‘Fabulous,’ muses Dad. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes as though he is back there, soaking up the sun outside the Albert Hall. He always was a sun worshipper. A man who would happily sit in a deckchair for hours on the beach at Southend, his top off and his trouser legs rolled up, in our early years – occasionally catapulting himself out of stripy canvas and crickety wood to fetch ice creams or help us make sandcastles with long foamy trenches dug back to the sea. Or he would enjoy enthusiastic, splashy paddles with Angela and me, standing in the shallows long after we had returned to our sandy kingdoms to stare at passing ships on the horizon, while moussey suds washed over his feet and the sun beat on his back.

Dad looks almost contented.

‘Do you want to go out on some day trips?’ I say softly but, to be quite honest, reluctantly. I have just the right inflection in my voice to let him know I don’t really want to. ‘Revisit some old haunts?’

‘No,’ says Dad, shaking his head, his eyes still closed. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘OK.’ I am relieved. Of course. Of course he doesn’t want to! There, Verity. I’ve done what you asked. I’ve suggested it and he said ‘no’.

‘What about this one?’ Dad has leant forward again and felt for another photo, curled at the edges. ‘Describe this one to me, Prue.’

‘It’s you and me and Angela outside Papa and Nonna’s gelato parlour in Clerkenwell,’ I say.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, you’ve got your arm around us both and you’re smiling and we’re smiling, and I look about eight or nine, and Angela looks about six or seven, and you’re wearing a white polo shirt and look all young, and the sun is in our faces. You can just about make out Nonna’s face, in the window, behind the counter. She’s got that headscarf on – the one with the big dots. And it’s so sunny that you can’t even really see the right-hand part of the photo and we just look … happy, I suppose.’

‘Is it sunny today?’ asks Dad, as I gaze at the three of us outside Nonna and Papa’s gelato shop, in Clerkenwell, and remember.

‘Yes, it’s sunny today. Ridiculously so.’

‘And do you think it will be sunny tomorrow?’

‘Yes, I think it’s going to be sunny again tomorrow.’

He turns his face towards mine. ‘Maybe we could,’ he says.

‘Could what?’ I answer.

‘Go out somewhere.’

‘Really?’

He sighs and smiles and he looks a little strained, but hopeful. ‘If it’s a warm sunny day I’d quite like to feel the sun on my back and on my face.’

‘Really?’ I repeat. I feel a little panicked.