‘What,’ she asked after a long silence, ‘do you think would be the male equivalent of Madonna and Child?’

He shifted in bed and the pillows were no longer the comforting arms, the bed was in fact quite comfortless. He could still hear the sound of the sea though, like the breath of the child in his ears. A living child.

He opened his eyes and saw the thread of blue, the promise of sun pushing its way through the crack between brown velvet curtains. If it weren’t for Pansy, he thought, I could lie here all day staring at the ceiling. I could hang that bit of cardboard on the door knob, Do Not Disturb, and they would presume that I was fucking some young one picked up last night in that pub at the top of the hill.

He grinned when he thought of the one who had picked him up, then he remembered the umbrella and swung his legs out of the bed and stretched his bare arms out towards the crack of light that hit the ceiling just above his head.

He took Pansy for a short run down to the harbour before breakfast and she twirled her tail with happiness and barked at a couple of bored seagulls that sat on the low stone wall. Two men were putting lobster pots into a small boat which bucked under them, impatient to be released from the ropes that held it to the shore. The smells were of seaweed and salt and decaying fish.

If only.

Dead dreams.

If only I had gone with them, I wouldn’t be here now to say if only.

Mother and Father would have taken Pansy. Father would have liked a companion for his daily walks.

That would all be so much more orderly.

Then he thought of his mother standing by the clock, dressed in grey.

‘Wouldjever throw us over that rope there?’ one of the men called to him from the bronco boat.

Lar nodded and pulled the loop of rope from a metal bollard and threw it across the couple of feet of water between the shore and the boat.

‘Champion,’ said the fisherman. Released, the boat clattered away.

‘Good luck,’ Lar called after them, but they weren’t listening. ‘So,’ he said to Pansy, who wasn’t listening either, ‘we’ll go and have breakfast and then we’ll bring that Clara back her umbrella. If we can remember where she lives.’

He couldn’t.

The roads looked so different in the daylight and he wandered for a long time past hedges and gates, peering into alleyways, but nothing resembling her cottage could he find. Maybe it didn’t exist. Maybe she didn’t exist, maybe he had never slept through practically a whole episode of Morse.

Still clutching the umbrella, he found the gate to the park and went in and up the hill. Uneasy grey clouds were blowing quite fast across the sky. She was there, standing on the edge again, listening, he presumed, to the music in her head.