She was shaking her head. ‘How would you?’ Her voice was soft but vibrated with rage. ‘After the war. So many people, one after the other. It was an epidemic.’ Sitting with Greta behind the Biedermeier sofa, the Baumanns’ chamber pots, memories shoved for space, overlapping like a montage, Berlin at the end, Germany at the end. ‘They couldn’t come to terms with their own idiocy.’ She looked at John. ‘Or their defeat. You see…’ His face was searching hers and she knew he was listening hard. ‘They’d swallowed Hitler and everything he promised. But it was a chimera.’ Was she making sense? Could he comprehend how people coped with the criminal calamity that had been Germany? That they had been party to? ‘He just took longer to grasp it than most.’

John placed his hand on her elbow, leading her away into the front room, helping her into an armchair as if she was an invalid. The room was cold, the fire unlit.

‘Who were you talking to?’ she said.

He didn’t answer but reached over to the mantelpiece for the matches, struck one and lit the gas poker, nestling it in among the coals.

‘That’ll make it warmer,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

‘You don’t know where anything is,’ she said.

‘I’ll find it.’

She rolled off her damp coat and sat back in the armchair, pulling out from beneath her a pleated cushion in synthetic silk. She looked at the familiar room. The wooden standard lamp with its fluted shade and tassels, the coffee table, the bureau. The grey carpet with the red diagonal slabs, parquet-patterned linoleum round the edges. There was a new clock on the mantelpiece, a brass carriage clock, and either side were two plaster Toby jugs. They looked cheap. The more Betty looked, the stranger the room became. A picture calendar had been tacked to the wall. The animal for November was a hedgehog, and two crocheted antimacassars were draped over the back of the sofa.

She heard the bell of a police car, an ambulance, could hear John opening the door to them, the tread of boots to the dining room, hear him talking. She could see Mrs H through the window, standing outside, her voice shrill, her words indistinct. Betty waited. Listening. John came back with the everyday teapot and cups.

‘I found some biscuits,’ he said, placing a tray on the table. ‘The police are here.’

‘What’s she doing?’ Betty said. ‘Mrs H?’

‘She’d been out all day,’ John said. ‘Visiting her sister. Has just come back. A bit of a shock, I imagine.’

‘I don’t want her in here,’ Betty said. ‘I don’t want to see her.’

‘Let the police take care of it.’