Frances hadn’t cleared out the belongings of someone dead before, didn’t know that the smell of the people stayed in the clothes even though the people themselves were gone. When she caught just a hint of the Body Shop tea rose that Emmy Lou had used she instinctively glanced behind her, as if Emmy must somehow be there. She folded Emmy’s jerseys and T-shirts, crying sometimes and then taking a deep breath and carrying on, putting shoes in plastic bags for Oxfam.

Harry was filming again in Dorset, had wanted Frances to wait until he got back; she’d shrugged and said sadly, ‘I’m off on Friday and it has to be done, it needs to be all finished before Christmas or it’ll just make us too sad.’ She listened to a short story on Emmy’s radio.

The voice books were still on the floor where Harry had thrown them that terrible day.

Emmy Lou had read plays, devoured plays. In the sitting room, next to the picture of Sarah Siddons, there were shelves and shelves of almost every play that had been written in, or translated into, English; she used to scour second-hand bookshops when she was on tour, Frances knew, gleefully finding some battered old edition of 1940s American plays to add to her collection. She reckoned she always knew in about twenty minutes, if someone offered her a part, what it was all about; all their acting lives Frances and Harry had phoned her for advice when parts were offered.

I guess we should keep the plays, Frances thought to herself.

But some memory of Harry’s pain made her put the voice books into a black bag of rubbish.

She had bought a buttered scone at a local bakery, she made herself a cup of black coffee with Emmy’s Nescafé. It was four o’clock and dark outside and cold here in the white flat. She would keep the picture of Sarah Siddons of course, but she didn’t know what to do with Emmy’s little, personal things that lay about the flat: a little porcelain pillbox with Home Sweet Home on the top, a small furry black cat that Emmy always took for luck to whichever theatre she worked in, some Victorian scissors, a conch shell, a framed picture of her elderly parents.

And one day someone will go through my things, thought Frances, and they won’t mean anything, to anybody.

In Emmy’s desk by the window were her unemployment card from the dole office, her birth certificate and her diary that just noted impersonally what she had done each day. The diary stopped abruptly the day she got the letter from Pamela Angel.