‘What’s the apology for?’

‘Intemperate words.’

‘Intemperate thoughts perhaps,’ she said, ‘but the words seem quite unexceptionable.’ She took a gulp from her cup, scalding the back of her throat. She grimaced and clutched for a moment at her neck. ‘We’re no great shakes here either, if it comes to that.’ She put the cup down on the table and looked at it with anger.’ I’m always doing that. I’m surprised I have any skin left at all, or tonsils or any of those bits and pieces in there. Actually, I don’t have any tonsils. They were whipped out when I was seven. It was the fashionable thing to do in those days, whether they were causing you trouble or not. Preventative medicine. Get rid of the tonsils and the adenoids before they start acting up. Pretty nasty experience. We all went through it. A middle-class rite of passage.’

He was looking at her sombrely.

‘OK,’ she said, waving a hand at him. ‘Glare away at me. I just don’t want to hear about the North. No North in this house. I don’t mind you talking about your wife, your child, your mother, your hopes and fears, your punctured dreams, but not the North. None of the gutted-by-history crap. Don’t pollute my house with that. When you want to have that conversation, we’ll go to the pub. Or walk in the rain.’

She pulled a key out of her pocket and pushed it across the table towards him.

‘Here. Come and go as you like. I cook one meal a day. You can share it with me. About eight in the evening. Take what you like the rest of the time. You can buy the wine. I prefer a nice Rhône red and Chilean white, dry. No need to spend a fortune, but I’ve moved beyond plonk. Now you know.’ She pushed herself out of the chair. ‘The washing machine is in the little scullery behind the kitchen. Use it when you like, but try not to break it. I get very ratty when the washing machine breaks down. I’m going back to work now. I’m on page two of a novel.’ She began to laugh. ‘It’s important that I get on to page three. You know of course about the man from Porlock?’

‘No. I …’ He looked confused.

‘No importance. Merely a literary joke – or tragedy, depends which way you look at it. Settle in. Read a book. Take the dog out. Do what you will. I’ll see you at twenty past seven when we will go to my mother’s. If I’m late she gets anxious, starts ringing the hospitals.’

She limped out of the room. Pansy thudded her tail on the floor. Lar poured himself some more tea.

The screen is grey: the colour of white shirts and handkerchiefs that have somehow got washed in the machine with something black, a depressing colour. I must try and change it. I don’t want to be depressed each time i sit down to write. I want to be filled with energy and hope that i will move from page two to page three and inexorably on until that moment comes when I will tap the words The End and I will sit back and feel … how will I feel? I don’t know. Purged? Astonished? That’s probably it. I will feel astonished by my persistence and by the probability that I will have come to terms once more with the upper case I. I do hope so. I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life relegated in my own mind to the lower case.