimful of desire and just a look, just a brush of his fingers, just allowing herself to remember it later, would spill her over. So many things she had forgotten, but not that. Never that.