Nicola Abbott could hear the sea in the night. Not in the day with the bustle of traffic and tourists coming up from the town but in the night, when the traffic and the tourists had gone. She could lie in her bed in the crescent with the windows open, as she had lain so long ago, and she could hear the English Channel shusshing in from France, catching on the stony beach, shusshing out again. So that, in the care of the community, she remembered everything that she had been encouraged for so long to forget.

Nicola Abbott, the glittering star of 1961, waited.

*

And Terence Blue drove, as night fell, into Brighton.

He didn’t go straight to the crescent. He could hardly face seeing the house again after so many years. In his red car was a bottle of whisky. He parked near the sea.

He had no coherent plan and as he drank the whisky it became less coherent still. All he knew was that he had to see Nicky, whom he hadn’t seen for so long till the reunion, and that she would be waiting.

The red car finally swerved fast up the hill, stopped outside Nicky’s house. The curtains weren’t drawn, it appeared to be in darkness, but he could see light coming from the back of the house that he had known so well. He could also see the one chair sitting there, a lonely shadow in the front room. Something like a sob choked from the back of his throat though he did not know it.

And then Terence Blue got out of his car, took a key from his pocket with his shaking hand and, as he had done so joyfully so long ago, opened the door of the house where he had lived briefly with his first wife, Nicola Abbott.

‘Nicky?’ he called, so that she would know it was him.

She was sitting in the kitchen, hadn’t cleared away the remains of a meal, and stayed motionless as she heard Terence walk down the hall. He stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at her, at her grey hair, at the damaged shoulder.

Then he moved into the kitchen, blinking in the harsh light, there was no shade on the bulb.

‘Hello Nicky,’ he said.

‘Hello Terry,’ said Nicky Abbott in the voice that nobody forgot and she stared up at him with an unfathomable look in her eyes.

Terence Blue kept moving towards the grey-haired woman who sat at the kitchen table.

‘Nicky.’

She said nothing more, stared at him, at his face. He had come. They were back in their house. She remembered everything.