This was the man she loved, the man who made her happy, the man who made her laugh, the man who gazed in amazement at her school photographs that seemed to him to be from a different era: look at you there with plaits and that funny little schoolbag, the man she sat and watched TV with on cold rainy evenings and read Sunday papers with and shared bills with and shared thoughts with and went on holiday with and planned Christmas with and, above all, the man who had held her together when her mother finally had committed suicide after all. This was, and she knew it (and it had been going on for over eight years now) the man she had loved most in her life.

So she went on listening to The Pelicans in Leicester on a hot Saturday night, as her head ached and the music blared and Banjo’s arm rested there, around her shoulders.

*

Emmy Lou Brown lived in a very small flat in Finsbury Park that she’d bought outright when her parents died. She was the only child of elderly parents who had lived in Bath, where her father was an architect, but who had often taken her to the theatre in Bristol and London when she was a child. They were already in their sixties when she went to drama school and had both died at seventy: first her father, her mother two years later. She was lucky to have the flat, she knew, and the money they had left her. What if she still lived in rented accommodation, what would have happened to her?

She had felt sick on the early evening tube: the sharp smell of aftershave and cheap perfume wafted through the half-empty carriage, the smell of Saturday night people, going somewhere. But her date was Saturday night in a small flat in Finsbury Park that was entirely white: white walls, white curtains, white furniture, a white telephone. There was only one picture on the wall: a copy of Joshua Reynolds’ painting of the eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons entitled The Tragic Muse which Emmy had owned since she was a teenager and had heard that the ghost of Sarah Siddons stalked the corridors of the Theatre Royal in Bristol. And had first conceived a longing to be an actress herself. The white television which she always put on as soon as she walked into her flat immediately blared out a quiz show, flashed the lottery numbers across the bottom of the screen.

‘I’ll have an egg in front of the telly,’ said Emmy Lou to the empty kitchen. But before she reached the fridge she began to weep. First tears just arriving unannounced on her cheeks, then big racking sobs.

‘I must be drunk,’ she said to the kitchen between sobs. ‘I shouldn’t drink like that on an empty stomach.’